II The Exposition (Narratio)
Grym. The art and the fountain of this stream is that very man who is so fruitful in goodness—Flexibulus, if you know him.
Bud. Who does not know the man? He, as I have heard from my father and my cousins, is a man of great wisdom and experience of things, not only known to this city, but also generally beloved and honoured as only few are. Oh, fortunate that you are! to have heard him more closely and to have conversed with him familiarly, and thereby to have gained so great a fruit in the forming of manliness!
Grym. By so much the happier art thou, to have had all this born with you in your home, as they tell me, and to be able, not once and again as I, but every day, as often as you pleased, to listen to such a father, holding forth wisely on the greatest and most useful topics.
Bud. Stop this, please, and let the conversation proceed, with which we started, about thee and Flexibulus.
Grym. Let us then be silent with regard to your father since this is your desire: let us return to Flexibulus; nothing is sweeter to me than his discourse, nothing more sagacious than his counsels, nothing more weighty than his precepts, or more holy. So by this foretaste of himself which he has provided me, the thirst has been stimulated and increased in a wonderful degree, to draw further from that sweet fountain of wisdom. Those who describe the earth tell us that the streams are of wonderful formation and nature; some inebriate, others take away drunkenness; some send stupor, others sleep. I have experienced that this fountain has the property of making a man of a brute, a useful person of a wastrel, and of a man an angel.
Bud. Might I not be able also to draw something from this fountain, though it be with the tip of my lips?
Grym. Why shouldst thou not? I will show you the house where he dwells.
Bud. Another time! But do thou, whilst we are walking along (or let us sit down, if you like), tell me something of his precepts, those which thou considerest to be his best and most potent.