about your funeral. What is the meaning of those common tables of yours? what that crowd of friends and handsome youths? Why those many thousand lines written and composed so laboriously on Metrodorus, and Aristobulus, and Chæredemus, that they may not be unknown even in death, if4 you ordain for virtue oblivion, for art inactivity, for philosophy silence, and for success that it should be speedily forgotten?
§ iv. But if you exclude all knowledge about life, like putting the lights out at a supper party, that you may go from pleasure to pleasure undetected,5 then "live unknown." Certainly if I am going to pass my life with the harlot Hedeia, or my days with Leontium, and spurn at virtue, and put my summum bonum in sensual gratifications, these are ends that require darkness and night, on these oblivion and ignorance are rightly cast. But if any one in nature sings the praises of the deity and justice and providence, and in morals upholds the law and society and the constitution, and in the constitution what is honourable and not expedient, why should he "live unknown"? Is it that he should instruct nobody, inspire in nobody an emulation for virtue, and be to nobody a pattern in good?6 Had Themistocles been unknown at Athens, Greece would not have repelled Xerxes; had Camillus been unknown at Rome, Rome would not have remained a state; had Plato been unknown to Dion, Sicily would not have won its freedom. And as light, I take it, makes us not only visible but useful to one another, so knowledge gives not only glory but impetus to virtue. Epaminondas in obscurity up to his fortieth year was no use to the Thebans, but when his merits became known and he was put into power, he saved his state from ruin, and liberated Greece from slavery, making his abilities efficacious in emergency through his reputation like the bright shining of a light. For Sophocles' words,
are also appropriate to the character of a man, which gets rusty and senile by not mixing in affairs but living in obscurity. For mute inglorious ease,