Two Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho

DEDICATION.

of places, of religions, and of historical events must be known, with the sole exception of those that pertain to their own religion and nation. Among these, to spend good hours on such german authentic/true trifles is hardly less a disgrace than not to have perused Tzetzes a 12th-century Byzantine scholar known for his dense commentaries, or—as I have perhaps done both—to not write the name of that divine man correctly, or to decline it poorly. Thus, while we go where the adolescents are going, not where we ought to go (which that age does not see, unless to someone

original: "magnam mentem animumque / Delius inspirat vates, aperitque futura," — "The Delian seer inspires a great mind and spirit, and reveals the future,"

and nature, aiming at something great and significant, has inborn a manly distaste for trifles, and a provident talent that can see the end at the beginning of any discipline, and can see at the very first glance what each has of solid and fruitful, and what of futility and empty delight)—while we first emulate the knowledge of our teachers, and strive with a certain blind and reckless impulse to excel in those studies that happen to be in honor where fortune has placed us; then, in those things in which we seem to excel, we do not dare to doubt their excellence; meanwhile it happens that we grow old in trifles and minutiae, and we make ourselves ridiculous with great labor. For what can be more ridiculous, either to happen or to be imagined, than a Christian man, a priest, a professor of theology, initiated into all the sacred rites of the heathens, being a stranger and a guest in his own? Who could call back from the dead the entire superstition of a thousand peoples,