372 THE STONES OF VENICE

Christian mind.¹ Cicero’s justice includes charity, beneficence, and benignity, truth, and faith in the sense of trustworthiness. His fortitude includes courage, self-command, the scorn of fortune and of all temporary felicities. His temperance includes courtesy and modesty. So also, in Plato, these four virtues constitute the sum of education. I do not remember any more simple or perfect expression of the idea, than in the account given by Socrates, in the “Alcibiades I.,” of the education of the Persian kings, for whom, in their youth, there are chosen, he says, four tutors from among the Persian nobles; namely, the Wisest, the most Just, the most Temperate, and the most Brave of them. Then each has a distinct duty: “The Wisest teaches the young king the worship of the gods, and the duties of a king;” (something more here, observe, than our “Prudence!”); “the most Just teaches him to speak all truth, and to act out all truth, through the whole course of his life; the most Temperate teaches him to allow no pleasure to have the mastery of him, so that he may be truly free, and indeed a king; and the most Brave makes him fearless of all things, showing him that the moment he fears anything, he becomes a slave.”²

§ 50. All this is exceedingly beautiful, so far as it reaches; but the Christian divines were grievously led astray by their endeavours to reconcile this system with the nobler law of love. At first, as in the passage I am just going to quote from St. Ambrose, they tried to graft the Christian system on the four branches of the Pagan one; but finding that the tree would not grow, they planted the Pagan and Christian branches side by side; adding to the four cardinal virtues the three called by the schoolmen theological, namely, Faith, Hope, and Charity; the one series considered as attainable by

¹ [Ruskin in re-reading this chapter in later times was not satisfied with this § 49; he has written, in his own copy, against the page ending at this point “all wrong.”]

² [Alcibiades I., 122. Ruskin himself tried to influence the education of princes. See his conversations, cited above, p. xxxiii., with one of his present Majesty’s tutors, and, in a later volume of this edition, a long letter to another. Upon the late Duke of Albany Ruskin’s influence was considerable, as will also appear in a later volume.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]