But we have no right to talk in this way about an Agesilaus, or a Numa, or a Darius. Neither then should we compel a Solon [Sidenote: C] to leave the Council of the Areopagus, nor a Cato the Senate, nor yet urge a Pericles to leave popular government to look after itself. It is contrary to reason that in our youth we should bounce upon the platform, spend upon the public all the passionate licence of our ambition, and then, when age arrives and brings the wisdom of experience, desert and betray our public standing like a woman whom we have used at our pleasure.
In Aesop, when the hedgehog wanted to pick off his ticks, the fox would not let him. ‘These are glutted,’ said he, ‘and [Sidenote: D] if you get rid of them, hungry ones will be at you in their place.’ So with public life. If it is perpetually shedding the old men, it will necessarily be plagued with young ones, who are thirsting for notoriety and power but devoid of political sense. How can they be otherwise, if they are to have no elderly statesman to watch and learn from? A ship’s captain is not made by treatises on navigation. He must often have stood upon the quarter-deck and watched the struggle with wave and wind and stormy nights, when
_The sailor on the brine longs sore For Tyndareus’ twin sons._
And can the handling of a State and the persuading of Assembly [Sidenote: E] or Council be rightly left to a young man because he has read a book or taken down a lecture on statesmanship in the Lyceum? Though he has not taken his stand many a time beside rudder-rope and tiller, leaned first to this side and then to that, while generals and public leaders were pitting their knowledge and experience against each other, and so learned his lesson in the midst of dangers and difficulties? Beyond question, No! For the education and training of the young, if for no other reason, old men should play a public part. A teacher of letters or of music himself reads or plays a passage over first by way of example [Sidenote: F] to his pupils. So the authority on statesmanship must guide a young man, not simply by talking or suggesting from outside, but by the practical administration of public business. It is by deeds as well as by words that he will mould him to the true shape, filled with the breath of life. It is training of this kind—not in the schools where you practise safe forms of wrestling under mannerly professors, but in contests truly Olympian and Pythian—that makes one, as Simonides puts it,