New Students at Plato's Academy

This is what happened, as Aristotle always used to tell the story, to most of the audience at Plato’s lecture “On the Good.” They all arrived, you see, supposing that they would get out of it some of the things which men have considered good: wealth, for example, or health, or power - in short, some remarkable source of happiness. But when the account proved to be about mathematics, numbers, geometry, astronomy, and - finally - about oneness as the good, it seemed to them, I guess, to be something completely unfathomable. The upshot was that some expressed contempt for the whole business, others severe criticism.

-- Aristoxenus (quoted in J. Miller’s “Examined Lives”)