Two Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho

DEDICATION.

do we consider it the only one of all those that have ever existed which is unworthy of our effort and study to know? Or what great sin did those ancient Romans and Greeks commit when they embraced the true religion, having cast off the superstition of their ancestors, that from that time on no care for them touches us, and those whose every affair, and every most slight custom and habit, we previously tracked with insatiable and almost ridiculous curiosity, we now neglect no less than we do our own ancestors? Surely, according to the reasoning of those to whom it has been permitted for too long to govern the limits of doctrine, whatever possesses some significant utility must be assigned to barbarism, and that alone in every kind of study is to be deemed worthy of the name of doctrine which is rare and deviant and far removed from the use and footsteps of men, and to which we are driven not by some sordid appetite for fruit—unworthy of a learned man—but by a certain generous love of bare knowledge, inborn in high and great minds. The rest of the crowd, who consider their own advantage in their studies and value things more by their utility than by their rarity and difficulty, do not know these things because they know they are not worthy of knowledge. Hence, I suppose (for it is certainly not easy to give a better reason for such a ridiculous and preposterous education), the studious youth must grasp all of antiquity, all old books must be unrolled, and everything of all times, of peoples,