Cicero
treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter
points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature
of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant
buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin
says, was a great wit, but a great rascal.

Plato--who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of
Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of
philosophers, by Cicero--Athenaeus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying;
Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence;
and Aristophanes, of impiety.

Aristotle, whose industry composed more than four hundred volumes, has
not been less spared by the critics; Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, and
Plutarch, have forgotten nothing that can tend to show his ignorance,
his ambition, and his vanity.

It has been said, that Plato was so envious of the celebrity of
Democritus, that he proposed burning all his works; but that Amydis and
Clinias prevented it, by remonstrating that there were copies of them
everywhere; and Aristotle was agitated by the same passion against all
the philosophers his predecessors.

Virgil is destitute of invention, if we are to give credit to Pliny,
Carbilius, and Seneca. Caligula has absolutely denied him even
mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has
furnished a thick volume with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his
apology has confessed, that he has stolen from Homer his greatest
beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; from
Nicander, hints for his Georgies; and this does not terminate the
catalogue.

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn,
has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

The majority of the critics regard Pliny's Natural History only as a
heap of fables; and Pliny cannot bear with Diodorus and Vopiscus; and in
one comprehensive criticism, treats all the historians as narrators of
fables.

Livy has been reproached for his aversion to the Gauls; Dion, for his
hatred of the republic; Velleius Paterculus, for speaking too kindly of
the vices of Tiberius; and Herodotus and Plutarch, for their excessive
partiality to their own country: while the latter has written an entire
treatise on the malignity of Herodotus. Xenophon and Quintus Curtius
have been considered rather as novelists than hi