at the very first to remove, as the
common proverb has it, from the sacred line; and having mentioned
how Chaerephon brought from Delphi an oracle, well known to us all,
concerning Socrates, he says thus: "Now as to this narration of
Chaerephon's, because it is odious and entirely sophistical, we will
overpass it." Plato, then, that we may say nothing of others, is also
odious, who has committed it to writing; and the Lacedaemonians are yet
more odious, who keep the oracle of Lycurgus amongst their most ancient
and most authentic inscriptions. The oracle also of Themistocles, by
which he persuaded the Athenians to quit their town, and in a naval
fight defeated the barbarous Xerxes, was a sophistical fiction. Odious
also were all the ancient legislators and founders of Greece who
established the most part of their temples, sacrifices, and solemn
festivals by the answer of the Pythian Oracle. But if the oracle brought
from Delphi concerning Socrates, a man ravished with a divine zeal to
virtue, by which he is styled and declared wise, is odious, fictitious,
and sophistical, by what name shall we call your cries, noises, and
shouts, your applauses, adorations and canonizations, with which you
extol and celebrate him who incites and exhorts you to frequent
and continual pleasures? For thus has he written in his epistle to
Anaxarchus: "I for my part incite and call you to continual pleasures,
and not to vain and empty virtues, which have nothing but turbulent
hopes of uncertain fruits." And yet Metrodorus, writing to Timarchus,
says: "Let us do some extraordinarily excellent thing, not suffering
ourselves to be plunged in reciprocal affections, but retiring from this
low and terrestrial life, and elevating ourselves to the truly holy
and divinely revealed ceremonies and mysteries of Epicurus." And even
Colotes himself, hearing one day Epicurus discoursing of natural things,
fell suddenly at his feet and embraced his knees, as Epicurus himself,
glorying in it, thus writes: "For as if you had adored what we were then
saying, you were suddenly taken with a desire, proceeding not from any
natural cause, to come to us, prostrate yourself on the ground, embrace
our knees, and use all those gestures to us which are ordinarily
practised by those who adore and pray to the gods. So that you made
us also," says he, "reciprocally sanctify and adore you." Those, by
Jupiter, well deserve to be pardoned, who say, they would willingly give
a