Preparation for the Gospel — Book XIV

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

1.1| PREFACE. In the preceding book I went through everything that could be said and heard about the philosophy of Plato: its agreement with the oracles of the Hebrews, for which we have been struck with admiration for the man, and in turn its disagreement with them, for which no one of sound mind would accept him. I now pass on to the remaining schools of those among the Greeks who became famous for philosophy.

1.2| Of these too, in turn, I shall set before the eyes of my readers, for them to examine, the slide away from the truth—not on my own authority or from myself, but once again through the testimony of the Greeks’ own words. I do so not out of hostility toward any of these men, for I confess that I hold them in great wonder whenever I compare them with the rest, as men with men;

1.3| but when I set them beside the theologians and prophets of the Hebrews, and beside the God who through these men made predictions of things to come and displays of wonders, and who, more than that, laid down the teaching of pious lessons and true doctrines, I do not think any longer that anyone could reasonably find fault with us if we honor God before human beings, and truth itself before mortal reasonings and conjectures.

1.4| This is the whole of what the argument of the present Preparation has striven to show, as at once an answer and a defense to those who will ask what fine or venerable thing we saw in the writings of barbarians that we resolved to rank them above our ancestral and noble philosophy—that of the Greeks, I mean. But now let the demonstration proceed by deeds.

2.1| I think that first of all I must begin from the very top, from the first foundation of the philosophers among the Greeks, and learn who the men were who lived before Plato and were called natural philosophers, and what sort of champions of its argument their philosophy had; then pass on to the succession of Plato and learn who these in their turn were, and examine their verbal battles with one another; and survey as well the splits of the other schools and the opposing positions of their doctrines, in which I shall exhibit these fine fellows boxing and trading blows for glory, as if on a stage before spectators.

2.2| Let us see at once, then, how Plato mocked the first men before him, and how others mocked Plato’s own household and successors; and again how Plato’s companions refuted the wisdom of Aristotle’s many-sided mind; and how those who prided themselves on Aristotle and the Peripatos showed the opinions of those who championed the opposite side to be nothing.

2.3| You will see, too, the formidable precision of the Stoics’ hair-splitting laughed to scorn in its turn by others, and all of them on every side dusting themselves for the bout against their neighbors and joining battle and wrestling most manfully, as though they were now building siege-works for their war on one another with their hands and tongues—or rather with pen and ink—all but hurling and being hit with the spears and full armor of words.

2.4| And the stadium in this athletic contest of ours will hold, besides those already named, men stripped naked of all truth, who took up arms from the opposite side against all the dogmatic philosophers together: I mean the followers of Pyrrho, who declared that nothing can be grasped by human beings; and those of Aristippus, who say that only the affections can be grasped; and again those of Metrodorus and Protagoras, who assert that we must trust only the senses of the body.

2.5| Against these, in turn, we shall strip for the contest the followers of Xenophanes and Parmenides, who drew up on the opposite side and abolished the senses.

2.6| Nor shall we pass over the champions of pleasure; we shall enroll their chief hero, Epicurus, along with those already named. And against them all together we shall set the refutation of them with their own weapons.

2.7| I shall also bring into the open the disagreements in the doctrines of all those called natural philosophers together, and the uselessness of their learning—not as a hater of the Greeks or a hater of learning, far from it, but to clear myself of the slanderous charge that we preferred the oracles of the Hebrews because we had the least share in Greek education.

3.1| The Hebrews, having searched out piety and true philosophy from of old, from a long age back—from the very first generation of mankind, so to speak—have kept it uncorrupted for those who came after them as well, son receiving from father a treasure of true words and guarding it, so that no one dared either to add anything to what had once been decided or to take anything away.

3.2| Neither did the all-wise Moses, shown by the earlier arguments to be older than all the Greeks, yet the latest in time of the earlier Hebrews, intend to change or alter anything of what the forefathers held concerning doctrinal theology, except so far as to lay down, for the men under him, a way of life suited to them and a legislation for a kind of middle polity;

3.3| nor did the prophets after him, who shone forth in countless periods of years later, dare to utter in speech any word at variance either with themselves or with what was held by Moses and by the God-beloved men of old.

3.4| Nor does our own school of teaching, springing from there and by divine power filling all Greece and the barbarian world together, contain anything at variance with the former, unless someone were to say that it hands on the same discipline as that of the God-beloved Hebrews before Moses, not only in the tenets of theology but also in the manner of life.

3.5| Such are our teachings, attested with one mind and one voice by the first, the middle and the last; they seal the certainty of true piety and philosophy with every vote, and fill the whole inhabited world, growing young and blooming every day as though they had only just been founded and were in their first prime; and neither the ordinances of laws nor the plots of enemies nor the swords often whetted by foes have shown a power greater than the strength of the words which we pursue.

3.6| But let us now see what strength the teachings of the Greek philosophy showed, as they wavered, sending first of all into the contest those called natural philosophers; how those said to have shone before Plato quarreled with one another we can learn from Plato himself, who refutes the dispute of Protagoras and Heraclitus and their circle with Parmenides and those around him.

3.7| For Protagoras, who became a companion of Democritus, acquired a reputation for atheism. At any rate he is said to have used this opening in his work On the Gods: “Concerning the gods I do not know either that they exist or that they do not exist, nor what they are like in form.” And Democritus said that the first principles of the whole are the void and the full; calling the full what is, and solid, and the void what is not. For this reason he says that what is is no more than what is not; and that from eternity things that are move continuously and swiftly in the void.”

3.8| Heraclitus said that the first principle of everything is fire, out of which all things come to be and into which they are dissolved. For all things are an exchange, and a time is fixed for the dissolution of all things into fire and their generation out of it.

3.9| These men, then, said that everything is in motion; but Parmenides, an Eleatic by birth, taught that the all is one, unborn and motionless, and spherical in shape. Melissus was a companion of Parmenides and held the same opinions as Parmenides. Hear what Plato goes through about these men in the Theaetetus:

4.1| “Out of motion and movement and mixture with one another come to be all the things we say are, though we do not name them rightly. For nothing ever is; it is always becoming. And on this all the extraordinary wise men, with the exception of Parmenides, agree: Protagoras and Heraclitus and Empedocles, and the foremost poets of either kind of poetry, Epicharmus of comedy and Homer of tragedy, who, when he says ‘Ocean, origin of the gods, and mother Tethys,’ has said that all things are offspring of flow and motion. Or does he not seem to say this?”

4.2| “‘To me he does.’ ‘Who, then, against so great an army, with Homer as general, could dispute it without becoming ridiculous?’” Then going on in the argument he adds, saying:

4.3| “We must therefore approach more closely, as the argument on behalf of Protagoras commanded, and examine this moving essence by striking it, to see whether it rings sound or rotten. And the battle about it has been no slight one, nor among few.’ ‘Far from slight; in Ionia it grows very great. For the companions of Heraclitus champion this doctrine most vigorously.’ ‘Then all the more, dear Theodorus, we must examine it, and from the beginning, just as they themselves propose it.’”

4.4| “Certainly. For, Socrates, as for these followers of Heraclitus, or as you call them, of Homer and men still more ancient, it is no more possible to hold a discussion with the people of Ephesus themselves, all those who claim to be expert, than with madmen. They are carried along quite literally in line with their writings; but to stay with an argument and a question, and to answer and ask quietly in turn, is less in their power than nothing at all. Rather, “not even nothing” goes beyond “nothing,” so little quiet is there in these men. If you ask one of them something, they pull out little riddling sayings, as if from a quiver, and shoot them off; and if you seek to get an account of what he has said, you will be struck by another one, newly renamed. You will never bring anything to a conclusion with any of them, nor do they with one another; they take very good care that nothing be stable, whether in argument or in their own souls, believing, as it seems to me, that anything stable would be something static. And against that they wage total war, and as far as they can they banish it from everywhere.”

4.5| “Perhaps, Theodorus, you have seen these men fighting, but have not been with them when they were at peace; for they are not your companions. But I suppose they explain such things at leisure to their pupils, whomever they wish to make like themselves.” “What pupils, my good man? Among such people no one becomes another’s pupil; they spring up of themselves, each from wherever he happens to catch inspiration, and each regards the other as nothing. So from these men, as I was about to say, you could never get an account, whether they are willing or unwilling; we must take the matter up ourselves, as a problem, and examine it.”

4.6| “And you speak reasonably. Now as for the problem, have we received anything other than this: from the ancients, who hid it from the many behind poetry, that the origin of all things is Oceanus and Tethys, a flowing, and that nothing stands still; and from the later men, as being wiser, who demonstrate it openly, so that even the cobblers may hear their wisdom and learn it, and stop foolishly supposing that some things stand still and others move, and, having learned that all things move, may honor them? But I almost forgot, Theodorus, that others in turn have declared the opposite of this: “Immovable is the name of the All,” and all the other things that the Melissuses and Parmenideses, opposing all these men, insist on: that all things are one and stand still in themselves, having no place in which to move.”

4.7| “What then, my friend, shall we do with all these? For advancing little by little we have unawares fallen into the middle of both parties, and unless we somehow defend ourselves and escape, we shall pay the penalty, like those who play at the line in the wrestling-schools, when they are caught by both sides and pulled in opposite directions.”

4.8| So much from the Theaetetus. Then, passing next to The Sophist, he again speaks as follows about the natural philosophers who came before him: “Parmenides seems to me to have talked with us in an offhand way, and so has everyone who ever set out to decide how many and of what sort the things that are are. — Each of them seems to me to be telling us a kind of tale, as though we were children. One says that things are three, and that some of them at times fight one another in some way, and at other times become friends and provide marriages and births and the rearing of offspring; another says there are two, the moist and the dry, or the hot and the cold, and settles them together and gives them in marriage. But our own Eleatic tribe, beginning from Xenophanes and even earlier, goes through its tales on the view that what are called all things are one. Then certain Ionian and, later, Sicilian Muses understood that it was safer to weave both together and to say that what is is many and one, held together by enmity and friendship. For in being at variance it is always in agreement, say the more strenuous of the Muses; the gentler ones relaxed the claim that this is always so, and say that in turn the All is now one and friendly through Aphrodite, and now many and warring with itself through some strife. Whether any of these men has spoken truly or not, it is hard, and wrong, to find fault with men so famous and ancient.”

4.9| And after a few lines he adds: “As for those who are precise about what is and what is not, we have not gone through all of them, but let that suffice. We must look in turn at those who speak differently, so that from all of them we may see that it is no easier to say what the real is than the unreal. — Then we must go on to these as well. — And indeed there seems to be among them a kind of battle of giants, because of their dispute with one another about essence.

4.10| “How so? — One party drags everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and oaks with their hands. For laying hold of all such things, they insist that only that is which offers contact and touch, defining body and essence as the same; and if anyone says that something without body is, they despise him altogether and are unwilling to listen to anything else. — You have spoken of dreadful men; for I too have met many of them already.

4.11| “And so those who dispute with them defend themselves very cautiously from somewhere above, forcing the true essence to be certain intelligible and bodiless forms; and the bodies of their opponents, and the truth they speak of, they break into little pieces in their arguments, and call it, in place of essence, a kind of becoming that is carried along. Between the two parties on these matters, Theaetetus, an endless battle is always going on. — True.”

4.12| Through all this Plato has attacked the natural philosophers before him. What opinion he himself brought forward on the matters under inquiry we have set out in the earlier books, where we showed that he agrees with the doctrines of the Hebrews and runs together with the teaching of Moses about what is.

4.13| Let us now consider in our account the successors of Plato himself. They say that Plato, once he had set up his school in the Academy, became the first to be called an Academic, and founded what is called the Academic philosophy. Following Plato, Speusippus, who was a son of Plato’s sister Potone, took over the school, then Xenocrates, then Polemon.

4.14| They say that these men, starting from the very hearth, immediately began to undermine Plato’s teachings, twisting what had seemed right to their teacher by importing foreign doctrines, so that you may expect that the force of those marvelous dialogues was not long in being extinguished, and that with the man’s death the succession of his doctrines died too. From this point a conflict and faction began, which has never ceased to this day, so that those who embrace and zealously follow his views are nobody, except perhaps one or two in all of time, or a few others very small in number, and not even they wholly free of counterfeit sophistry; since the earlier successors of Plato, too, are criticized as being of this sort.

4.15| For they say that Polemon was succeeded by Arcesilaus, who, the report holds, abandoned Plato’s doctrines and established a foreign, and, as they say, second Academy. For he said that one must suspend judgment about everything, since all things are beyond grasp, and the arguments on either side are equally strong, and the senses are unreliable, and so is all reason. He praised, at any rate, this saying of Hesiod: “For the gods keep the mind of men hidden.” And he also tried to revive certain paradoxes.

4.16| After Arcesilaus, they say that Carneades and Clitomachus and their circle, turning away from the opinion of their predecessors, became the founders of a third Academy. Some add a fourth, that of Philo and Charmidas, and some count a fifth, that of Antiochus. Such was the succession from Plato himself. What sort of men these were in their manner, read the following words of Numenius the Pythagorean, which stand in the first book of the work entitled “On the Disagreement of the Academics with Plato.”

5.1| “Up to Speusippus, then, Plato’s nephew, and Xenocrates, successor of Speusippus, and Polemon, who received the school from Xenocrates, the character of the doctrines remained almost always the same, at least so far as this much-talked-of suspension of judgment, and any other such things, had not yet appeared. For in other respects they in many ways undermined and twisted things, and did not abide by the first succession; beginning from him they diverged, sooner or later, either by choice or through ignorance, and in some cases from some other cause, perhaps not without ambition.

5.2| “Nor do I wish to say anything disparaging on account of Xenocrates; I would rather speak on Plato’s behalf. For it stings me that they did not do and endure all things to preserve, in every respect and every way, complete agreement of opinion with Plato. And yet Plato was worth that to them: not better than the great Pythagoras, yet perhaps no worse than he, whose followers, by revering him, became the chief cause of Pythagoras being so greatly honored.

5.3| This the Epicureans, though they ought not to have learned it, did learn; and they were never seen to set themselves against Epicurus in anything, but agreed that he was wise, and being themselves of one mind with him, they rightly enjoyed the name they bore. It was also the case that among the later Epicureans no one ever spoke against another, or against Epicurus, on any point worth mentioning; any innovation was condemned as a transgression, or rather an impiety. For that reason no one even dares, and their doctrines rest in deep peace because of their constant agreement with one another. The school of Epicurus resembles a true commonwealth, entirely free of faction, having one mind and one judgment; and from it they have been, are, and, it seems, will be devoted followers.

5.4| But the Stoics have been torn by faction, beginning with their leaders and not yet ended even now. They refute him with a hostile refutation, gladly, some of them still remaining in his school, others having already changed sides. The first of them resemble oligarchs, who by their splitting became the cause among their successors of much criticism of their predecessors and much of one another, and still, one after another, some are more Stoic than others; and the more they showed themselves petty over technicalities, the more so. For these very men, outdoing the others in meddling and in hair-splitting, were quicker to find fault.

5.5| Long before these, however, the same thing happened to those who drew away different doctrines from Socrates: Aristippus on his own, Antisthenes on his own, and elsewhere on their own the Megarians and the Eretrians, or whoever else there were besides these.

5.6| The reason is that Socrates posited three gods and philosophized to them in the rhythms suited to each, and those who heard him were ignorant of this, and supposed that he said everything at random, by whatever chance prevailed at the moment, now one way and now another, according to how the wind blew.

5.7| But Plato, who had become a Pythagorean—and he knew that Socrates had spoken and spoken knowingly from no other source than that, for these very reasons—therefore bound up the matter in this way himself, neither in the customary manner nor openly. He carried each point through as he thought fit, concealing it in the middle between clear and unclear, and wrote in safety; but he himself furnished the cause of the faction and the pulling apart of the doctrines after him, not out of envy nor ill will; but I do not wish to say unseemly words about men older than myself.

5.8| Having learned this, we must turn our attention rather to the following; and as we proposed from the beginning to separate him from Aristotle and Zeno, so now too, if God lends a hand, we shall separate him from the Academy and let him now stand on his own as a Pythagorean; since, torn about more madly than befitted even a Pentheus, he suffers dismemberment limb by limb, though he does not change or exchange himself, whole for whole, at all.

5.9| So that being a man in the middle between Pythagoras and Socrates, he brought down the solemnity of the one to the level of human kindness, and raised the elegance and playfulness of the other from irony to dignity and weight, and, mixing Pythagoras into Socrates in this very way, he appeared more popular than the one and more solemn than the other.

5.10| “But my inquiry now is not to arbitrate these matters; I shall go back to what I had decided on earlier, from which I seem to have strayed, and run back to it, lest we be driven off the road that leads there.

5.11| Arcesilaus and Zeno became pupils of Polemon; I shall mention them again at the end. Zeno, I remember, I have said attended Xenocrates, then Polemon, and again lived as a Cynic under Crates; but now let it be reckoned for him that he also had a share in Stilpo and in the arguments of Heraclitus.

5.12| For since, studying together under Polemon, they became rivals of one another, they brought into their conflict with one another further allies: the one took Heraclitus and Stilpo along with Crates, and became under Stilpo a fighter, under Heraclitus austere, and under Crates a Cynic; while Arcesilaus took Theophrastus and Crantor the Platonist and Diodorus, then Pyrrho, and became under Crantor a producer of plausibilities, under Diodorus a sophist, and under Pyrrho a man of every kind, reckless, and nothing.

5.13| Of him a parodic and insulting line was even sung: “Plato in front, Pyrrho behind, Diodorus in the middle.” And Timon says that he got his captiousness from Menedemus, if indeed he says of him: “Here, with Menedemus’ lead beneath his breast, he will run off either to Pyrrho, all flesh, or to Diodorus.”

5.14| So, working Pyrrho’s reasonings and the sceptical method into the hair-splitting of Diodorus, who was a dialectician, he furnished out with Plato’s cleverness of speech a kind of chattering nonsense; and he argued and argued back, and rolled himself this way and that, from either side, wherever it happened, retracting and hard to judge, shifty and reckless at once, knowing nothing, as he himself said, noble fellow; and then somehow he would come out looking like those who know, appearing in every shape by a shadow-painting of arguments.”

6.1| And though it is unclear to which side Homer’s son of Tydeus belonged, whether he was in company with the Trojans or with the Achaeans, Arcesilaus was no less unclear. For to say one account and the same one at any time was not in him, nor did he think such a thing at all worthy of a clever man. So he was called a formidable sophist, the slaughterer of the untrained.

6.2| For like the bogeys of the stories, he worked his charms by preparation and practice in the phantoms of arguments, and bewitched; he knew nothing himself and would let no one else know anything; he frightened and threw into uproar, and, carrying off the first prize for sophistries and the theft of arguments, he delighted in the reproach and took wondrous pride that he knew neither what was shameful or fine, nor what was good or bad, but whichever view had sunk into his hearers’ souls, he would state it, and then change about and overturn it in more ways than those by which he had built it up.

6.3| So he was a man cutting up a hydra, cutting himself and cut up by himself, both sides of each other hard to distinguish and unexamined as to what was needed; yet he pleased his hearers, who watched a handsome man as they listened. He was therefore most pleasant to hear and to see, since they grew accustomed to welcoming his arguments coming from a fair face and mouth, not without the friendliness of his eyes.

6.4| These things must not be heard simply; this is how it was from the beginning. Having fallen in with Theophrastus as a boy, a gentle man and not unskilled in matters of love, because he was handsome, while still in his bloom he obtained as lover Crantor the Academic, and joined himself to him; and, by nature not unendowed, using it freely as it ran, ardent from love of victory, he took part in these clever, villainously worked plausibilities, and consorted with Pyrrho (Pyrrho having sprung from Democritus, from wherever it was); so, trained from this source, except for the title, he stayed with Pyrrho, as with the abolition of everything.

6.5| Mnaseas, then, and Philomelus and Timon, the Sceptics, name him a sceptic, as they themselves were, since he too does away with the true and the false and the plausible.

6.6| Called a Pyrrhonist, then, on account of his Pyrrhonist views, out of respect for his lover he still put up with being called an Academic. He was, then, a Pyrrhonist apart from the name, and an Academic only in being called one. For I am not persuaded by Diocles of Cnidus, who says in the work entitled Diatribes that Arcesilaus, fearing the followers of Theodorus and of Bion the sophist, who attacked philosophers and did not hesitate to refute from any ground, was on his guard against them, so that he might not have trouble, and, advancing no apparent doctrine, put forward suspension of judgment before himself like the cuttlefish’s ink. This, then, I am not persuaded of.

6.7| Those who set out from there, then, Arcesilaus and Zeno, with such helpers, arguments fighting on the side of both, forget the beginning from which they started out from Polemon, and standing apart and arming themselves, “shields and spears and the fury of men in bronze corselets clashed together; and the bossed shields struck one another, and a great din arose. Shield pressed on shield, helmet on helmet, man on man.” And there arose together the groan and the cry of triumph of men killing and being killed—of the Stoics.

6.8| For the Academics were not struck by them, being unknown where they could be caught more easily. They were captured when their footing was shaken, if they could find no starting point nor any ground to fight from. The starting point was to show that they did not speak as Platonists; and as for leaving them no ground, it was enough, as I said, that they altered one single item, taking it out of the definition of the cataleptic impression.

6.9| It is not the right moment for me to explain this now, but I shall mention it again when I am about to reach that very point. So, standing apart, they struck at each other in the open—not the two of them, but Arcesilaus struck Zeno. For Zeno had something solemn and weighty in his fighting, and no better than the orator Cephisodorus. This Cephisodorus, on seeing his own teacher Isocrates struck by Aristotle, was ignorant of Aristotle himself and inexperienced in him; but because he saw that Plato’s reputation stood high, he supposed that Aristotle philosophized after the manner of Plato, and so he made war on Aristotle but struck Plato, and brought his charges beginning with the Ideas and ending with the rest, which he did not know himself, but only guessed at what is commonly thought and said about them.

6.10| This man, then, not fighting the one he was at war with, fought the one he did not wish to be at war with. Zeno, however, once he let Arcesilaus alone, if he did not make war even on Plato, was in my judgment philosophizing in a way worth very much, at least for the sake of this peace. But if, though perhaps not ignorant of Arcesilaus’ views, he was ignorant of Plato’s, as is shown by what he wrote against him, then he did the opposite himself, not striking the man he knew, but heaping the most dishonorable and shameful abuse on the one he ought not to have, and that far worse than is fitting even for a dog.

6.11| Still, he made a show of magnanimity in keeping his hands off Arcesilaus. For either from ignorance of his ways, or from fear of the Stoics, he turned the great mouth of bitter war elsewhere, against Plato. But about the innovations which Zeno made against Plato, with neither fairness nor shame, I shall speak at some other time, if I devote leisure to philosophy. May I never devote such leisure, at least for that purpose, unless in play.

6.12| Arcesilaus, then, seeing that Zeno was a rival in his craft and worthy to be fought, tore down the arguments that were carried away from that quarter, and did not hesitate.

6.13| As for the other points on which he fought him, I perhaps cannot say, and even if I could, there was no need to mention them at present. But as for this doctrine of which Zeno was the first discoverer, the cataleptic impression: seeing that it, and its name, were winning esteem in Athens, Arcesilaus used every device against it. Zeno, being in the weaker position, kept quiet, unable to be wronged; he let Arcesilaus alone, though he had much he could have said, but did not wish to—or perhaps rather for some other reason—and shadow-boxed instead against Plato, who was no longer among the living, and raised a din with the whole repertory of abuse hurled from the festival wagons, saying that Plato would not defend himself, and that no one else cared to defend him; and if Arcesilaus did care, he thought he himself would gain by turning Arcesilaus away from himself. I know that Agathocles of Syracuse used this same stratagem against the Carthaginians.

6.14| The Stoics listened, struck dumb. For their muse was not at that time fond of learning, nor a worker of graces, by which Arcesilaus, striking at some things, cutting under others, tripping up still others, talked them down and was persuasive. Accordingly, with those against whom he argued defeated, and those among whom he spoke thunderstruck, it was somehow taken as shown for the men of that time that nothing was a word, or a feeling, or a deed, or anything small, or useless on the contrary, that could ever be seen, unless it seemed so to Arcesilaus of Pitane; and to him nothing seemed anything, nor did he declare anything, any more than that these were mere phrases and terrors.”

7.1| “About Lacydes I want to tell something amusing. Lacydes was rather stingy, and in a way what is called thrifty, esteemed as such by the many; he opened the storeroom himself and locked it himself. He also took out himself what he needed, and did all such things by his own labor—not at all praising self-sufficiency, nor otherwise making use of poverty, nor from a lack of slaves, since he had slaves, however many; the reason one may guess.

7.2| But I shall tell the amusing thing I promised. Managing the stores himself, he did not think he ought to carry the key about on his person; after locking up, he would put it into a hollow writing-tablet, and, having sealed it with his ring, he would roll the ring through the keyhole into the house, letting it drop in, so that later, coming back and opening with the key, he could pick up the ring, lock up once more, then seal, and then toss the ring in again through the keyhole.

7.3| The slaves, noticing this clever device, as soon as Lacydes went off for a stroll or somewhere else, would open up themselves, and then, as their spirit moved them, eat some things, drink others, and carry off still others; then they would go through the routine in order: lock up, seal, and, laughing heartily at him, let the ring fall inside the house through the keyhole.

7.4| Lacydes, then, who had left the vessels full and found them empty, was at a loss at what was happening; and since he had heard that incomprehensibility was being philosophized in Arcesilaus’ school, he thought that this was what was happening to him in the storeroom. And starting from there he took up philosophy under Arcesilaus, holding that he saw or heard nothing clearly or soundly; and once, drawing one of his associates into his house, he insisted to him, with astonishing vehemence as it seemed, on suspension of judgment, and said: “This I can tell you beyond dispute, having learned it from myself, not from trying another.”

7.5| And then he began to relate the whole experience that had befallen him in the storeroom. “What, then,” he said, “could Zeno still say against so agreed and manifest an incomprehensibility, evident to me through everything in matters of this sort? For I, who locked up with my own hands, and sealed myself, and let the ring fall inside myself, and then coming back and opening see the ring within, but not the other things—how shall I not justly hold myself in distrust of the facts? For I cannot venture to say that someone came and stole them, when the ring was inside.”

7.6| And the man who heard him—for he was an insolent fellow—having taken in the whole account as it was told, though he had hardly been holding himself in even before, burst into a very broad laugh, and laughing and guffawing still, he refuted at the same time the other’s vain conceit. So from then on Lacydes no longer threw the ring inside, nor any longer made use of incomprehensibility in the storeroom, but grasped what had been let go, and had philosophized in vain.

7.7| Not that the slaves were anything but rascals, and not caught in the one way; being like those of comedy, Getae and Dacians, trained to chatter in the Dacian talk, when they had heard the sophistries of the Stoics, or had learned them otherwise, they went straight to the daring act, and undid his seal, and sometimes put another in its place, and sometimes not even another, in the belief that for him these things would be incomprehensible; and so on in other ways too.

7.8| He came in and looked: when he saw the tablet unsealed, or sealed but with another seal, he was annoyed. When they said that it had been sealed, and that at any rate they saw his own seal, he reasoned it out precisely and demonstrated it; when they, beaten by the demonstration, said that if the seal was not on it he had perhaps forgotten and not sealed it; he said he remembered sealing it, and demonstrated it, and went all around the argument, and made terrible speeches to them, thinking he was being played with, and swore besides.

7.9| But they, taking up his attacks, supposed that they themselves were being played with by him, since Lacydes, being a wise man, had made it his doctrine to be without opinion and so without memory; for memory is an opinion. In fact, they said, they had heard him say this to his friends only recently.

7.10| When he turned their arguments back on them and said these were not Academic ones, they went to some Stoic and learned afresh what they should say, and starting from there argued back with sophistries, and were rival-craft thieves, Academics; and he would bring charges against the Stoics; but the slaves dissolved his charges by means of incomprehensibility, not without some mockery.

7.11| So there were debates among all of them there, with arguments and counter-arguments; and not one thing was left in the middle, no vessel, nor anything put in a vessel, nor whatever else is part of the furnishing of a house.

7.12| And Lacydes was for a time at a loss, seeing that the aid from his own doctrines did not profit him, and supposing that, if he did not refute them, everything would be overturned for him; falling into helplessness, he called out to his neighbors and to the gods, “Ah, ah!” and “Woe, woe!” and “By the gods, yes, by the goddesses,” and whatever other inartistic proofs there are in the terrible complaints of the distrustful—all this was said with a shout and an air of credibility.

7.13| In the end, when he had a quarrel of contradiction going on in the house, he himself would play the Stoic against the slaves, while the slaves maintained the Academic position, in order to have no more trouble, our friend stayed at home, sitting on guard in front of the storeroom. But since it profited him nothing at all, suspecting where his wisdom was going, he threw off the mask. “These things, boys,” he said, “are said by us in our schools one way; we live another way.”

7.14| So much for Lacydes. He had many pupils, of whom one conspicuous was Aristippus of Cyrene. Of all his associates, Evander and those after him succeeded to his school.

7.15| After them Carneades took over the school and founded the third Academy. In his method of argument he followed Arcesilaus: he too practiced arguing on both sides of a question, and overturned everything said by others; he differed from him only on the doctrine of suspension of judgment, saying that it is impossible for a human being to suspend judgment about everything, and that there is a difference between the unclear and the incomprehensible: all things are incomprehensible, but not all are unclear. He also took part in the Stoic discussions, and by taking a stand against them contentiously he grew greater, aiming at what appears plausible to the many, not at truth; hence he caused the Stoics much vexation. Numenius, at any rate, writes the following about him:

8.1| “Carneades, taking over from Hegesinus, who was bound to preserve whatever was unmoved and whatever had been moved, neglected this, and carrying the fight back to Arcesilaus, whether his positions were better or worse, after a long interval renewed it afresh.”

8.2| And next he adds: “He too, then, plundered and carried off, and brought together counter-arguments and subtle twists in the fight, varying them; he was both denying and affirming, and arguing against on both sides; and wherever there was need of arguments with something wonderful in them, he roused himself in a torrent like a rushing river, filling everything here and there, and fell upon his hearers and swept them along in the uproar.

8.3| So while leading the others away, he himself remained undeceived, which was not the case with Arcesilaus. For that man, going about with his drug among those who raved with him, did not notice that he had first deceived himself into believing that he perceived nothing, and was persuaded that what he said was true, through the abolition of everything at once.

8.4| It would have been evil laid upon evil, Carneades against Arcesilaus, had he not relaxed some small thing, by which they would not be left without action, in the positing and denying impressions that, on his view, come from the plausible, of this being some living creature or not being one.

8.5| By thus giving way, then, like beasts that draw back and then hurl themselves more violently on the spears, he too, having yielded, came on more strongly. And when he had made his stand and was succeeding, then he willingly neglected, and no longer remembered, what he had earlier accepted.

8.6| For by granting that the true and the false are in things, as if cooperating with the manner of inquiry, like a skilled wrestler giving a hold, he got the upper hand from there. For offering each side according to the inclination of the plausible, he said that neither is firmly apprehended. He was, at any rate, a robber and sorcerer of the cleverer sort.

8.7| For taking a false thing like a true, and an apprehensible thing like a cataleptic impression, and bringing them to equality, he did not allow either the true or the false to be, or one more than the other, or else more by the plausible.

8.8| It was thus dreams in place of dreams, because false impressions are similar to true ones, as from a wax egg to a real egg.

8.9| The evils, then, became more numerous. And Carneades, when he spoke, charmed and enslaved. He was an unseen thief, but openly a robber, capturing by guile and force even those very well prepared.

8.10| Every thought of Carneades, at any rate, prevailed, and none whatever of others, since those he warred against were too powerless to speak.

8.11| Antipater, who lived in his time, meant to take pains to write something, but against the arguments that came daily from Carneades’ circle he never published, neither in the schools nor on the walks, nor did he speak, nor utter, nor did anyone hear a squeak from him, they say; he kept up a pretense of rejoinders, and, taking a corner, left behind books written for those who came later, which are no use now and even then were too weak against so towering a man as Carneades appeared and was thought to be by the men of that time.

8.12| Yet even he, though stirring things up in public by his Stoic contentiousness, with his own companions in secret agreed, spoke truly, and declared what any ordinary person would.”

8.13| Then he says next: “Carneades had as a pupil first Mentor, who was not however his successor; for while Carneades was still alive, having found him an adulterer with his concubine, not by a plausible impression, nor as one who had not apprehended, but trusting his eyes above all, and apprehending it, he refused him the school. Departing, Mentor argued against him with sophistries and was a rival in his craft, refuting the incomprehensibility in his arguments.”

8.14| And again he continues: “Carneades, philosophizing as it were upside down, prided himself on falsehoods and under them hid away the truths. He used the falsehoods as screens, and told the truth inside, in hiding, in a rather huckster’s fashion. He therefore suffered what happens with pulses, the hollow ones of which drift on the surface of the water and stand out above it, while the sound ones lie down below, out of sight.”

8.15| So it is said about Carneades. His successor in the school was Clitomachus, and after him Philo, about whom Numenius reports these things:

9.1| “Philo, then, having taken over the school, was struck with delight, and in gratitude paid court to Clitomachus, and increased what he had decided, and armed himself against the Stoics with gleaming bronze.

9.2| But as time went on, and their suspension of judgment, worn out by familiarity, lost its force, his thoughts were no longer consistent with themselves, and the vividness and agreement of the experiences turned him around. Having already great discernment, he was, you may be sure, exceedingly eager to find people to refute him, so that he might not seem to have turned his back and fled of his own will.

9.3| Philo had a pupil Antiochus, who founded another Academy. Having studied under Mnesarchus the Stoic, he took a view opposed to his teacher Philo, and attached countless foreign elements to the Academy.”

9.4| Such things, and countless others like them, are recorded about Plato’s succession. It is time now to take up the account again from above and consider the false opinions, and equally the opposing opinions, of the natural philosophers: men who wandered over much of the earth and made the discovery of the truth their highest concern, who held converse with all the ancients' opinions and had gone over the exact detail of the theology long before them among all the Phoenicians and Egyptians and the Greeks themselves—let us hear what fruit worth hearing they found from their labors among them, that we may learn whether anything worthy of God came down to them from their elders.

9.5| For from ancient times the worship of many gods had prevailed earlier among the nations, and temples and sacred rites and mysteries of the gods were customarily kept in every city and country by all. There was then no need even of human philosophy, if divine wisdom had already been in place; nor was it necessary for the wise to innovate, if their ancestors’ teachings were sound for them, nor for noble philosophers to quarrel and differ, if their ancestral opinion about the gods had been proven to be agreed and true.

9.6| Why was it necessary for them to make war and fight against one another, or to run about up and down on the long road, wandering and pilfering the things of barbarians, when they might have stayed at home and learned from the gods, if there were any gods, or from the theologians, the true and unshaken accounts of the things sought in philosophy, about which, after laboring countless times, they disagreed, falling far short of the discovery of truth?

9.7| And why should they have dared to inquire after novelties about the gods, or quarrel and come to blows with one another, if the secure and firm discovery of the gods and the true knowledge of piety were contained in the rites, the mysteries, and the rest of the most ancient theology, when it was possible to cherish that very theology unmoved and in agreement?

9.8| But if these men should prove to have learned nothing true about God from their predecessors, but to have applied themselves to the investigation of nature with their own notions, using conjecture rather than apprehension, what remains but to agree that the ancient theology of the nations contains nothing more than the account already given in the earlier books?

9.9| That Greek philosophy came into being from human conjecture and much verbal wrangling and wandering, and not from any exact apprehension, you may learn from Porphyry’s letter to Anebo the Egyptian, since you hear him confessing this very thing in these words:

10.1| “I shall begin my friendship with you from the gods and good daemons and the philosophical doctrines akin to them, about which a great deal has been said also among the philosophers of the Greeks, but what has been said has, for the most part, its grounds of belief in conjecture.”

10.2| And going on next he adds: “Among us there is a great deal of verbal wrangling, since the good is guessed at from human reasonings; but for those who have devised the association with the higher, if this part is left unexamined, their wisdom has been practiced in vain.”

10.3| But in his work addressed to Boethus on the soul, the same man likewise confesses, writing as follows, word for word: “While the common notions and the evidence of history establish beyond dispute that the soul is immortal, the arguments brought forward by the philosophers as proof seem easily overturned, because of the inventiveness in argument of the contentious in every case. For what argument in philosophy is not disputable by those of other opinions, when even about things that seem evident some of them thought it right to suspend judgment?”

10.4| And in the work he entitled “On Philosophy from Oracles” he expressly admits that the Greeks have gone astray, calling his own god as witness, since Apollo himself declared this through oracles and bore witness that the discovery of truth belongs rather to barbarians than to Greeks, and indeed mentioned the Hebrews among those he attested.

10.5| After setting down the oracle, he then used these concluding words: “You have heard how great a toil it is for someone to offer the purifications for the body, let alone to find out the soul's salvation. For the road to the gods is bronze-bound, steep and rough; many of its paths barbarians have found, but Greeks have gone astray, and those who already held them even spoiled them; and the god has borne witness that the discovery belongs to the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and Chaldeans (for these are the Assyrians), and Lydians, and Hebrews.”

10.6| So says the philosopher, or rather his god. Is it then fitting for us afterwards to be blamed because we left behind the erring Greeks and chose the things of the Hebrews, who were attested to have grasped the truth?

10.7| What, then, should one expect to learn from philosophers? What hope of benefit from them, if what is said among them has for the most part conjecture and guesswork as the starting points of its belief? And what is the fruit of verbal wrangling, if every argument of the philosophers is readily overturned because of the inventiveness in argument in every case? For these things were not just now said by us, but were heard as said by them.

10.8| Therefore we seem to me to have acted well and with examined judgment, not irrationally, in having despised such things and embraced those of the Hebrews, not because they have been attested by the daemon, but because they are shown to share in divine virtue and power.

10.9| But so that you may learn the wranglings of these admirable philosophers from their very works, I shall set out for you a little later their own words, concerning the disagreements about first principles and the gods and the constitution of the universe.

10.10| First, since they go around up and down making a clamor of the mathematical studies, saying that those who are to gain experience of the apprehension of truth must by all means go through astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music—which, as has been shown, came to them from barbarians—for without these, they say, a learned man and philosopher cannot be perfected, nor even touch the truth of things, unless knowledge of these has been first impressed in the soul; then, puffed up by their learning of the things mentioned, they suppose themselves lifted up on high and all but walking on the very aether, as though carrying God himself around in numbers, and they consider us, because we do not pursue the same things, to differ in nothing from cattle, and say that on this account we cannot know God or any of the august things—come, let us set right this first error, putting the true account before them in place of light.

10.11| It will show that countless Greeks and countless tribes of barbarians, who had the studies mentioned, recognized neither God nor a temperate life nor any of the best and most profitable things at all, and that those apart from all the studies have been the most pious and the most philosophical. As for Socrates, who is celebrated among them all, you could learn what he thought about these matters by trusting Xenophon, who reports in the Memorabilia somewhat as follows:

11.1| “He also taught how far the rightly educated man ought to be versed in each subject. For instance, geometry, he said, one should learn only so far as to be able, if need ever arose, to take over, hand over, or divide land correctly by measure, or to show the amount of work. This, he said, is so easy to learn that one who attends to the measuring knows at once how large the land is and goes away understanding how it is measured.

11.2| But to learn geometry as far as the hard-to-follow diagrams he rejected; for he said he did not see what use they were—though he was not unacquainted with them. He said that they were sufficient to use up a man’s life and to hinder him from many other useful studies.

11.3| He also urged them to become acquainted with astronomy, and even in this only to the extent of being able to know the hour of the night, the month, and the year, for the sake of travel, voyaging, and keeping watch, and for whatever else is done by night or in the month or in the year, so as to have signs to use for these by distinguishing the times mentioned. And these things are easy to learn from night-hunters and helmsmen and many others who take care to know them.

11.4| But to learn astronomy so far as to know the bodies that are not in the same revolution, the planets and the erratic stars, and their distances from the earth, and their orbits, and to wear oneself out seeking their causes, he strongly discouraged. For he said he saw no benefit in these either—though he was not without hearing of them. He said that these too were enough to wear out a man’s life and to keep him from many useful studies.

11.5| In general, he discouraged becoming a student of the heavenly things, how God contrives each of them; for he thought they were not discoverable by human beings, and did not think that the one who sought what the gods did not wish to make clear would be pleasing to the gods. He said that anyone who fretted over these things would run the risk of going out of his mind no less than Anaxagoras did, who took the greatest pride in explaining the contrivances of the gods.

11.6| For that man, in saying that fire and the sun are the same, was ignorant that people easily look at fire but cannot look at the sun; that they have darker complexions when lit by the sun but not by fire. He was ignorant also that of the things growing from the earth nothing can grow well without the sun’s light, while all things heated by fire perish; and when he said the sun was a red-hot stone, he was ignorant of this too, that a stone in the fire neither shines nor holds out for long, whereas the sun remains for all time the brightest of all things.

11.7| He also told them to learn calculations, and here likewise, as in the other studies, he told them to guard against idle labor; but so far as was useful, he himself examined everything with them and went through it with his companions.” So Xenophon in the Memorabilia. And in the letter to Aeschines, about Plato and those who boast of knowing the natural science of the universe, the same writer writes as follows:

12.1| “That divine things are beyond us is clear to everyone; it is enough to revere them for their superior power; what sort they are is neither easy to find out nor lawful to inquire. For it is not fitting for slaves to know the nature or the actions of masters beyond what service requires. And most important, the more one ought to admire those who labor at human things, the more burdensome it is to those who yearn for reputation from many untimely and empty pursuits. For when, Aeschines, has anyone heard Socrates speaking about the heavenly things? Or urging people to learn lines for the purpose of correction? As for music, we know he understood it as far as the ears; but on every occasion he continued telling them what is fine, and what are courage and justice and the other virtues. These he called human goods, and as for the rest, he said that they either cannot be grasped by human beings or are akin to myths, the playthings of sophists going through them with a lofty brow. And it was not that he said these things but did not practice them. To write down what was done, for you who know it, though it would not be unpleasant, takes time, and I have recorded it elsewhere. Let those whom Socrates did not please, then, stop, now that they are refuted, or come round to what is reasonable: Socrates, to whom while he lived the god bore witness for his wisdom, while those who killed him found no cleansing for their remorse. And, fine thing indeed, they fell in love with Egypt and with the monstrous wisdom of Pythagoras, whose extravagance and inconstancy toward Socrates were exposed by a passion for tyranny, and in place of simple fare, the Sicilian table of the measureless belly.” So Xenophon, hinting at Plato. And Plato in the Republic records that Socrates said the following about gymnastics and music:

13.1| “What then, Glaucon, would be the study that draws the soul from becoming to being? I think of this as I speak: did we not say that these men must be athletes of war while young? We did. Then the study we seek must have this in addition. What? That it not be useless to men of war.

13.2| “It must, however,” he said, “if that is possible. Surely in the earlier part they were educated by us in gymnastics and music.” “They were,” he said. “And gymnastics is concerned with what comes to be and perishes; for it presides over the growth and decay of the body.” “So it appears.” “Then this could not be the study we are seeking.” “No.” “But perhaps music, as much of it as we went through before?”

13.3| “But that,” he said, “was the counterpart of gymnastics, if you remember, educating the guardians by habits, handing on by harmony a certain harmoniousness, not knowledge, and by rhythm a certain rhythmic grace, and in discourse having other habits akin to these, both in those discourses that are mythical and in those that are more true; but a study leading to anything like what you now seek was nowhere in it.”

13.4| “You remind me most exactly,” I said; “for in fact it had nothing of the kind. But, my good Glaucon, what could such a study be? For all the arts, I suppose, seemed to be vulgar.” “How could they not?”

13.5| Then, going on next, he adds: “Lest those whom we shall rear attempt to learn any part of these in an incomplete form, one that does not always arrive at the point at which all of them ought to arrive, as we said a moment ago about astronomy. Or are you unaware that they do something else of the same sort about harmony? For measuring against each other the concords and notes that are heard, they labor to no end, just as the astronomers do.”

13.6| “Yes, by the gods,” he said, “and ridiculously too, naming certain ‘condensations’ and laying their ears alongside, as if hunting a voice from next door, some saying they still hear a certain sound in between, and that this is the smallest interval by which to measure, others disputing, saying that the notes are already alike, both putting their ears before their mind.”

13.7| “You,” I said, “mean the worthy fellows who give the strings trouble and put them to the test, twisting them on the pegs. But lest the image run on too long, with blows from the plectrum, and charges and denials and boastings of the strings, I leave off the image, and I say that it is not these I mean, but those we said were spoken of just now in regard to harmony.

13.8| For they do the same as those in astronomy. They look for numbers in these concords that are heard, but do not ascend to problems, to examine which numbers are concordant and which not, and why in each case.”

13.9| But let this too stand as serving our purpose, in our defense that it was not without right reasoning that we made light of the useless learning of such things as well. Let us now at last consider, starting from the beginning, the dogmatic disagreements with one another of the natural philosophers mentioned. Plutarch, who in the work he entitled “On the Physical Opinions That Please the Philosophers” assembles the views of all the Platonists and Pythagoreans together, and of the still older natural philosophers called such, and again of the later Peripatetics and Stoics and Epicureans, writes; and from it I shall set down the following:

14.1| “Thales of Miletus, one of the seven wise men, declared that the first principle of things is water. This man seems to have begun philosophy, and from him the Ionian school got its name; there were very many successions. He philosophized in Egypt, and came to Miletus when older. He says that all things are from water and are resolved into water. He conjectures this first from the fact that the seed of all living things is a first principle, being moist; so it is likely that all things have their beginning from moisture. Second, because all plants are nourished by moisture and bear fruit, and when deprived of it dry up. Third, because even the fire of the sun and the stars is nourished by the evaporations of the waters, and the world itself. For this reason Homer too sets down this opinion about water: ‘Oceanus, who is the origin of all.’ So much for Thales.”

14.2| “Anaximander the Milesian says that the first principle of things is the unlimited; for from this all things come to be and into this all things perish. Therefore infinite worlds are also generated, and perish again into that from which they come to be. He says it is unlimited so that nothing may fall short in the coming-to-be that is underlying. But this man too errs in failing to say what the unlimited is, whether it be air, or water, or earth, or some other bodies; he is at fault, then, in declaring the matter while doing away with the efficient cause. For the unlimited is nothing other than matter; and matter cannot be in actuality unless the efficient cause is posited.”

14.3| “Anaximenes of Miletus declared air to be the first principle of things; for from it all things come to be and into it they are again resolved. For example, he says, our soul is air; it holds us together; and breath and air surround the whole world; air and breath are spoken of as synonyms. This man too is at fault, supposing that living creatures are composed of simple, single-formed air and breath. For it is impossible for matter alone to stand as the one first principle of things; one must also posit the efficient cause. For example, silver is not enough for a cup to come to be, unless there is the maker, that is, the silversmith; likewise with bronze and wood and the rest of the matter.”

14.4| “Heraclitus and Hippasus of Metapontum: fire is the first principle of everything. For they say that all things come to be from fire and all things end in fire; and when it is quenched, all things are ordered into a world. For first its coarsest part, contracting into itself, becomes earth; then the earth, loosened by the fire, naturally becomes water, and being vaporized becomes air. Again the world and all bodies are consumed by fire in the conflagration. Fire is therefore the beginning, because everything comes from it, and the end, in that all things are resolved into it.”

14.5| “Democritus, whom Epicurus followed long afterward: the first principles of things are atomic bodies, discernible by reason, without share in void, ungenerated, eternal, indestructible, unable to be broken, or to receive any shaping from parts, or to be altered; they are discernible by reason; they move in the void and through the void; the void itself is infinite and the bodies infinite. Three properties belong to these bodies: shapes, size, weight; but Democritus said two, size and shape, and Epicurus added weight as a third to these. For it is necessary, he says, that the bodies be moved by the blow of weight, because otherwise they will not be moved. The shapes of atoms are limited, not infinite; for they are not hooked, nor trident-shaped, nor ring-shaped; since these shapes are readily broken, whereas atoms are impassible and unbreakable; they have their own shapes discernible by reason. An atom is called so not because it is the smallest, but because it cannot be cut, being impassible and without share in void; so that when he says ‘atom,’ he means unbreakable, impassible, without share in void. That it is an atom is clear; for there are elements, and [….], and the monad.”

14.6| “Empedocles, son of Meton, of Acragas: four elements, fire, air, water and earth, and two principles and powers, friendship and strife, of which the one is unifying and the other dividing. He says as follows: ‘Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bearing Hera, and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who moistens with tears the mortal spring.’ By Zeus he means the heat and the aether, by life-bearing Hera the air, by Aidoneus the earth, and by Nestis and the mortal spring, as it were, the seed and the water.”

14.7| Such is the disagreement of the first natural philosophers, and such their opinion about first principles; none of them posited among the first principles God, or a creator, or a Maker, or any cause of the whole, nor yet gods, nor incorporeal powers, nor intellectual natures, nor rational essences, nor anything whatever beyond the senses.

14.8| Anaxagoras alone is the first of the Greeks recorded in the discourses on first principles to have declared mind the cause of all. They say, at any rate, that he admired natural science more than those before him; he left his own land to pasture for the sake of it, and was the first of the Greeks to articulate the account of first principles. For he declared not only about the essence of all things, as those before him did, but also about the cause that moves it.

14.9| “In the beginning,” he says, “things were all mixed together, and mind came in and brought them from disorder into order.” It is remarkable that he was the first among the Greeks to do theology in this fashion, yet was considered an atheist by the Athenians because he did not make the sun a god but the maker of the sun, and he was all but stoned to death.

14.10| But it is said that not even this man kept his doctrine sound. For he set mind over all things, but no longer rendered his natural science of existing things according to mind and reason. Listen, then, to how Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue On the Soul, finds fault with the man in these words:

15.1| “But once I heard someone reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, which said that mind is what orders everything and is the cause of all; this cause pleased me, and it seemed to me somehow good for mind to be the cause of everything, and I reasoned that if this is so, mind in ordering all things orders them and sets each in the way in which it would be best.

15.2| So if anyone wished to discover the cause of each thing - how it is generated, or perishes, or exists - he must find this about it: how it is best for it to be, or to undergo or do anything else. From this argument it follows that it is fitting for a man to look at nothing else, whether about himself or about other things, but the best and the most excellent. And it is necessary that the same man also know the worse; for the knowledge of them is the same.

15.3| Reasoning thus, I gladly supposed that in Anaxagoras I had found a teacher of the cause of things, to my own mind, and that he would first tell me whether the earth is flat or round, then when he had told me, would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity, stating what is better, and that it was better for it to be so; and if he said it is in the middle, he would proceed to explain that it was better for it to be in the middle; and if he showed me these things, I was prepared no longer to long for another kind of cause.

15.4| And I was likewise prepared to inquire in the same way about the sun, and the moon and the other stars, about their speeds relative to one another and their turnings and their other affections, in what way it is better for each to act and to be acted upon as it is. For I never thought that he, having said that they had been ordered by mind, would bring any other cause to bear on them than that it is best for them to be as they are.

15.5| So, giving the cause for each of them and for all in common, I supposed he would go on to explain what is best for each and the good common to all. I would not have sold my hopes for a great price; taking the books up most eagerly, I read them as fast as I could, so as to know as quickly as possible the best and the worse. From that wonderful hope, my friend, I was swept away. But as I went on reading, I saw that the man made no use of mind at all and named no causes for the ordering of things, but made air and aether and waters and many other absurd things the causes.

15.6| And it seemed to me that his case was very like that of someone who says that Socrates does everything he does by mind, and then, trying to state the causes of each of the things I do, says first that I am sitting here now because my body is composed of bones and sinews, and that the bones are hard and have joints that separate them from one another, while the sinews are such as to be stretched and relaxed, surrounding the bones along with the flesh and the skin that holds them together.

15.7| The bones, then, swinging in their sockets, with the sinews relaxing and tightening, make it possible for me to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I sit here with my legs bent. And again, about my conversing with you, he would give other such causes, charging voices and airs and hearings and countless other such things, neglecting to state the true causes: that because the Athenians judged it better to condemn me, for this reason it has seemed better to me, in turn, to sit here, and more just to stay and undergo whatever penalty they order.

15.8| For by the dog, I think, these sinews and bones would have been near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried off by the opinion of what is best, if I did not think it more just and finer, before fleeing and running away, to submit to the city whatever penalty it ordered.

15.9| But to call such things causes is highly absurd. If someone said that without having such things, bones and sinews and the rest that I have, I would not be able to do what I have decided, he would speak truly; but that it is on account of these that I do what I do, and that I act by mind in doing so, and not by the choice of the best, would be a great and long carelessness of speech.”

15.10| Then he adds: “This is why one man puts a vortex around the earth and makes the earth stay put under the heaven, and another props it up on air as on a wide kneading-trough; but the power through which things are now placed as it is best they could be placed, this they neither seek nor suppose to have any divine strength, but think that they will someday find an Atlas more powerful and more immortal than this one, and more fully holding all things together, and they do not believe at all that the good and the binding truly bind and hold together.”

15.11| So much Socrates said about the opinion of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras’ successor in both school and opinion was Archelaus, and Socrates is reported to have been a pupil of Archelaus. But other natural philosophers as well, Xenophanes and Pythagoras, who flourished together with Anaxagoras, philosophized about the incorruptibility of God and the soul's immortality; from these men and after them the schools of Greek philosophy arose, some following these, others those, and some devising opinions of their own. Plutarch in turn writes the views of the same men about the gods in this way:

16.1| “Some of the philosophers, such as Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene and Euhemerus of Tegea, say that there are no gods at all; Euhemerus is also alluded to by Callimachus of Cyrene in his iambs. And Euripides the tragedian was unwilling to declare it openly, fearing the Areopagus, but revealed it in this manner: he brought on Sisyphus as the champion of this opinion, and spoke in support of his view.”

16.2| After these he brings on Anaxagoras again, saying that he was the first to think rightly about God. He says as follows: “Anaxagoras says that the bodies stood still in the beginning, and the mind of God ordered them and made the generations of all things. But Plato supposed that the first bodies were not standing still but moving without order; therefore, he says, God, having taken note that order is better than disorder, set them in order.”

16.3| To this he adds: “Both are mistaken, in that they made God concerned with human affairs and constructing the world for their sake. For the blessed and incorruptible living being, filled with all good things and incapable of receiving any evil, wholly occupied with the maintenance of his own happiness and incorruptibility, has no concern with human affairs. He would be miserable, laboring and worrying like a workman and builder over the construction of the world.

16.4| And again, the God they speak of either did not exist in the time before, when the bodies were motionless, or when they moved without order; or he was asleep, or awake, or neither of these. Now neither the first can be accepted, for every god is eternal, and not the second either: for if God slept from eternity, he was dead; for eternal sleep is death. But God is incapable of sleep; for the immortal and what is near to God is removed from sleep.

16.5| And if God was awake, he either lacked something for happiness or was filled with blessedness. Neither on the first is God blessed, for what lacks something for happiness is not blessed; nor on the second, for, lacking nothing, he would be undertaking empty works. And how, if there is a God and human affairs are managed by his care, does the counterfeit prosper while the fine man suffers the opposite? For Agamemnon, both ‘a good king and a mighty spearman,’ was overcome by an adulterer and an adulteress and treacherously murdered; and his kinsman Heracles, after cleansing human life of many of its ravagers, was poisoned by Deianira and murdered.”

16.6| “Thales: the world is God. Anaximander: the stars are heavenly gods. Democritus: God is in fire, the spherical soul of the world. Pythagoras: of the principles, the monad is God and likewise the good, being the nature of the one, mind itself; while the indefinite dyad is the daemon and evil, around which is the material multitude, and the visible world.”

16.7| After these, hear how the younger men in time thought: “Socrates and Plato: the one thing, single in nature and self-sprung, the unitary, the truly existing good. All these names hasten to mind. God, then, is mind, a separate form, that is, unmixed with any matter and not entangled with anything subject to affection.

16.8| Aristotle: the highest God is a separate form, seated upon the sphere of the whole, which is an aethereal body, called by him the fifth; and this being divided into spheres, joined in nature but separated in thought, he holds that every one of the spheres is a living being composed of body and soul, the body of which is aethereal, moving in a circle, and the soul is an unmoved reason, the cause of the motion in actuality.

16.9| The Stoics declare God to be intelligent, a craftsman fire, proceeding by a method toward the generation of the world, having embraced all the seminal principles according to which everything comes to be by fate. He is breath pervading the whole world, taking on different names through all the matter through which he has passed. They hold the world to be God, and the stars and the earth, and the highest mind of all in the aether.

16.10| Epicurus: the gods are all human in shape, but all perceptible only by reason, owing to the fineness of the nature of the images. The same man holds four other natures, imperishable in kind: the atoms, the void, the infinite, and the likenesses, and these are called the homoeomeries, and the elements.”

16.11| Such are the disagreements and blasphemies of the natural philosophers about God; our account establishes that the first among them to set mind and God over the world were Pythagoras and Anaxagoras and Plato and Socrates. These men prove to be quite children in point of time, living in the very period in which the last events of the ancient history of the Hebrews are recorded.

16.12| Knowledge of the God of the universe, then, which Anaxagoras was the first of the Greeks to bring forth, along with his circle, was not the oldest among all the Greeks and those long before them who introduced the worship of many gods among Phoenicians and Egyptians. And indeed the polytheistic worship held sway over all nations; but it did not, as it seems, contain the true theology, but what the Egyptians and Phoenicians were attested to have been first of all to establish.

16.13| This theology deified no gods at all, nor any divine powers, but men who had long since lain among the dead, as the argument of truth showed long ago. Come then, let us take up the argument again. Since some of the natural philosophers cast everything down to the senses, while others in turn pulled in the opposite direction, such as the circle of Xenophanes of Colophon and Parmenides of Elea, who did away with the senses, saying that nothing perceived by sense is apprehensible, so that one must trust reason alone, let us examine what has been said against them.

17.1| “Others arose who raised their voices against these. For they think that one must cast down the senses and the impressions, and trust reason alone. Such things were said earlier by Xenophanes and Parmenides and Zeno and Melissus, and later by Stilpo and the Megarians. Hence these men held that what is, is one, and that the other is not, and that nothing comes to be or perishes or moves at all.

17.2| We shall come to know more of the argument against these men as we philosophize; for now, however, this much must be said: we might say that our reason is the most divine thing; yet there is also need of sense perception, just as of the body. That sense perception is naturally truthful is plain; for it cannot be that one who perceives fails to undergo something, and undergoing it he would know the affection; so perception is some kind of knowledge.

17.3| But if perceiving is a kind of undergoing, and everything that undergoes undergoes at something’s hands, then what acts and what is acted on must be different. So first, what is said to be would be different, as color and sound; and next, what is will not be one; and indeed neither immovable; for perception is motion.

17.4| In this way everyone wants his senses to be in a natural state, since he trusts, I think, the healthy ones rather than the diseased. It is reasonable, then, that a powerful love of them is ingrained in us. No one who is not mad would ever choose to throw away even a single sense, so that all other goods should come to him.

17.5| Those who malign them ought, if they were persuaded that they have them in vain, to say what Pandarus says in Homer about his bow: “May some stranger straightway cut off my head, if I do not put this bow in blazing fire, breaking it in my hands, for it serves me to no purpose”—and after that to destroy all their own senses. For in this way one would believe them, teaching by deed that they have no need of them.

17.6| But as it is, this is the most absurd thing: while declaring them useless in word, they continue to make the greatest use of them in deed.

17.7| Melissus, in wishing to show that none of the things that appear and are in sight really is, proves it through the very things that appear. He says, at any rate, that if there are water and air, fire and iron and gold, one thing living and another dead, and black and white and everything else that people say is true, and if we see rightly and hear rightly, then what is would have to be such as it first seemed to us, and not change, nor become different, but be the same as each thing is. But as it is, we say that we rightly see and hear and understand; yet to us the hot seems to become cold, and the cold hot, the hard soft, and the soft hard.

17.8| As he says these things and many others like them, one might quite reasonably ask: did you then, not perceiving it, know that what is now hot afterward becomes cold? And likewise with the rest. For, as I said, he would be found to be doing away with the senses and refuting them for no other reason than that he trusts them most of all.

17.9| But such arguments have by now paid a sufficient penalty; they have faded away, as if they had never been said at all. Let us now say with confidence that those philosophize rightly who take both the senses and reason for the knowledge of things.”

17.10| Such, then, were those around Xenophanes, who is reported to have flourished along with Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. Parmenides became a pupil of Xenophanes; Melissus of Parmenides; Zeno of Melissus; Leucippus of Zeno; Democritus of Leucippus; Protagoras and Nessas of Democritus; Metrodorus of Nessas; Diogenes of Metrodorus; Anaxarchus of Diogenes. A pupil of Anaxarchus was Pyrrho, from whom the school of those called Sceptics arose; and these too, defining that nothing at all is apprehensible either in sense or in reason, and suspending judgment about everything, you can learn how their opponents refuted them from the work already indicated, which runs word for word somewhat as follows:

18.1| “It is necessary above all to examine our knowledge of ourselves; for if we are by nature unable to know anything, there is no longer any need to look into other matters.

18.2| There were, then, some even among the ancients who voiced this position, against whom Aristotle argued. Pyrrho of Elis, however, was strong in saying such things; but he himself left nothing in writing, while his pupil Timon says that whoever is to attain happiness must look to these three: first, of what sort things are by nature; second, in what way we should be disposed toward them; and last, what will result for those so disposed.

18.3| He says that Pyrrho shows things to be equally indifferent and unstable and undecidable, and that for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions tell the truth or lie. For this reason, then, one must not trust them either, but be without opinion, uninclined, and unshaken, saying of each single thing that it is no more than it is not, or that it both is and is not, or that it neither is nor is not.

18.4| For those so disposed, Timon says, the result will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance; but Aenesidemus says pleasure.”

18.5| “These, then, are the main points of what they say; let us consider whether they speak rightly. Since they declare all things equally indifferent, and for this reason bid us assent to nothing and hold no opinion, one might reasonably, I think, ask them: do those who think that things differ make a mistake, or not? For if they make a mistake, they surely do not suppose rightly. So they must say that there are some who hold false opinions about the things that are; and they themselves would then be the ones who speak the truth; and thus there would be something true and something false. But if we, the many, do not make a mistake in thinking that things differ, what has come over them that they scold us? For it is they who would be in error in claiming that they do not differ.

18.6| And indeed if we granted them that all things are indifferent alike, it is clear that they themselves would not differ from the many. What, then, would their wisdom amount to? And why does Timon abuse everyone else but sing the praises of Pyrrho alone?

18.7| Moreover, if all things are equally indifferent and for this reason one should hold no opinion, then these things too would not differ: I mean differing or not differing, and holding an opinion or not holding one. For why are they more such than not such? Or, in Timon's words, why yes and why no, and the very ‘why’? It is plain, then, that inquiry is done away with; so let them stop troubling us. As it is, they are mad beyond all art, at once telling us not to hold opinions and at the same time bidding us do exactly that; saying that one ought not to make a declaration about anything, and then making declarations; they claim to assent to nothing, but bid us be persuaded by them; then, saying they know nothing, they refute everyone as though they knew very well.

18.8| Those who say that all things are unclear must do one of two things: either keep silent or declare and say something. If they keep quiet, it is clear that there can be no argument against such people; if they declare, then in every way and altogether they would say either that something is or that it is not, just as they now say that all things are unknowable and conventionally believed by all.

18.9| Now, this being so, the one who makes the claim either makes the matter clear so that it can be understood as spoken, or does not. If he does not make it clear, then once and for all there could be no argument against such a man either. But if he signifies it, he surely speaks either of the unlimited or the limited; if the unlimited, again there could be no argument against him, for there is no knowledge of the unlimited; but if what is signified is limited, or any single thing, the one who says this defines and judges something. How then could all things be unknowable and undecidable? And if he says that one and the same thing is and is not at once, first the same thing will be true and false alike, then he will say something and not say it, and using argument he will do away with argument, and further, confessing that he lies, he says that one must trust him.

18.10| It is worth asking from where they learned that all things are unclear. For they must first know what the clear is; only so could they say that things are not of that kind. One must first know the affirmation, then the denial. If they do not know what sort of thing the clear is, they would not know what the unclear is either.

18.11| When Aenesidemus, in his Outline, goes over the nine modes (for by so many modes he has tried to show things unclear), are we to say that he speaks knowing them or not knowing? For he says that living creatures differ, and we ourselves, and cities, and ways of life, and customs, and laws; and he says that our senses are weak, and that there are many external things that spoil knowledge, distances and sizes and motions; and further that young and old are not disposed alike, nor waking and sleeping, nor healthy and sick; and that we grasp nothing simple and pure.

18.12| For all things are confused and spoken of in relation to something. As he made these and such subtle speeches, one would gladly ask him whether he says it knowing well that matters stand this way or not knowing. For if he did not know, how should we trust him? And if he did know, he was a complete fool, declaring everything unclear while at the same time saying he knows so much.

18.13| And indeed when they go through such points, they are doing nothing other than offering a kind of induction, showing what sort of things the appearances and the particulars are; and such a thing both is and is called belief. If they assent to it, it is clear that they hold opinions; if they do not trust it, we would not wish to give them heed either.

18.14| Timon, moreover, in the Python, after stretching out a long account, tells how he met Pyrrho as he was walking to Pytho by the shrine of Amphiaraus, and what they said to one another. Might not someone reasonably stand beside him as he wrote this and say: Wretch, why do you trouble yourself writing this and telling of what you do not know? For why did you meet him rather than not meet him, and converse rather than not converse?

18.15| And did that wonderful Pyrrho himself know why he was going to see the Pythian games? Or did he wander along the road like madmen? And when he began to accuse men and their ignorance, shall we say that he spoke truly or not, and that Timon was affected by it and assented to the words, or paid them no heed? For if he was not convinced, how did he become a philosopher instead of a dancer and go on admiring Pyrrho? But if he assented to what was said, he would be a strange fellow, philosophizing himself but hindering us.

18.16| In general, one might wonder what Timon’s Silloi and the slanders against all mankind, and the long Elements for Aenesidemus, and all such throng of words are meant to do for them. For if they wrote these things thinking to make us better, and for this reason think they must refute everyone, so that we may stop talking nonsense, then clearly they want us to know the truth and to suppose that things are as Pyrrho claims. So if we were persuaded by them, we would become better instead of worse, having judged what is more profitable and welcomed those who speak better.

18.17| How then can things be equally indifferent and undecidable? And how could we be without assent and without opinion? And if the arguments bring no benefit, why do they disturb us? Or why does Timon declare, “No other mortal could rival Pyrrho”? For one would no more admire Pyrrho than that famous Coroebus or Meletides, who are thought to have excelled in folly.

18.18| One must also bear this in mind. What sort of citizen, or judge, or counselor, or friend, or in a word, human being, would such a man be? What evil would he not dare, who truly believes that nothing is evil, or shameful, or just, or unjust? Nor could one say that such people fear the laws and the punishments; for how could they, if they are, as they themselves say, free from feeling and disturbance?

18.19| Timon says this about Pyrrho: “But what a man I saw, free from vanity, and unconquered by all of you who subdue the tribes of mortals, nameless and named alike, light-minded peoples weighed down this way and that by passions, by opinion, and by idle lawmaking.”

18.20| When they say this wise thing of theirs, that one must live following nature and custom but assent to nothing, they are simple-minded indeed. For if to nothing else, to this at least they must assent, and suppose that it is so. And why must one follow nature and custom rather than not, when one knows nothing and has nothing by which to judge?

18.21| This is altogether foolish, when they say that just as purgative drugs expel along with the waste their own selves too, in the same way the argument that holds all things unclear does away with itself along with the rest. For if it refutes itself, those who use it are talking nonsense. It would therefore be better for them to keep quiet and not even open their mouths.

18.22| But the purgative drug and their argument are not at all alike. For the drug is expelled and does not remain in the bodies, whereas the argument must exist in the souls, always being the same and always believed; for this alone could make people without assent.

18.23| That they do not suppose a human being to be without opinion, one might learn also in this way. It is impossible for one who has sensation not to sense; and to sense is to recognize something. That he also trusts sensation is clear to everyone: wanting to see more accurately, he wipes his eyes, and draws nearer, and shades them with his hand.

18.24| And indeed we know when we are pleased and when we suffer; for it is impossible for one who is burned or cut not to be aware of it. As for memories and recollections, who would not say that they come with a supposition? And what would one say about common notions, that such a thing is a human being, and about the sciences and arts? None of these would exist if we were not naturally disposed to suppose. But I leave the rest aside: whether we believe or disbelieve what is said by these men, we necessarily hold an opinion in every way and altogether.”

18.25| “That it is impossible to philosophize in this fashion is clear; that it is also contrary to nature and to the laws, we may see in this way. For if things really were such, what would remain for us but to live as in sleep, aimlessly and senselessly? Then lawgivers and generals and teachers would be talking nonsense. But it seems to me that all other people live according to nature, and that only these are puffed up with conceit, or rather suffer a vigorous madness, who talk this nonsense.

18.26| One might learn this not least from the following. Antigonus of Carystus, who lived at the same time and wrote their life, says that Pyrrho, chased by a dog, fled up a tree, and when those present mocked him, said that it is hard to strip oneself of being a man. And when his sister Philista was sacrificing, and one of his friends, having promised the things for the sacrifice, failed to supply them, Pyrrho bought them himself and was annoyed; and since the friend said that he was not acting in accord with his arguments or worthy of his freedom from feeling, he is said to have replied: In a woman one need not make one’s demonstration. And yet the friend might justly have said: Fool, in a woman and a dog and in everything, if there is any use at all in these arguments of yours.”

18.27| “It is right to learn also who were his zealous followers and whom he himself emulated. Pyrrho became a pupil of a certain Anaxarchus. At first he was a painter, and not a very successful one; then, having come upon the books of Democritus, he neither found nor wrote anything useful, but spoke ill of everyone, gods and men alike; later, wrapping himself in this very conceit and calling himself free of conceit, he left nothing in writing.

18.28| Pyrrho’s pupil was Timon of Phlius, who at first danced in the theaters, and then, having met him, wrote burdensome and buffoonish parodies in which he blasphemed all who ever philosophized. For he was the author of the Silloi, saying: “Wretched men, base reproaches, mere bellies, from such quarrels and groans you are molded; men, wineskins full of empty conceit.”

18.29| And since none of them was noticed, as though they had never lived at all, only yesterday and the day before in Alexandria in Egypt a certain Aenesidemus began to rekindle this drivel. And almost the ones thought to be the strongest among those who have walked this road are these.

18.30| That no sane person would call such a school, or system of arguments, or whatever one wishes to call it, right, is clear. I do not think it should even be called philosophy, since it does away with the very principles of philosophizing.”

18.31| So much against those who are thought to philosophize after Pyrrho. Akin to them would also be the objections raised against the followers of Aristippus of Cyrene, who say that only the affections are apprehensible. Aristippus was a companion of Socrates, the founder of the so-called Cyrenaic school, from which Epicurus took his starting points for his account of the end. Aristippus was very loose in his way of life and fond of pleasure; but he made no open statement about the end, though in effect he said that the substance of happiness lies in pleasures. For by always making speeches about pleasure he led those who approached him to suspect that he said the end is to live pleasantly.

18.32| Among others, his daughter Arete became his pupil; she bore a son and named him Aristippus, who, introduced by her to the discourses of philosophy, was called “mother-taught.” He defined clearly that the end is to live pleasantly, placing pleasure as that which lies in motion; he said, for his part, that there are three states in our constitution: one in which we suffer pain, like a tempest at sea; a second in which we feel pleasure, likened to a smooth wave, for pleasure is a smooth motion, comparable to a following wind; and the third a middle state, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt, resembling a calm. Of these affections alone, he claimed, we have sensation; against these men the following objections have been made:

19.1| “Next would be those who say that only [the affections] are apprehensible; some of the Cyrenaics said this. They claimed, as if oppressed by a kind of stupor, to know nothing at all unless someone stood by and struck or pricked them; for when they were burned or cut, they said, they recognized that they were undergoing something, but whether what burned was fire, or what cut was iron, they could not say.

19.2| One might at once ask those who say this whether they at least know this, that they are affected and sense. For if they do not know, they could not even say that they know only the affection; but if in turn they recognize it, then the affections would not be the only things apprehended. For “I am burned” was a statement and not an affection.

19.3| But it is necessary that these three subsist together: the affection itself, what acts, and what is acted upon. The one who grasps the affection will therefore surely perceive also the one affected. For he will not know that he is being warmed, if it happens, yet be ignorant whether it is he himself or his neighbor, and whether now or last year, in Athens or in Egypt, living or dead, and even whether a man or a stone.

19.4| So he will also know by what he is affected; for people recognize one another, and roads, and cities, and food; and craftsmen know their own tools; physicians and sailors, too, observe signs of what is to come, and among beasts the dogs find the tracks.

19.5| Moreover, whoever is affected in any way surely grasps the affection either as his own or as foreign. Whence then will he be in a position to declare that this is pleasure and this pain? Or that in tasting or seeing or hearing he is affected in some way? And that he tastes with the tongue, sees with the eyes, hears with the ears? Or how do they know that one thing must be chosen and another avoided? If they know nothing of this, they will lack any impulse or desire, and so neither would they be living creatures. They are ridiculous when they say that these things happen to them but do not know how or in what way. These people could not say whether they are human by nature, or whether they are alive; so neither whether they are saying and declaring anything.

19.6| What argument could there be against such people? One would wonder if they do not know whether they are on earth or in heaven; but much more remarkable if they do not know, while claiming to philosophize, whether four is more than three, and how many the one and the two are. They are unable even to say how many fingers are on their hands, or whether each of them is one or several.

19.7| So they could not know even their own name, or their native country, or Aristippus. Nor, then, whom they love or hate, nor what they desire; nor if they laughed or wept could they say that this is laughable and that distressing. It is clear that they do not understand what we are now saying. Such people would then differ in nothing from gnats or flies, though even those recognize what is according to nature and what is contrary to it.”

19.8| Against those so disposed, though countless things can be said, these are enough. It follows to examine together with them also those who went the opposite way and defined that one must trust everything to the senses of the body, and these include Metrodorus of Chios and Protagoras of Abdera.

19.9| They say that Metrodorus was a pupil of Democritus, and that he declared the principles to be the full and the void, of which the one is being and the other non-being. At any rate, when he wrote On Nature he used this opening: "We know nothing, not one of us, not even this very thing, whether we know or do not know." This opening gave bad starting points to Pyrrho, who came after. As he went on, he says that all things are whatever anyone may conceive.

19.10| Protagoras, the story goes, was called an atheist. In writing about the gods he too used an opening like this: "Concerning the gods, I do not know either that they exist or what form they have; for there are many things that prevent me from knowing each of these." The Athenians punished him with exile and burned his books in public, in the middle of the marketplace. Since these men, then, said that we must trust the senses alone, let us look at the objections raised against them."

20.1| "There have been some who claim that we must trust sensation and appearances alone. Some indeed say that Homer too hints at this, when he declares Ocean the origin of all things, as though things existed in a flux; and from what we know, Metrodorus of Chios seems to say the very same, though Protagoras of Abdera says it outright.

20.2| For he said that of all things man is the measure: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not; for things are such as they appear to each person, and about anything else we can assert nothing.

20.3| Against these men one might say what Plato says in the Theaetetus. First, why on earth, if things are so, did they hold man to be the measure of truth, rather than a pig or a baboon? Next, how could they claim to be wise, if each person is for himself the measure of truth? Or how do they refute others, if what appears to each is true? And we are ignorant of some things, even though we often perceive them, as when we hear barbarians speaking.

20.4| Again, whoever has seen something and afterward remembers it knows it, but no longer perceives it. And if someone shut one eye and saw with the other, clearly he will both know and not know the same thing.

20.5| Besides, if what appears to each person is also true, and the claims made by them do not appear true to us, then it would also be true that man fails to be the measure of all things.

20.6| Moreover, craftsmen differ from the unskilled, and the experienced from those without experience, and for this reason a pilot, a physician and a general foresee what is going to happen better than others do.

20.7| In short, these men do away with the more and the less, with what is of necessity and what is contingent, with what is according to nature and what is contrary to nature. Thus one and the same thing would be both being and non-being. For nothing prevents the same thing from appearing to exist to some and not to exist to others; and the same thing would be a man and a piece of wood, since at times the same thing appears to one person a man, to another a piece of wood.

20.8| Every statement would be true, and for that very reason also false; and those who deliberate and sit in judgment would have nothing they could do. And what is most dreadful, the same people will be both good and wicked, and vice and virtue the same. One could say many other such things; but there is no need of further argument against those who do not suppose that they have mind and reason."

20.9| Then, next: "Since there are still some now who say that every appearance without exception is true, let us say a little about these as well. For they seem to fear that, if they were to say that some sensations are false, they would have no firm or reliable criterion and standard. They do not see that in this way they could not avoid declaring all opinions true as well; for we are naturally equipped to judge many things by these also; and yet they none the less hold that some of them are true and others false.

20.10| Then, if one looks closely, one will see that none of the other criteria either is always and in every case free of error, such as the balance, or the lathe, or anything of the kind; each of them is sound when it is in one condition and defective when it is in another, and when used in this way it gives the truth, in that way it lies. And indeed, were every sensation true, there should not be so great a difference among them. For there are sensations from near and from far, of the sick and of the healthy, of the skilled and the unskilled, of the sensible and the foolish. It would be quite absurd to say that those of the mad are true, or those of people who see or hear amiss; for it would be silly to claim that someone with faulty sight either sees or does not see; one would say that he sees, but not correctly.

20.11| Yet when they say that sensation, being without reason, neither adds nor takes away anything, they are evidently failing to see what is in front of them; for with the oar in the water, as with paintings and ten thousand other things, it is sensation that deceives. That is why we all find fault in such cases not with our mind but with the appearance. For the argument refutes itself in claiming that every appearance is true. For it declares false our own appearance, by which we do not suppose every appearance to be such. It follows, then, that they say every appearance is both true and false.

20.12| In general they err in claiming that things are such as they appear to us. Rather, they appear to be such as they are by nature; we do not make them be so, but we are ourselves affected in some way by them. It would also be laughable if we, like painters and modelers, imagined puppies or chimeras and claimed that they at once exist and for that reason appear to us as if standing ready before us."

20.13| That it is not right, then, to say that every sensation and every appearance is true is clear from these arguments. But although this is so, Epicurus and his followers, starting out from the succession of Aristippus, again tied everything to pleasure and sensation, defining the feelings alone as apprehensible and pleasure as the end of goods.

20.14| Epicurus is said by some to have heard no one, but to have come upon the writings of the ancients; by others, that he heard Xenocrates, and later became a pupil of Nausiphanes, the associate of Pyrrho. Let us see, then, what has been said in reply to him as well.

21.1| "Since there are two kinds of knowledge, the one of facts, the other of what we should choose and avoid, some say that we have as the starting point and criterion of choice and avoidance pleasure and pain; and even now Epicurus and his followers say something of this sort. We must therefore look at this question also.

21.2| For my part, I am so far from asserting that feeling is the starting point and standard of good and evil that it seems to me that this itself needs a criterion. That it exists, it shows of itself, but what sort of thing it is requires another to judge. Sensation tells us whether a thing is congenial or alien, but reason tells us if it should be chosen or avoided.

21.3| They themselves say that one should not embrace every pleasure and turn away from every pain. And this follows quite naturally. For criteria show both themselves and the things judged, but feeling shows only itself. That this is so they themselves bear witness. For although they claim that every pleasure is good and every pain evil, they nevertheless say that one should not always choose the one and avoid the other; for they are measured by quantity, not by quality.

21.4| Clearly, then, quantity is judged by nothing other than reason; for it is better to endure certain pains in order that we may enjoy greater pleasures, and it is advantageous to abstain from certain pleasures in order not to suffer harsher pains; and in all of this reason is the judge.

21.5| In sum, sensations and appearances seem to be like mirrors and images of things; but feelings, pleasures and pains are turnings and alterations of ourselves. Accordingly, in perceiving and receiving appearances we look outward, but in feeling pleasure and pain we turn back upon ourselves alone. For external things produce our sensations; and whatever those things are like, they make our appearances like it, whereas feelings come to be of a certain kind through us and according to how we ourselves are disposed.

21.6| Hence these same things appear at one time pleasant and at another unpleasant, and sometimes more so, sometimes less. Since this is so, we shall find, if we care to look, that those lay down the starting points of knowledge best who admit both the senses and the mind.

21.7| Sensation is like snares and nets and other such hunting gear, while mind and reason are like the dogs that track the scent and run down the quarry. Yet better than these should we hold those to philosophize who neither use the senses at random nor take the feelings as a means to discerning the truth. It would be a dreadful thing for human beings, born as they are, to hand themselves over to irrational pleasures and pains, and let go of the most divine judge, the mind." So much from the works of Aristocles.

22.1| Let us, then, assess each of the three against pleasure and against mind. We have to see to which of the two each should be assigned as more akin. Do you mean beauty, truth and measure? Yes. Take first truth, Protarchus, and having taken it, look at the three, mind, truth and pleasure, and after waiting a long time, answer yourself whether pleasure is more akin to truth or mind is.

22.2| What need of time? For they differ greatly, I think. Pleasure is the most boastful of all things; and as the saying goes, even in the pleasures of love, which seem the greatest, perjury has won pardon from the gods, as though those who take their pleasure, like children, possessed not the least bit of mind; whereas mind is either the same as truth or the most like it and the truest of all things.

22.3| Then next you will consider measure in the same way: is there more of it in pleasure than in wisdom, or in wisdom more than in pleasure? This too is an easy inquiry you have set. For I think one could find nothing by nature more immoderate than pleasure and exultation, and nothing more moderate than mind and knowledge.

22.4| You have spoken well. Yet go on and speak of the third. Has mind a larger share of beauty than the class of pleasure, so that mind is more beautiful than pleasure, or the reverse? Surely, Socrates, no one has ever seen or imagined wisdom and mind to be ugly, waking or dreaming, anywhere or in any way, whether in what comes to be, or in what is, or in what will be? Rightly.

22.5| But pleasures, and these almost the greatest, whenever we see anyone enjoying them, we see either the ridiculous or the most shameful thing following upon them, and we are ourselves ashamed and hide them away as far as possible, giving all such things over to night, as though daylight ought not to see them.

22.6| You will say everywhere, then, Protarchus, sending messengers and telling those who are present that pleasure is not the first possession, nor indeed the second, but that the first lies somewhere in the sphere of measure and the moderate and the timely and everything of that sort that we must suppose the eternal nature has chosen. So it appears, at any rate, from what has now been said.

22.7| The second lies in the sphere of the proportionate and beautiful and perfect and sufficient and all that belongs to this family. So it seems.

22.8| The third, then, as my divination goes, if you put down mind and wisdom, you would not stray far from the truth. Perhaps.

22.9| Then are not fourth those things that we set down as belonging to the soul itself, namely knowledges and arts and what are called right opinions, these being the four in addition to the three, if indeed they are of closer kinship to the good than to pleasure? Perhaps.

22.10| Fifth, then, the pleasures that we set down, defining them as painless, naming them pure pleasures of the soul itself, and those that follow upon knowledge, with others upon the senses. Perhaps.

22.11| "In the sixth generation," says Orpheus, "bring the ordering of your song to rest"; and our discourse too seems to have come to rest at the sixth judgment. After this nothing is left for us but, as it were, to put a crowning head on what has been said. So we must.

22.12| Come then, the third to the Savior: let us go through the same argument once more, calling it to witness. Which one? Philebus set down for us that the good is all pleasure, and complete pleasure. By "the third," Socrates, you seem to have meant a moment ago that we must go over the argument again from the beginning.

22.13| Yes. Let us hear what follows. For I, having seen all that I have now gone through, and disliking the argument of Philebus, and not his alone but that of ten thousand others again and again, said that mind is far better and superior to pleasure for human life. So it was.

22.14| I suspected there were many other things too, and said that if anything better than both of these should appear, I would join mind in the contest against pleasure for the second prize, and pleasure would lose even the second prize. You did say so. And after that, it was shown most fully that neither of the two is sufficient. Most truly.

22.15| Then in this argument both mind and pleasure were released from the claim that either of them is the good itself, since both lack self-sufficiency and the power of the sufficient and perfect? Quite right. And since something else has appeared that is better than either, mind has now appeared infinitely more akin and closely related than pleasure to the form of the victor. Of course.

22.16| Then, by the judgment as the argument has now declared it, the power of pleasure would come fifth. It seems so. But it would not be first, not even if all the oxen and horses and every other beast should say so by pursuing enjoyment; trusting these, as seers trust birds, the many judge that pleasures are the best thing for living well, and think that the desires of beasts are weightier witnesses than the discourses that the philosophic Muse prophesies on each occasion. Most truly, Socrates, have you now spoken, as we all say."

22.17| So says Plato. But I shall set beside it a few of the replies against Epicurus from the work On Nature by Dionysius, a man who was bishop of the philosophy that is according to Christ. Take them and read his words, which run as follows.

23.1| "Is the universe one continuous whole, as it appears both to us and to the wisest among the Greeks, Plato and Pythagoras and the Stoics and Heraclitus; or two, as someone perhaps supposed; or many and unlimited, as it seemed to certain others, who by many wanderings of thought and varied utterances of words tried to break the essence of the whole into pieces, and suppose it unlimited, unbegotten, and without providence?

23.2| For some, calling them atoms, name certain indestructible and very small bodies, countless in number, and positing a void space of unbounded size, say that these atoms are borne at random in the void, and fall in with one another of their own accord through disorderly motion, and become entangled because, being of many shapes, they catch hold of one another; and that in this way they produce the world and what is in it, or rather worlds without number.

23.3| Of this opinion were Epicurus and Democritus; they differed only in that the one supposed all atoms to be of the smallest size and therefore imperceptible, while Democritus supposed that some atoms are also of the greatest size. Both say they are atoms and are so called because of their unbreakable hardness.

23.4| Others, renaming the atoms, say they are partless bodies, parts of the whole, from which, being indivisible, all things are constituted and into which they are dissolved. They say that Diodorus was the coiner of the name for these partless things; and Heraclides, they say, gave them another name and called them masses, and from him the physician Asclepiades inherited the name." After saying this, he next overturns the doctrine by many arguments, among them these.

24.1| "How can we put up with them when they say that wise and therefore beautiful works of craft are chance occurrences? Each of these, when it came to be, was seen to be beautiful by the one who commanded it to come into being, and likewise all of them together. For God saw, it says, everything he had made, and behold, they were exceedingly good.

24.2| But neither are they instructed by small, familiar examples that lie at their feet, from which they could learn that no useful work, serving some benefit, is produced without design or by chance, but is shaped by hand to fit its proper service; and when it falls into uselessness and unprofitableness, then it is dissolved and scattered without order, wherever it may fall, since wisdom, which was concerned for its holding together, no longer handles or arranges it.

24.3| For a garment is not woven without a weaver, with the warp threads standing up by themselves and the weft interlacing of its own accord; and if it is worn away, the torn pieces are thrown out as rags. A house is built, and a city, not by taking in some stones that come over of their own accord to the foundations and others that leap up into the courses, but the mason brings up each fitting stone to its place; and when it is thrown down, each stone is carried off as it may chance and falls away.

24.4| And when a ship is built, one keel does not lay itself down, nor does the mast raise itself amidships, nor does each of the other timbers take of itself whatever position it happened to; nor are the so-called hundred timbers of a wagon fastened together each in whatever empty place it found, but the builder of each brings each piece into its proper place; and if the ship is broken up at sea, or the wagon on the road, the timbers are scattered wherever it happens, some by the waves, some by the violent rush of the vehicle.

24.5| So it would be fitting to say of their atoms also that they remain idle, unwrought by hand and useless, and are borne about at random. Let those men see the unseen ones, and conceive the unconceivable, not as that man did, who, when God revealed it to him, confessed to him: "My eyes saw your unwrought state.""

24.6| And when they say that the finely made fabrics that come from atoms are produced by the atoms themselves without wisdom and without perception, who will bear to hear the atoms called workwomen, when even the spider, working with its hands out of itself, is wiser than they?

25.7| Or this great house, composed of heaven and earth, which on account of the greatness and abundance of the wisdom shining forth in it is called a cosmos, adorned and made an order by atoms that are borne along in no order at all, and disorder become cosmos?

25.8| How are regular motions and courses brought forth from disorderly movement? How does the all-harmonious dance of the heavenly bodies sing in concert out of instruments that are unmusical and out of tune?"

25.9| In what way, when the essence of all is one and the same, and the same indestructible nature, apart from sizes, as they say, and shapes, are some bodies divine and unspoiled and eternal, as they themselves would say, or at least long-lived, according to the man who so named them, some visible and some invisible: visible, the sun and moon and stars, earth and water; invisible, gods and demons and souls? For they cannot deny that these exist, even if they want to.

25.10| Others are the longest-lived animals and plants: among birds, as they say, eagles, ravens and phoenixes; among land animals, deer, elephants and serpents; among water creatures, the whales; among trees, palms, oaks and persea trees. Of trees, some are evergreen, which someone has counted and said to number fourteen; others flower and shed their leaves in season; and most of what grows and is born is short-lived and quickly ended, among which is man, as a certain holy scripture says of him: "Mortal, born of woman, is short-lived."

25.11| But they will say that the differing bonds between atoms are the cause of the difference in lasting. For they say that some things are compacted and drawn tight by them, so that these become felted masses almost impossible to part, while others have the junction of their atoms looser and more relaxed, in lesser or greater degree, so that they separate from their cohesion sooner or after no long time; and that some are made up of atoms of this kind and shaped in this way, and others mixed from different atoms differently arranged."

25.12| "Who, then, is the one who sorts them by kind, gathers them together and pours them out, and arranges these thus to make the sun, and those so, that the moon may come to be, and brings each together according to its kinship for the light of each star? For neither would the solar atoms, so many and of such kind and united in just this way, have come down to the making of the moon, nor have the interwoven strands of the lunar atoms ever become a sun; nor would Arcturus, however bright he may be, ever presume to hold the atoms of the morning star, nor would the Pleiades hold those of Orion. For Paul has rightly distinguished, saying: the sun has one glory, the moon another glory, and the stars yet another; for star differs from star in glory.

25.13| And if their compacting came about without any perception, as with soulless things, they needed a knowing craftsman; if their confinement was not by choice but by necessity, as with irrational things, some wise herdsman drove them together and presided; if they were shut in to work willingly of their own accord, some marvelous master builder who supplied the work led them; or, like a well-ordering general, he did not leave his army confused and all mixed together, but drew up the cavalry in one place, the heavy infantry apart, the javelin-throwers by themselves, the archers separately, and the slingers where they were needed, so that those with the same equipment might fight side by side.

25.14| But if they consider this example a jest because it compares large bodies with the smallest, we shall pass on to the tiniest things."

25.15| Then next after this he adds: "But if no choice, no selection, no ordering by a ruler were laid upon them, and they of themselves guided themselves out of the great turmoil of their flow and made their way through the great uproar of collisions, so that like atoms came to like atoms, not led by God, as the poet has it, but running together and herding together, recognizing their kin, then wonderful is the democracy of the atoms, as friends greet one another and embrace, and hasten to encamp in one dwelling; and some are turned of their own accord into the sun, the great light-giver, to make the day, while others are kindled into many pyramids of stars, to crown the whole heaven; and others are set round about, to harden and vault the aether at random as a stairway for the luminaries; and the conspiracies of the common atoms choose abodes for themselves, and divide the heaven by lot into houses and stations for themselves."

25.16| Then after other matter he says: "But these men do not even see what is plain, so far are they from discerning the unseen. They appear not to observe the ordered risings and settings, whether of the other bodies or of the sun, the most conspicuous of all, nor to make use of the aids that are given to men through them: the day kindled for work, and the night that draws over it for rest. For man, it says, will go out to his work and to his labor until evening.

25.17| Nor do they consider his other revolution, in which he brings about fixed seasons and fitting times and unalterable turnings, guided, supposedly, by the atoms of which he is made! But even if the wretches are unwilling, the righteous believe that great is the Lord who made him, and by his words he hastened his course.

25.18| Do atoms, you blind men, bring you rains, that the earth may yield food for you and for all the living creatures on it? Do they bring on summer, that you may receive the fruits of trees for your delight? And why do you not worship the atoms and sacrifice to those that bear fruit? Ungrateful men, you do not even dedicate to them a small first-offering from the many gifts you have from them."

25.19| And after a little he says: "The many-nationed and many-mingled people of the stars, which the ever wandering and ever scattered atoms put together, divided lands among themselves by agreement, as though they had taken up a colony or a common dwelling, with no founder or master of the house presiding; and they keep their neighborly borders sworn and in peace, not crossing the limits that they took possession of from the beginning, as if legislated for by queenly atoms.

25.20| But those atoms do not rule; how could they, when they do not even exist? Hear instead the divine oracles: In the Lord's judgment are his works. From the first, and from their making, he divided their portions; he arranged his works forever, and their rule through their generations.

25.21| And after a little he says: Or what phalanx has so well ordered crossed a plain, with no one running ahead, no one turning aside, no one hindering, no one falling behind those drawn up beside him, as the continuous, unbroken, untroubled and unimpeded host of the stars always advances, in even ranks, shield locked with shield?

25.22| But by inclinations and sidelong swerves certain of their turnings become hidden. And yet they always keep their times and look ahead to their places, whence each [….] those who have given attention to them. Let them tell us then, those cutters of atoms and dividers of the partless, gatherers of the uncomposed, who contemplate the unlimited, whence comes the circling motion and course of the heavenly bodies, not of a single mass of atoms thus unaccountably hurled, but of so great a circular chorus stepping evenly in rhythm and revolving together; whence did all those unordered, unchosen fellow travelers, strangers to one another, wander together in such multitude? And the prophet rightly placed among the impossible and the unprovable that even two strangers should travel together: Will two walk together unless they have recognized each other?"

25.23| After saying this, and adding ten thousand other things to these, he next sets out the problem at greater length from the individual elements of the universe, from the many kinds of living creatures in them, and indeed from the nature of man. From these I shall add a little to what has been said, and then bring the present discourse to a close.

26.1| "And they see neither themselves nor what concerns themselves. For if one of the founders of this impious doctrine had reckoned who he is and where he came from, he would have thought what he knew in his own consciousness, and would have said, not to atoms, but to his father and maker: Your hands formed me and made me; and he would have added, concerning the marvelous manner of his making: Did you not milk me like milk, and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and interwove me with bones and sinews. You granted me life and mercy, and your visitation guarded my breath.

26.2| For how many atoms, and of what sort, did Epicurus' father pour forth from himself when he sowed Epicurus? And how, once cast into his mother's womb, did they congeal, take shape, receive form, begin to move, and grow? And did the tiny drop summon many atoms of Epicurus, put on some of them as a garment once they had become skin and flesh, stand upright by means of others that had turned to bone, and bind itself together with others as it was stitched with sinews?

26.3| And the many other limbs, organs, entrails and sense organs, some within, some without, were fitted together, through which the body was brought to life? Of these nothing was added idle or useless, since not even the humblest, hairs and nails, is so; all of them contribute, some to the advantage of the body's constitution, others to the beauty of its appearance.

26.4| For providence takes care not of use alone but also of comeliness. The hair is a defense and covering for the head in all, while the beard is a decoration for the philosopher. He fitted the nature of the whole human body together from all the necessary parts, and gave all the limbs both fellowship with one another and a supply from the whole in due measure.

26.5| Of these things the main points are plain even to laymen from the power they know by experience: the sovereignty of the head; and the senses forming a bodyguard about the brain, as about a ruler in a citadel; the eyes advancing, the ears reporting, taste like a tax-collector, smell like a tracker and searcher, and touch directing everything that is subject.

26.6| (For now I shall run over in summary a few of the works of all-wise providence, and shortly, God granting, I shall work them out more exactly, when I turn against the man who seems to be the more learned.)

26.7| There is the service of the hands, through which all kinds of work and many-skilled crafts are accomplished, since their separate powers are articulated for a single cooperation; the carrying of loads by the shoulders, the grip of the fingers, the bending of the elbows, turning inward toward the body and bending outward, so that they can both draw in and push away; the service of the feet, through which all creation around the earth has been put under us, the earth walkable, the sea navigable, the rivers passable, and everything able to mingle with everything; the belly, a storehouse of food, distributing from itself in measure the ration to all the limbs ranked with it and discharging the surplus; and the other contrivances by which the maintenance of human life is plainly managed, which the wise, though they have the use of them like the foolish, have no knowledge of.

26.8| For some refer this administration, the most knowing in all things and the most beneficial to themselves, to whatever [….] they may suppose, trusting that it is the work of a superior and truly divine wisdom and power; while others aimlessly attribute this most wonderful craftsmanship to the chance meeting and collision of atoms.

26.9| A still more active inquiry than these, into the arrangement of the inner parts, physicians have searched out exactly and, struck with amazement, have deified nature; and we shall later, as far as we are able, survey it, if only superficially.

26.10| But as a whole and in sum, who built such a tent as this whole body, upright, erect, well proportioned, keen in sense, easy to move, capable in work, able to do everything? The irrational multitude of atoms, they say. But those atoms, coming together, could not form a clay image, nor carve a stone statue, nor cast and produce an idol of silver or gold;

26.11| yet the arts and handicrafts that produce these bodily works were invented by men. And if likenesses and shadow-paintings of these things could not come about without wisdom, how did the true originals of them come about of themselves?

26.12| And whence did soul and mind and reason come to the philosopher? Did he gather these as contributions from soulless, mindless, reasonless atoms, and did each of them breathe into him some thought and doctrine?

26.13| And as Hesiod's tale says that Pandora was completed by the gods, was the man's wisdom completed by the atoms? And all poetry, all music, astronomy and geometry and the other branches of knowledge, will the Greeks no longer say that these are discoveries and teachings of gods, but that the atoms alone have become the skilled and wise Muses of all?

26.14| For Epicurus' theogony from the atoms is banished from the infinite worlds, and driven into infinite disorder."

27.1| "To work, and to govern, and to take thought for others, and the like, is perhaps burdensome to the idle, the foolish, the weak and the wicked, among whom Epicurus enrolled himself, thinking such things about the gods; but to the earnest, the able, the intelligent and the temperate, such as philosophers ought to be (and how much more the gods?), these things are not only not disagreeable and irksome, but most delightful, and more welcome than anything, for whom carelessness and delay in doing anything good is a reproach, as the poet admonishes them, counseling not to put things off till tomorrow, and adding the threat: the man who is always delaying wrestles with ruin.

27.2| And the prophet teaches us in more august terms, saying that works of virtue are truly fit for God, and that the man who neglects them is accursed: for cursed, he says, is the one who does the works of the Lord carelessly.

27.3| For those unlearned in any craft and less perfect, because of unfamiliarity with practice and lack of practice in the work, toil attends their attempts; but those who are advancing, and still more the perfect, rejoice as they accomplish with ease what they pursue, and would rather choose to go on carrying out and completing their accustomed tasks than to have all the goods among men fall to them.

27.4| Democritus himself, for example, as they say, said that he would rather discover one causal explanation than have the kingdom of the Persians come to him; and he did this while giving explanations in vain and without cause, starting as he did from an empty and wandering first principle and hypothesis, and not seeing the root and common necessity of the nature of things, and holding the greatest wisdom to be the understanding of what happens without wisdom and by folly; and he set chance up as mistress and queen of the universal and the divine, declaring that all things come about according to her, while proclaiming her banished from human life and convicting her worshipers of folly.

27.5| At any rate, at the beginning of his Counsels he says: "Men have fashioned an image of chance, as a pretext for their own folly." For by nature judgment fights chance; they said that this, the greatest enemy of wisdom, rules it; or rather, while utterly destroying and abolishing the one, they set the other up in its place. For they sing not of wisdom as fortunate, but of fortune as most wise.

27.6| Now the masters of the works that serve life take delight in the help they give to their own kind, and aim at praise and fame for the labors they bear, some as feeders, some as pilots, some as healers, some as statesmen; and philosophers, who labor so hard to educate men, pride themselves on it.

27.7| Or will Epicurus or Democritus dare say that they are vexed when they philosophize? Nor would they set any other gladness before it. For even if they hold that the good is pleasure, they will be ashamed not to say that philosophizing is sweeter to them.

27.8| As for the gods, of whom the poets among them sing that they are givers of good things, but whom these philosophers mock with praise, gods unendowed with and having no share in any good; by what means do they prove that there are gods, when they do not see them present and doing anything (as those who admired the sun, moon and stars said these were called gods because they run), nor assign them any craftsmanship or workmanship, so that from the setting up, that is, the making, they might make them gods (for it is for this reason that the creator and Maker of all things is truly alone God); nor set forth any governance or judgment or grace of theirs toward men, so that, owing them fear or honor, we might worship them?

27.9| "Or was it after peering out beyond the cosmos and climbing over the enclosing wall of heaven, or after slipping out through some secret gates known to him alone, that Epicurus beheld the gods in the void and called their abundant luxury blessed? And so, having come to desire that pleasure and to covet that life in the void, does he summon everyone to a share in this blessedness, to be made like those gods, convening for them a blessed banquet, not in heaven or on Olympus as the poets do, but in the void, setting before them ambrosia made of atoms and pledging their health in nectar drawn from the same?

27.10| And then, by those gods who are nothing to us, he writes oaths and adjurations without number into his books, swearing constantly "No, by Zeus!" and also "Yes, by Zeus!", and imploring his readers and those he converses with "by the gods," not, I suppose, because he himself feared perjury or feared them, but uttering this as an empty, false, idle and meaningless appendage to his words, as though he were clearing his throat or spitting, turning his face or moving his hand. So thoughtless and so futile a piece of play-acting was his naming of the gods.

27.11| This much at least is plain: after the death of Socrates, cowering before the Athenians lest he be thought to be what he was, an atheist, he conjured up and painted for them empty shadows of gods without subsistence. For he never looked up to heaven with the eyes of the mind, to hear the clear voice coming from above, which the attentive beholder heard and attested: "The heavens declare glory, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands"; and neither did he look down in thought to the ground, or he would have learned that "the mercy of the Lord fills the earth," and that "the Lord's is the earth, and all that fills it." And further on it says: "The Lord watched over the earth and filled it with his good things. With the life of every living creature he covered its face."

27.12| If they are not blind, let them consider the endlessly varied multitude of living creatures, those of the land, of the air, of the water, and let them understand that the Master's testimony at his judgment of all things has proved true, and that all things, made at his command, have shown themselves good."

27.13| These pieces I have culled from a great many writings against Epicurus composed by Dionysius, a bishop of our own. It is time now to pass on to the followers of Aristotle and the school of the Stoic philosophers, and to survey what remains of these admirable natural philosophers, so that we may give those who love to find fault our own account of why we have withdrawn from these men too.

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