BOOK I, PREFACE 30-32 



of honour to those next to them and to those far 

 from second rank? The far-famed fulminations of 

 Cicero " did not deter from the pursuit of eloquence 

 Brutus or CaeHus, PolUo or Messala or Calvus ; * for 

 Cicero himself had not yielded in fright to the thun- 

 derings of Demosthenes and Plato, and the father of 

 eloquence, that divine Maeonian," with the mighty 

 floods of his rhetoric had not quenched the zeal of 

 those who came after him. And we observe that 31 

 even artists of lesser fame, who through these 

 many generations have been admirers of Protogenes 

 and Apelles and Parrhasius,'^ have not ceased from 

 their own labours ; and, though stunned by the beauty 

 of Phidias' Olympian Jove and of his Minerva,*' men 

 of the succeeding age, Bryaxis, Lysippus, Praxiteles, 

 and Polyclrtus,/ were not reluctant to try what they 

 could do or how far they could advance. But in every 

 branch of knowledge the highest have attained to 

 admiration and reverence, and those of lesser worth 

 have received their meed of praise. Added to this 32 

 is that in the case of the man whom we wish to be 

 a finished husbandman, even though he be not a man 

 of consummate skill, though he may not have attained 

 to the sagacity of a Democritus or a Pythagoras ? in 

 the nature of the universe, and the foreknowledge 

 of Meton or Eudoxus ^ in the movements of the stars 

 and the winds, the learning of Chiron* and MelampusJ 



* Democritus (fifth cent, b.c.) and Pythagoras (sixth 

 cent. B.C.), early Greek philosophers. 



* Two Greek astronomers of the fifth and fomth centuries 

 B.O. 



* According to Greek mythology Chiron was a Centaur, 

 half-man and half-horse, learned in many arts and the tutor 

 of many mythological heroes. 



^ A famous seer and physician of Greek mythology. 



25 



