Letter 2: Aeneas calls Cassus back from the countryside to city conversation.

Old Laertes no longer wanted to be king or rule over men; he chose to become a gardener and tend trees. You seem to me to have taken him as your model. Otherwise you would not have left the city and your own people and spent so long sitting in the country talking to plants. You should have remembered Socrates instead of Laertes, and Socrates' teaching: fields and trees are not willing to teach anything, but people in the city are. Follow him rather than the old gardener. Leave the fields where farmers reap no harvest of wisdom, and remember our usual conversations, where there is something wise to learn, something to teach, and, best of all, something to delight friends.