PREFACE, 27-30 



completion — Made hy so-and-so (these I will bring 

 in at their proper places) ; this made the artist appear 

 to have assumed a supreme confidence in his art, and 

 consequently all these works were very unpopular. 

 For my o^vn part I frankly confess that my works 

 would admit of a great deal of amplification, and not 

 only those now in question but also all my pubUca- 

 tions, so that in passing I may insure myself against 

 your ' Scourges of Homer ' (that would be the more 

 correct term), as I am informed that both the Stoics 

 and the Academy, and also the Epicureans, — as 

 for the philologists, I always expected it from them — 

 are in travail with a reply to my publications on 

 Philology, and for the last ten years have been 

 having a series of miscarriages — for not even elephants 

 take so long to bring their ofFspring to birth ! But 

 as if I didn't know that Theophrastus, a mortal 

 whose eminence as an orator won him the title of 

 ' the divine,' actually had a book written against 

 him by a woman — which was the origin of the proverb 

 about ' choosing your tree to hang from ' ! I am 

 unable to refrain from quoting the actual words of 

 Cato the Censor applying to this, to show that even 

 the treatise on miUtary discipUne of Cato, who had 

 learnt his soldiering under Africanus, or rather 

 under him and Hannibal as well, and had been unable 

 to endure even Africanus, who when commander-in- 

 chief had won a triumph, found critics ready for it of 

 the sort that try to get glory for themselves by 

 running down another man's knowledge. ' What 

 then? ' he says in the book in question, ' I myself 

 know that if certain writings are pubUshed there wiU 

 be plenty of people to quibble and quarrel, but 

 mostly people quite devoid of true distinction. For 



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