Tres Orationes

are left to others to discuss. Let it be enough to know that these were the most ancient monuments of human memory, and that the ancients wished to consult the common good through such enigmatic sculptures (of which there was certainly much, and I know not whether excessive, use in early centuries) while simultaneously taking care that the mysteries of wisdom and the ἀξιωμάτων axioms/principles of natural things, which they deemed it forbidden to reveal to the profane vulgate in common letters, would not be buried by the destruction of men and extinguished by the oblivion of posterity. How much more rightly, and with greater faith and profit to posterity, did the Greeks act, into whose language the science of herbs (the glory of which Egypt had arrogated to itself, as it had for almost all disciplines) and thus the whole of ancient medicine migrated. They preferred to inscribe the monuments of their ancestors and the ancestral lineage, as well as the salutary precepts in the art of healing and the aids sought and tested from herbs, openly and clearly on the columns of temples rather than to play with such enigmas and to cloak the truth in fabulous inventions, lest they seem to wish to snatch away with one hand what they were bestowing with the other. By this rite, they themselves also assigned the origin and invention of herbal medicine to the immortal gods, being persuaded that the sharpness of men's minds was much too dull to be able to penetrate into the natures of plants, especially the hidden ones, and into their admirable gifts,