GAULMINI DEDICATION.

...is. The first poets claimed for themselves the glory of wanton eloquence and impiety; and with great confidence in posterity, and even greater in themselves, as if they alone were wise, they invented old wives' tales about the gods and demons. Homer, the prince of the family, could not keep to himself what he had seen in heaven. He revealed the heavens to men, and eventually attained this alone, that he spoke so elegantly and impiously that he earned belief. There was nothing done among the gods day or night in his time that he did not know: so often he dreamed in heaven more than in his bed. He certainly even followed Jupiter when he was whispering something into Juno's ear. For he looks through the cracks of the clouds and throws flowers of every kind beneath them. Thus, while he watches, he acts as a pimp; while he narrates, he acts as a poet; in both he is impious, while he feigns both. Hesiod took up the sacred madness of the divine old man; and, to make it even more insane, he distributed their seats to them, and desired that those who had been ostracized banished/cast out should grow old in those places: he found a demon everywhere much more easily than he found mallow or asphodel in his garden 1. Philosophers followed the poets, who seem to have cared only that the now-obscure truth should be wrapped in even denser shadows: thus almost all wrote according to the diversity of their opinions or the logic of their sects. I do not wish to go through the ages or recall the perishing memory of the centuries; but since those poet-philosopher-babblers original: "ποιητοφιλοσοφοληροῦντες" taught others what they did not know themselves, it happened that others...