the fear of death? But Philosophy is so far from being praised
as much as she has deserved by mankind, that she is wholly neglected by
most men, and actually evil spoken of by many. Can any person speak ill
of the parent of life, and dare to pollute himself thus with parricide,
and be so impiously ungrateful as to accuse her whom he ought to
reverence, even were he less able to appreciate the advantages which he
might derive from her? But this error, I imagine, and this darkness has
spread itself over the minds of ignorant men, from their not being able
to look so far back, and from their not imagining that those men by
whom human life was first improved were philosophers; for though we see
philosophy to have been of long standing, yet the name must be
acknowledged to be but modern.

III. But, indeed, who can dispute the antiquity of philosophy, either
in fact or name? For it acquired this excellent name from the ancients,
by the knowledge of the origin and causes of everything, both divine
and human. Thus those seven [Greek: Sophoi], as they were considered
and called by the Greeks, have always been esteemed and called wise men
by us; and thus Lycurgus many ages before, in whose time, before the
building of this city, Homer is said to have lived, as well as Ulysses
and Nestor in the heroic ages, are all handed down to us by tradition
as having really been what they were called, wise men; nor would it
have been said that Atlas supported the heavens, or that Prometheus was
bound to Caucasus, nor would Cepheus, with his wife, his son-in-law,
and his daughter have been enrolled among the constellations, but that
their more than human knowledge of the heavenly bodies had transferred
their names into an erroneous fable. From whence all who occupied
themselves in the contemplation of nature were both considered and
called wise men; and that name of theirs continued to the age of
Pythagoras, who is reported to have gone to Phlius, as we find it
stated by Heraclides Ponticus, a very learned man, and a pupil of
Plato, and to have discoursed very learnedly and copiously on certain
subjects with Leon, prince of the Phliasii; and when Leon, admiring his
ingenuity and eloquence, asked him what art he particularly professed,
his answer was, that he was acquainted with no art, but that he was a
philosopher. Leon, surprised at the novelty of the name, inquired what
he meant by the name of philosopher, and in what philosophers differed