CALVITII ENCOMIUM

10. Now the Egyptians are wise in this way also, that among them the race of prophets do not allow the vulgar and the artisans to make images of the gods. This is in order that they may not infringe the laws in any such matter, and while they mock at the 5 masses with those beaks of hawks and ibises, which they carve in the precincts of their temples, they themselves, descending to their sacred crypts, watch over whatever works they may have completed. They have at their reunions little chests which conceal—so they say—those spheres, which will enrage the mob 10 if it sees them, and the frivolous will laugh to scorn, for the mob will have jugglery. How else can they behave, being a mob?

For this reason, I think, beaks of ibises have been placed on all the statues. There is one deity, however, which they do not conceal, but openly exhibit; that is Aesculapius The Greek god of medicine., and you may see him 15 much balder than a pestle. Yet this god at Epidaurus is adorned with hair; the reason of this being that, among the Greeks, zeal for truth is languid, and it is for that defect that a historian has justly blamed our race. The Egyptians see Aesculapius daily, and converse with him, not merely the man whose hearth he fre-1185 20 quents, nor in such manner nor as often as he may prefer.

Now I hear it said that the Egyptian man has an art for working upon the gods, as also certain enchantments, and that by pronouncing a few foreign words he can, when he pleases, draw all the divine nature to follow such spells. From foreigners therefore, and not from 25 the Greeks, must we obtain the truer images of the divine nature. And yet, as I said a little while ago, the man who has examined the sun and the stars is satisfied not to inquire curiously into anything else; and admitting that there is any star with long hair, yet it is no star at all (for the body carried around in a circle 30 marks the place of stars, in which nothing new ever takes place): but the space underneath the moon is the very frontier of generation and contains the combustible matter of the stars falsely so-called.