theme, not being foreign to the literary department of the Academy, 

 will be received with their wonted candour and indulgence. Should 

 it prove the means of making him more known to my countrymen, 

 I shall be well compensated for my labour, and have the satisfac- 

 tion of reflecting, that the gratitude due to his memory, for the 

 pleasure which I have received from his writings, may thus be 

 discharged. 



To two writers, one of them an anonymous grammarian, the 

 other Constantinus Manasses, who lived at Constantinople in the 

 twelfth century, we are chiefly indebted for the history of Oppian.* 

 They have recorded few particulars, indeed, of his life, but these 

 few are equally honourable to his character as a man, and success 

 as a poet. He was born probably in the last year -f- of the reign 

 of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, in Anazarba, a city of Cilicia. 

 If he derived no honour from being the native of a country which 

 had acquired and merited the double reproach of being greatly 

 addicted to piracy and falsehood,^ he might enjoy the nobler 

 praise of reflecting a lustre on the land of his birth by his 

 genius and virtues. Democritus was a glory to Thrace, and 

 Anacharsis to Scythia. But Cilicia was not, like tiiose countries, un- 

 known to the Muses, and a stranger to refinement. On the con- 

 trary, it ranked high among the provinces of Asia Minor, that land 

 of poets and philosophers, for the cultivation of the fine arts. 



• Vide Belin de Belli. Prolegomena in 0pp. p. III. f Idem. 



% The alarming lengths to which the Cilicians had carried their piracies, in the time of 

 Pompey the great, are well known to the classical reader. The other part of their character 

 became proverbial, Xoyo^ is-oc>^aio^y ^a ^adia? aXTi^vuv T»f KjAfxoc^. The r^tx xicTrTrec xecxia-^ec enig- 

 matically expressed the infamy attached to the names of the Cappadocians, Cretans and Cili- 

 cians. " Augustinus, in grammaticis, indicat fuisse tortum in Corn. Syllam, Corn. Cinnam et 

 Corn. Lentulum, Creditumque est in libris Sybillinis horum nomina tribus hisce Uteris fuisse 

 designata." Erasmi Adagia, p. 309. 



