Good Writing Takes Learning

I say nothing of the Greeks, since you boast of knowing them, even to the point of saying that, in devoting yourself to a foreign literature, you have forgotten your own language. I am afraid that, as the old proverbs say, I might be like the pig teaching Minerva, or the man carrying firewood into the forest. I only wonder that you, the Aristarchus of our time, should have shown ignorance of things every schoolboy knows. No doubt it is partly because your mind is fixed on the meaning of what you write, but partly also because you are so sharp-eyed in manufacturing slanders against me, that you despise the rules of grammarians and orators. You make no attempt to set straight words that have been thrown out of order when a sentence has grown complicated, or to avoid a harsh clash of consonants, or to escape a style full of gaps. It would be ridiculous to point to one or two wounds when the whole body is weakened and broken. I will not pick out passages to criticize; let him pick out any passage that is free of faults. He must not even have known the saying of Socrates, “Know yourself.” [a]

Perhaps he will swear that he never learned to read and write. I can easily believe that without an oath. Or perhaps he will take refuge in what the apostle says of himself: “Even if I am unskilled in speech, I am not so in knowledge.” But Paul’s reason for saying this is plain. He had been trained in Hebrew learning and brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, whom he was not ashamed to call his teacher even after he had reached the rank of an apostle. He thought Greek eloquence of no account, or at any rate in his humility he would not parade his knowledge of it, so that “his preaching should rest not on the persuasive wisdom of words but on the power of the things signified.” He despised other men’s riches, since he was rich in his own. Still, it was not to an illiterate man who stumbled over every sentence that Festus cried out, as Paul stood before his judgment seat: [d] “Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you mad.” [f]

You who can hardly do more than mutter in Latin, and who creep like a tortoise rather than walk, ought either to write in Greek, so that among those who do not know Greek you may pass for a man who knows a foreign language; or else, if you attempt to write Latin, you should first get a grammar teacher, flinch under his cane, and start over as an old pupil among children to learn the art of speaking. Even if a man is bursting with the wealth of Croesus and Darius, learning will not follow the moneybag. It is the companion of toil and labor, the friend of those who fast, not of the well-fed, of self-mastery, not of self-indulgence. It is told of Demosthenes that he burned more oil than he drank wine, and that no workman ever cut short his nights as he did. To pronounce the single letter R, he was willing to take a dog as his teacher; and yet you make it a crime in me that I took a man to teach me the Hebrew letters. This is the kind of wisdom that keeps people unlearned: they do not choose to learn what they do not know. They forget the words of Horace:

That Book of Wisdom too, which is read to us as the work of Solomon, says: “Wisdom will not enter a malicious soul, nor dwell in a body that is subject to sin. For the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee deceit and withdraw from thoughts that are without understanding.” It is a different matter with those who only want to be read by the common crowd and do not care how much they offend the ears of the learned. They despise the poet’s words, which brand the presumption of noisy ignorance: [j]

If you want things like that, there are plenty of curly-headed fellows in every school who will sing you scraps of trashy verse from Miletus. Or you may go to the show put on by the Bessi and watch people shaking with laughter at the Pig’s Last Will and Testament, or at any clowns’ entertainment where silly things of this kind are eagerly sought after. Not a day passes but you may see the costumed clown in the streets whacking the buttocks of some blockhead, or half pulling out people’s teeth with the scorpion he twists around for them to bite. We need not wonder if the books of know-nothings find plenty of readers. [l]