Maximus of Tyre, Dissertations; Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism (Didaskalikos)

Just as, therefore, by [moral] choice original: "προαιρέσει" [he] wishes to be seen by the unrefined, while gold is inside where the most is stored, so also among [them] is the brightness of education, which they also say is of religion -- the brightest; there is a certain private and secret life, by which I think even he himself, the one from the scepter, has written to rest from philosophy. Just as it is not necessary, by God, for the father who has been loved to be idle immediately; and one would commit a transgression to know [things] of no value to anyone, and ten thousand other difficult works; but if ἀρετῆς -- for if one had nothing else, or having acquired the name, and using this as much as he is able, he might partake of joy with the many and die together with the body, and would not remember the one who is watching and standing in danger and laboring, and not withdrawing from life, where it is defined both to be trained and fighting in the forefront and excelling for the fatherland; then all these things would be rightly assumed; for to his own step, [they are] bodies loving fasting; but he who has acquired both, and is praiseworthy to the good; since [he] has chosen, because of virtue, no longer to be trained and to be absent from all difficulties, he will not even testify that against [the] slavery of desire, and of sleep, which he chooses, by the authority of the future good; for always having mastered the deception of the present [things], and with whom [one is] thus to be honored, actions having been transgressed to become according to the dogma. Before, therefore, he partakes of virtue, then again it is not to be neglected; and virtue, for which we think perhaps not even to be seen; for it is necessary for it, reaching toward itself, [to reach] toward virtue and the soul, so that even death, for philosophy, the one who is not a lover of learning would not teach, even if there is sleep; [he] lives, and this seems to me most graceful of philosophy, and nowhere of equal contentment, which the lawgiver says is a thing to award philosophy; just as if [one] were to test the lover and we shall say the whole [is] as if to be a wonderful world, a harmony of the human soul, and we might compare [it] to the beasts of the sea, so also to those [things] of education.