Two Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho

men who are fruit-bearing, and from an ancient discipline, estimate the dignity of the arts solely from public utility and necessity. If they wished to reflect on what position they themselves would hold in the republic they are building, and in what way their work would be useful to their fellow citizens, they would perhaps concern themselves less with new things. For this reasoning would overturn not only the arts and disciplines, but republics, and the entire state of the globe. For, as the good Columella once rightly said in defense of his art, Without playful arts, and even without lawyers (there is no need to say how many and whom he could add) cities were once sufficiently happy and will be so in the future: but it is manifest that without farmers mortals can neither subsist nor be fed.

But, they say, other studies either have some utility, or at least a certain ingenuous delight: this has neither. They are very much mistaken. Whatever there is in the whole of learning of utility or pleasure, criticism claims by its own right that it is all referred back to itself, since the knowledge of antiquity depends entirely upon it, and to it we owe whatever books of the ancients exist no less than to their authors themselves; which, had it not been for critics, we would not have read, but instead would have had the errors and commentaries of stupid scribes, just as no one ever understood, nor will be able to understand, unless he has either learned criticism, or, due to the excellent magnitude of his talent, being a critic born, has had no need to learn it. Without which art, or rather faculty, if anyone thinks that something great can be done in literature, he should believe the same can be done in common life without judgment, which is criticism, or in a republic without sagacity, which is its perfection, and the goal of human genius.

But let us pass over these higher matters, which are at this time understood or cared for by few, and let us describe the faculty of our critic, not by the almost immense boundaries of that art, but, as is now commonly done, by one of the limits of its provinces; who would not marvel that this art, whose function and duty is to correct the writings of the ancients, which have been incredibly corrupted by the various injuries of a long period of time, and to restore them to their original luster, should appear to learned men, and especially to those who profess themselves the greatest admirers of these authors, a certain futile, inept, and utterly useless thing? It must be that they think either that no errors remain in those books, or at least none that can be removed: both of which are far otherwise, as all daily feel who are not entirely devoid of critical acuteness, and which they themselves would perhaps have seen if they had not learned to ridicule criticism before knowing it, and to admire these writers before understanding them. Let them just examine the writings of even the lowest class of critics. They will understand how great a supply of errors has lain hidden from them, and how they are not incurable, when they see that they sometimes hit upon the best and most certain emendations, not a few being so futile and devoid of judgment that they seem to act by chance rather than by reason and counsel, many not indeed endowed with absolutely no judgment, but, which