LXXXVIII

The question has sometimes been posed whether these liberal studies make a man a better person.  But in fact they do not aspire to any knowledge of how to do this, let alone claim to do it.  Literary scholarship concerns itself with research into language, or history if a rather broader field is preferred, or, extending its range to the very limit, poetry.  Which of these paves the way to virtue?  Attentiveness of words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody?  What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire or reins in passion?

...

'But it's a nice thing, surely, to be familiar with a lot of subjects.'  Well, in that case let us retain just as much of them as we need.  Would you consider a person open to criticism for putting superfluous objects on the same level as really useful ones by arranging on display in his house a whole array of costly articles, but not for cluttering himself up with a lot of superfluous furniture in the way of learning?  To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.  Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores,  not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need.  The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works:  I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works.

--Seneca