I must make the same remark about historians, specially when they write merely to please.  And we certainly shall not follow rhetoricians in the art of lying.…I have been taught by one well able to understand a poet’s mind that with Homer all his poetry is praise of virtue, and that in him all that is not mere accessory tends to this end.  A marked instance of this is his description of the prince of the Kephallenians saved naked from shipwreck.  No sooner did he appear than the princess viewed him with reverence; so far was she from feeling anything like shame at seeing him naked and alone, since his virtue stood him in the stead of clothes. Od. vi. 135 κ.τ.λ.  Afterwards he was of so much estimation among the rest of the Phæacians that they abandoned the pleasures amid which they lived, all looked up to him and imitated him, and not a man of the Phæacians prayed for anything more eagerly than that he might be Ulysses,—a mere waif saved from shipwreck.  Herein my friend said that he was the interpreter of the poet’s mind; that Homer all but said aloud, Virtue, O men, is what you have to care for.  Virtue swims out with the shipwrecked sailor, and when he is cast naked on the coast, virtue makes him more noble than the happy Phæacians.  And truly this is so.  Other belongings are not more the property of their possessors than of any one else.  They are like dice flung hither and thither in a game.  Virtue is the one possession which cannot be taken away, and remains with us alike alive and dead.