Draco Lycurgus; laws and pedagogy void if Fate

and Draco and Lycurgus, as introducers of all-beautiful lessons, and as having invented the best laws for the Greeks. For what benefit from this anymore, if nothing is upon us, yet rather our things have been hung upon others? And somehow equal and similar hereafter, to those knowing the laws, also the one having been ignorant of them, if it does not belong to those willing to do freely whatever they should perhaps choose; yet I say the guides of the laws have become most unjust, although having chosen upon themselves as much glory of justice as possible. For they have legislated—I do not know how—that the careless must be punished, and pay bitter justices of the transgression, and they have handed over as it were canons to the young and most praiseworthy manners of pedagogy, either as being upon us ourselves to choose to live through solemnly, or I do not know what having thought. And someone would say, I think: Well, O Solon, you were legislating for those then; yet it was somehow altogether necessary to persuade Fate besides to grant to those being legislated whatever they should wish to think and do. Yet you legislated not having persuaded; and you yourself were somehow perhaps also laughing at the myth, and you understood us lords of the things to be done, and you were scaring away the unjust and blind Fortune of human affairs; for would you not have thought it necessary to suppose the best citizen to be the pious and law-guarding one, and to have hung upon himself the glory of fairness unto the peak, yet again useless and numbered among the most shameful, the one saying farewell to the laws that will counsel darting unto uprightness?

Palladius: Most urbane and very well you have spoken.

Cyril: And what, O friend? Will we not say that the pedagogies and the counsels, and indeed also the challenges unto virtue, as many as fathers would make upon sons, and teachers upon companions, are empty, if it is necessary to descend the path not according to judgment, and to go a life’s track that is sometimes involuntary?

Palladius: And very much.

Cyril: And if indeed also upon one’s own children, or then upon some others having stumbled, someone should urge and make the rebuke straight, would you yourself praise such a one, or will you reckon him unjust, having chosen somehow to leave unrebuked those causes of all evils for us, yet to subject to the justices those led unto these things involuntarily and from necessity?

Palladius: It seems so. For the word has much persuasiveness.

Cyril: And that such a glory for them is full of the last impiety, you will know also from here: for shaking down as it were some steersman and overseer of this all—God—from the glory present to him, and going hereafter unto such boldness as to alienate him altogether from his own boasts, they themselves by their own votes distribute the power of the things according to us to whatever simply comes unto mind; although seeing the whole creation being carried not by unsupervised movements unto the