Sigalion in the Shield of Croesiades or Apologetic Dialogue for the Mystery of Detected Syncretism

quarrels about words, or things of no moment, but coldness in the worship of God, because even those who believed there was one GOD, yet, setting Him aside, showed worship to others, and indeed to those whom they did not believe were GODS, establishing as the norm of religion that which was received publicly. Nor did they assert anything certain concerning the reward of piety, which appears even from that last disputation of Socrates about to die. The same Grotius annotates these things, p. 194. Xenophon in Memorabilia V recites an oracle, by which the gods are ordered to be worshiped according to the law of each city. Repeat here the words of Seneca, which we cited above from Augustine. After which, thus Augustine: "He worshiped what he reproved, did what he argued, adored what he blamed." Naturally, as Plato said in the Timaeus and elsewhere, and Porphyry in the place which is in Eusebius, praeparatio, book 4, ch. 8: "It is not without danger to discuss the truth about divine things among the mob." But Greek, Latin, and barbarian philosophy valued the fear of that danger more than the sincere profession of truth: which alone suffices so that no one should think such men are to be followed in all things. Justin Martyr notes this in Plato in his Paraenesis to the Greeks.

Herodotus, book 1, p. 11.

errors, (bb) not fawning upon anyone, but using the truth.
Is Crete happy enough thus? Or is it a worthy example which the rest of Greece should follow by imitating?

SOLON THE SALAMINIAN.

§. 7.

Your labor, O King, to explore what you wish, it is right for me to undertake the commands! I will speak from a dispassionate sentiment, a sentiment the more purified and the more free, the more I am removed from the furies of the Cretans, if I will seem not to have spoken to them with salted stones. I praise before all things the study of peace, from which not even the most savage of wild beasts shrink: I cannot help but follow with a joyful poem the persuasion of that man, whoever he may have been, the Nestor of the Cretans; so fortunate that he persuaded them completely.

(a) Valerius Maximus, book 4, ch. 2.

For (a) if a calm sea is felt after a rough one, and a serene sky after a cloudy one with a cheerful aspect, if war changed into peace brings the greatest joy: the bitterness of offenses also having been laid aside, is to be celebrated with a candid account, yet so that I judge more of fortune than of virtue should be attributed to this: You may find outside of Crete lion-like spirits, which Pitho Persuasion, however flexible, would have sharpened more to the persecution of their own right than to the soothing of savage affections. But I have not yet migrated from that old and genuine wisdom of mine, which I once imbibed, that the honest is always to be preferred to the useful, duty to emolument, the sacred to the phantom, the sincere to the faked.