In his speech Dio, named after Dio of Prusa and dedicated to his unborn son, Synesius presents his cultural ideal. Paideia or general education (which means: study of the arts) is a preliminary or an initiation to philosophy, comparable to the development of Dio, who was (according to Synesius) a sophist first, but later converted to philosophy (which means knowledge of the Divine). General education in itself is insufficient to become happy: the sophist and the grammarian are unhappy people until they find true understanding.
The text is offered here in the translation by A. Fitzgerald. The green four-digit numbers are page numbers of the Migne edition.
