Guarding the Mind and Avoiding Bad Company

Iambus to Seleucus: I command you to rejoice, the beautiful and good son Seleucus, a branch of a well-born root. And I wish for you yourself to rejoice in your life, thinking greatly in lessons and ways.

First, indeed, have fear and longing for God; for God is to all the beginning and the end for those thinking well throughout all life. The second, indeed, is to practice the way, child: gentle, humble, self-controlled, firm, sweet, unshakeable, just, manly, wise, dignified, industrious, stable, and temperate.

For this is a wealth for both youths and elders, not in money so much, but to be rich in way; for this is yours; but money, wandering and playing, imitating the way of an unfaithful prostitute, with many lovers being seduced in various ways, joining to, fleeing from, and clinging to those things, yet to no one genuinely. For the stable thing does not have the nature of wealth, like the waves of a rough sea, rising and falling unpredictably.

You then, O child, will always have a treasure by being rich in ways, not being gathered by robberies, nor being laid out amidst informers, nor being exhausted by the hands of tyrants, nor being plundered by the weapons of barbarians, but remaining safely kept within the treasuries of the incorporeal buildings of the soul, which neither a consuming fire eats, nor a wave of the sea's surge will cover.

Guarding this truly existing, your own and genuine wealth, strive with lessons, with books of poets, with historical writings, and by practicing the subtle fine-speech of current orators and the thoughtful teachings of philosophers. And with all these, approach intelligently, wisely collecting the useful from them, and fleeing from each one's harm as having been judged, imitating the work of a wise bee, which settles in bloom upon everything, and harvests from each thing all-wisely, having in herself the nature of a teacher. And you, by calculation, gather the many that are useful. And if any harm is found...

Indeed, entering into the trivial, you fall away sharply. For the mind is swifter than men. Therefore, as much as they have written praises for it toward virtue, and again they revile evil, these things you should learn with diligence, and guard your mind and the grace of speech.

But what they have written concerning the gods in broad, coarse myths, teachings of demons, myths worthy of laughter and tears—turn away from these like from heavy rains and hailstorms. When reading both, the gods and the words, you find ridiculous gods and lovely words; despise the lustful gods, but honor the words, as if from a single plant; avoid the thorns and snatch the rose. And of the words outside of you, this is the best law. As for those with which it is necessary to harmonize everything with diligence, we shall say, but a little later. For that I want to tell you first.

The young man must flee from the beginning the company of evils and the pleasures associated with them. For there are many, like pastures full of birds and of some disease, who try the simpler young men, rubbing against them in the deceit of cunning, desiring to infect them with the sickness of wickedness, so that by the fellowship of the many they might spy upon you for the wicked. Guard against these. For, as it seems to Paul, bad company corrupts good morals (1 Cor 15:33).

Yes indeed, that must be strictly kept by you: a hatred of the indecent song of theaters, beasts, and chariot races; a viewing of the setting of evils; the futility of life; the flood of pleasures; the absurd lessons of dissolute men, in whom there is nothing shameful about being prudent. For some of them, servants of shame, have the art of thinking toward insolence, trained by the clumsy movements of mimics, fearing modesty before the razors before the hairs, a workshop of dissolute ugliness, in whom it is a part of the art to suffer and do all things, even what is not permitted, in the sight of all. Others, a more wretched nation of those, undermining the glory of men, subduing nature by bending limbs, making men into women, men...