[13] Now we may well feel profound admiration for the discretion shewn by Wisdom. She refrains from reproaching us with our backwardness or complete impotence in generation, though, as the text truly stated, it was through our unfitness that she was not bearing, and not because she grudged us offspring. Thus she says, “The Lord has shut me out from bearing,” and does not go on to add, “for you.” She does not wish to seem to upbraid and reproach others for their misfortune.
[14] “Go in, then,” she says, “to my handmaid, the lower instruction given by the lower branches of school lore, that first you may have children by her,” for afterwards you will be able to avail yourself of the mistress’s company to beget children of higher birth.
[15] For grammar teaches us to study literature in the poets and historians, and will thus produce intelligence and wealth of knowledge. It will teach us also to despise the vain delusions of our empty imagination by shewing us the calamities which heroes and demi-gods who are celebrated in such literature are said to have undergone.
[16] Music will charm away the unrhythmic by its rhythm, the inharmonious by its harmony, the unmelodious and tuneless by its melody, and thus reduce discord to concord. Geometry will sow in the soul that loves to learn the seeds of equality and proportion, and by the charm of its logical continuity will raise from those seeds a zeal for justice.
[17] Rhetoric, sharpening the mind to the observation of facts, and training and welding thought to expression, will make the man a true master of words and thoughts, thus taking into its charge the peculiar and special gift which nature has not bestowed on any other living creature.
[18] Dialectic, the sister and twin, as some have said, of Rhetoric, distinguishes true argument from false, and convicts the plausibilities of sophistry, and thus will heal that great plague of the soul, deceit.
It is profitable then to take these and the like for our associates and for the field of our preliminary studies. For perhaps indeed it may be with us, as it has been with many, that through the vassals we shall come to the knowledge of the royal virtues.
[19] Observe too that our body is not nourished in the earlier stages with solid and costly foods. The simple and milky foods of infancy come first. Just so you may consider that the school subjects and the lore which belongs to each of them stand ready to nourish the childhood of the soul, while the virtues are grown-up food, suited for those who are really men.