But tell me--Do you allow learners to contradict, if anything is said which they don't think right?
-- No, indeed! Still, if you wish, oppose your questions.

In that way you will learn more easily.
-- Let me know, then--Is there one only way which leads to a true philosophy--your own way--the way of the Stoics: or is it true, as I have heard, that there are many ways of approaching it?
-- Yes! Many ways! There are the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, and those who call themselves after Plato: there are the enthusiasts for Diogenes, and Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, besides others.
-- It was true, then.

But again, is what they say the same or different?
-- Very different.
-- Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the same, from all of them.

Answer me then--In what, or in whom, did you confide when you first betook yourself to philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to you, passed them all by and went in to the Stoics, as if there alone lay the way of truth?
What token had you?
Forget, please, all you are to-day--half-way, or more, on the philosophic journey: [150] answer me as you would have done then, a mere outsider as I am now.
-- Willingly! It was there the great majority went! 'Twas by that I judged it to be the better way.
-- A majority how much greater than the Epicureans, the Platonists, the Peripatetics?
You, doubtless, counted them respectively, as with the votes in a scrutiny.
-- No! But this was not my only motive.

I heard it said by every one that the Epicureans were soft and voluptuous, the Peripatetics avaricious and quarrelsome, and Plato's followers puffed up with pride.
But of the Stoics, not a few pronounced that they were true men, that they knew everything, that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to wealth, to wisdom, to all that can be desired.
-- Of course those who said this were not themselves Stoics: you would not have believed them--still less their opponents.