a man a captain,
but must separately name a man a man, good good, and a captain a
captain; nor can say ten thousand horsemen, or a fortified town, but
only call horsemen horsemen, and ten thousand ten thousand, and so of
the rest?" Now what man ever was there that lived the worse for this? Or
who is there that, hearing this discourse, does not immediately perceive
and understand it to be the speech of a man who rallies gallantly, and
proposes to others this logical question for the exercise of their wits?
It is not, O Colotes, a great and dangerous scandal not to call any man
good, or not to say ten thousand horsemen; but not to call God God,
and not to believe him to be God,--as you and the rest do, who will not
confess that there is a Jupiter presiding over generation, or a Ceres
giving laws, or a Neptune nourishing the plants,--it is this separation
of names that is pernicious, and fills our life with audaciousness and
an atheistical contempt of the gods. When you pluck from the gods the
names and appellations that are tied to them, you abolish also the
sacrifices, mysteries, processions, and feasts. For to whom shall we
offer the sacrifices preceding the tilling of the ground? To whom those
for the obtaining of preservation? How shall we celebrate the Phosphoria
or torch-festivals, the Bacchanals, and the ceremonies that go before
marriage, if we admit neither Bacchantes, gods of light, gods who
protect the sown field, nor preservers of the state? For this it is
that touches the principal and greatest points, being an error in
things,--not in words, in the structure of propositions, or use of
terms.

Now if these are the things that disturb and subvert human life, who are
there that more offend in speech than you? For you take utterly away
the whole category of namable things, which constitute the substance of
language; and leave only words and their accidental objects, while you
take away in the meantime the things particularly signfied by them, by
which are wrought disciplines, doctrines, preconceptions, intelligences,
inclination, and assent, which you hold to be nothing at all.

But as for Stilpo, thus his reasoning proceeds. "If of a man we
predicate good, and of an horse running, the predicate or thing
predicated is not the same with the subject or that of which it is
predicated, but the essential definition of man is one, and of good
another. And again, to be a horse differs from to be running. For being
as