BOOK III. i. 9-15

9 ...you will be truly beautiful; but so long as you neglect all this, you must needs be ugly, no matter if you employ every artifice to make yourself look beautiful.

10 Beyond that, I know not what more I can say to you; for if I say what I have in mind, I shall hurt your feelings, and you will leave, perhaps never to return; but if I do not say it, consider the sort of thing I shall be doing. Here you are coming to me to get some benefit, and I shall be bestowing no benefit at all; and you are coming to me as to a philosopher, and I shall be saying nothing to you as a philosopher.

11 Besides, is it anything but cruel for me to leave you unreformed? If some time in the 12 future you come to your senses, you will have good reason to blame me: "What did Epictetus observe in me," you will say to yourself, "that, although he saw me in such a condition and coming to him in so disgraceful a state, he should let me be so and say 13 never a word to me? Did he so completely despair of me? Was I not young? Was I not ready to listen to reason? And how many other young fellows make any number of mistakes of the same kind in their youth?

14 I am told that once there was a certain Polemooriginal: Polemōn; a wealthy Athenian youth known for his excess who became a philosopher who from being a very dissolute young man underwent such an astonishing transformation. The story of Polemo is a famous example of conversion in antiquity. While drunk, he burst into a lecture by Xenocrates, the head of the Platonic Academy, and was so moved by the discourse on temperance that he changed his life, eventually becoming the head of the Academy himself. This is also referenced in Diogenes Laertius, Book 4, section 16, and Horace’s Satires II. 3, 253-7. Well, suppose he did not think that I should be another Polemo; he could at least have set my hair right, he could have stripped me of my ornaments, he could have made me stop plucking my hairs; but although he saw me looking like—what shall I say?—he held his peace."

15 As for me, I do not say what it is you look like; you will say it yourself when you come to your senses and realize what those who behave in this way are and what they are called.