Sophocles did the
same when nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in
his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not desire to live longer
than he should be able to write, as he says himself in the
prologue to the Noctes Atticae.
The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus
the philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as
Gellius tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians,
hating the people of Megara, decreed that if any of the
Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then
Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of
Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman's
dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear
Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and
excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who
would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he
had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but
thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the
figure he was studying.
There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the
brevity we aim at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful
to relate, the clerks who are famous in these days pursue a very
different course. Afflicted with ambition in their tender years,
and slightly fastening to their untried arms the Icarian wings of
presumption, they prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere
boys become unworthy professors of the several faculties, through
which they do not make their way step by step, but like goats
ascend by leaps and bounds; and, having slightly tasted of the
mighty stream, they think that they have drunk it dry, though
their throats are hardly moistened.
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