[192] That is the reason, I think, why fathers of the most affectionate kind formally disinherit their sons and debar them from their home and kinship, when the depravity which they show overcomes the peculiar and intense affection implanted in parents by nature.
[193] The truth of what I say can easily be recognized from other examples. If a man has lost the use of his eyes, will the keen-sightedness of his ancestors help him to see? If his tongue is paralysed, will he express himself better because his parents or grandparents possessed strong voices? If he is worn to a thread by a long and wasting sickness, will it profit for restoring him to vigour that the athletic prowess of the founders of the family has placed them in the list of victors at the Olympic or all the other great games? Their bodily debilities remain just as they were and cannot be improved by the better luck of their relations.
[194] In the same way, just parents are no help to the unjust, nor temperate parents to the intemperate, nor, in general, good parents to the wicked, any more than the laws to law-breakers, whom they exist to punish, and the lives of those who have earnestly followed virtue may be called unwritten laws.
[195] And, therefore, I think, that if God had so formed nobility as to take a human shape, she would stand to face the rebellious descendants and address them thus. “In the court where truth presides, kinship is not measured only by blood, but by similarity of conduct and pursuit of the same objects. But your practice has been the opposite. What I hold dear you regard as hostile and my enemies you love. In my sight, modesty and truth and control of the passions and simplicity and innocence are honourable, in your eyes dishonourable. Shamelessness, falsehood, passion uncontrolled, vanity, vices are my enemies, but to you they are the closest of friends.
[196] You have done your best by your actions to make yourselves strangers, why do you hypocritically assume a specious name and call yourselves kinsmen? Seductive arts and clever wiles I cannot away with. It is easy for anybody to devise prettily-sounding words, but it is not easy to change bad morals to good.
[197] With these things before my eyes, I count now as enemies and hereafter shall hold as such, those who have kindled the fuel of enmity into a flame, and I shall frown on them, more than on those whose reproach is their ignoble birth. They may plead in defence that they have no pattern of high excellence for their own, but you stand accused, you who spring from great houses, which boast and glory in the splendour of their race. For though you have good models at your side, almost, indeed, your birth fellows, you have never been minded to reproduce any of their excellence.”
[198] That he held nobility to depend on the acquisition of virtue and considered that the possessor of virtue and not anyone born of highly excellent parents is noble can be shown from many examples.