104. OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, [IV. 4. 
people, who will be sure to come in on their side, So in 
the fable that Achilles was brought up under Chiron the. 
centaur, who was part a man and part a beast, expounded 
ingeniously but corruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth 
to the education and discipline of princes to know as 
well how to play the part of the lion in violence, and the 
fox in guile, as of the man in virtue and justice. Never- 
theless, in many the like encounters, I do rather think 
that the fable was first, and the exposition devised, than 
that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable framed. 
For I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus, that 
troubled himself with great contention to fasten the 
assertions of the Stoics upon the fictions of the ancient 
poets; but yet that all the fables and fictions of the poets 
were but pleasure and not figure, I interpose no opinion. 
Surely of those poets which are now extant, even Homer 
himself (notwithstanding he was made a kind of scrip- 
ture by the later schools of the Grecians), yet I should 
without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had 
no such inwardness in his own meaning. But what 
they might have upon a more original tradition, is not 
easy to affirm; for he was not the inventor of many of 
them. 
5. In this third part of learning, which is poesy, I can 
report no deficience. For being as a plant that cometh 
of the lust of the earth, without a formal seed, it hath 
sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind. 
But to ascribe unto it that which is due, for the expressing 
/of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are 
' beholding to poets more than to the philosophers’ works; 
' and for wit and eloquence, not much less than to orators’ 
' harangues. But it is not good to stay too long in the 
theatre. Let us now pass on to the judicial place or palace 
’ 
