7
"My child," she said, "I am the Art of Stonecutting, which you began yesterday to learn, friendly to you and a relative by blood, inasmuch as your grandfather"—naming my mother's father-" was a stone-cutter, and your two uncles, and both of them are very well thought of on my account. If you are willing to hold aloof from this woman's folly and nonsense "-pointing to her rival" and to come and dwell with me, you will in the first place be generously nurtured and have strong shoulders, and you will be a stranger to all jealousy; you will never leave your fatherland and family to go out into foreign countries, and it is not for mere words that you will win praise from every one.
8
Do not be repelled by my shabby exterior and my soiled garments, for it was after beginning thus that the great Pheidias, too, showed the world his Zeus, and Polykleitos fashioned his Hera, and Myron won praise and Praxiteles wonder. Now these men are worshipped with the gods. If, then, you should become one of these, you, too, would certainly be famous throughout the world. You will make your father, too, an object of envy, and turn all eyes towards the land that bore you." Thus, and at even greater length, spoke Handicraft, sprinkling her speech from end to end with stammering and rusticities in her eager argument and effort to persuade me. But I can no longer call it to mind, for most of it has already escaped my memory. When she now had made an end, the other began, somewhat in this way:
