t them. Are
augurs to be allowed to explore the livers of victims and may not a
philosopher look at them too, a philosopher who knows that he can draw
omens from every animal, that he is the high-priest of every god? Do
you bring that as a reproach against me which is one of the reasons
for the admiration with which Maximus and myself regard Aristotle?
Unless you drive his works from the libraries and snatch them from the
hands of students you cannot accuse me. But enough! I have said almost
more on this subject than I ought.

See, too, how they contradict themselves. They say that I sought my
wife in marriage with the help of the black art and charms drawn from
the sea at the very time when they acknowledge me to have been in the
midmost mountains of Gaetulia, where, I suppose, Deucalion's deluge
has made it possible to find fish! I am, however, glad that they do
not know that I have read Theophrastus' 'On beasts that bite and
sting' and Nicander 'On the bites of wild animals'; otherwise they
would have accused me of poisoning as well! As a matter of fact I have
acquired a knowledge of these subjects thanks to my reading of
Aristotle and my desire to emulate him. I owe something also to the
advice of my master Plato, who says that those who make such
investigations as these 'pursue a delightful form of amusement which
they will never regret'.

42. Since I have sufficiently cleared up this business of the fish,
listen to another of their inventions equally stupid, but much more
extravagant and far more wicked. They themselves knew that their
argument about the fish was futile and bound to fail. They realized,
moreover, its strange absurdity (for who ever heard of fish being
scaled and boned for dark purposes of magic?), they realized that it
would be better for their fictions to deal with things of more common
report, which have ere now been believed. And so they devised the
following fiction which does at least fall within the limits of
popular credence and rumour. They asserted that I had taken a boy
apart to a secret place with a small altar and a lantern and only a
few accomplices as witnesses, and there so bewitched him with a
magical incantation that he fell in the very spot where I pronounced
the charm, and on being awakened was found to be out of his wits. They
did not dare to go any further with the lie. To complete their story
they should have added that the boy uttered many prophecies. For this
we know is