Tres Orationes

plants, and distributed them with marvelous art and counsel, so that some might be edible and fit for consumption, while others might be useful for medicine; nor did He bring them forth all at one time of the year, so that we might always be delighted by both novelty and abundance. From this, indeed, one may take a document original: "documentum" meaning lesson or evidence of how loving God is to men, how kind and provident toward our entire race, which is incapable of any good thing by itself without divine munificence. When those who are not reckoned among the people and Church of God, and indeed the poets in particular, had heard something about this mystery of Creation and the economy of the providence of all parts of nature preserved most accurately within it, they consecrated that part of medicine which explores and traces the natures of herbs and plants, and examines them with the greatest possible diligence, to the invention of the immortal gods. And indeed, some of them were able to receive this by fame and hearsay from the fathers, and to learn of their Cabala tradition/received wisdom, which was later called by the Greeks παράδοσις tradition/handing down. Not unskillfully, the Latin translation was instituted as a transfer, or (as Agellius referring to Aulus Gellius does) a tradition, that is, a doctrine not entrusted to letters, but handed down to families by mouth and living voice, as if through degrees of succession. From this it is credible that the voice of the Sibyls was derived in distant times, with the truth of the names together with the things themselves being in part antiqued and worn away by the injury of the times and in part by the sloth of men. From them, therefore, and from the profession of religion customary to them