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 CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}, 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 novel