thought as scandalous as we should if we found one of our priests without
a Breviary. Xenophanes complained one day to Hiero, the tyrant of
Syracuse, that he was so poor he had not wherewithal to maintain two
servants. "What!" replied he, "Homer, who was much poorer than thou
art, keeps above ten thousand, though he is dead." What did Panaetius
leave unsaid when he called Plato the Homer of the philosophers? Besides
what glory can be compared to his? Nothing is so frequent in men's
mouths as his name and works, nothing so known and received as Troy,
Helen, and the war about her, when perhaps there was never any such
thing. Our children are still called by names that he invented above
three thousand years ago; who does not know Hector and Achilles? Not
only some particular families, but most nations also seek their origin in
his inventions. Mohammed, the second of that name, emperor of the Turks,
writing to our Pope Pius II., "I am astonished," says he, "that the
Italians should appear against me, considering that we have our common
descent from the Trojans, and that it concerns me as well as it does them
to revenge the blood of Hector upon the Greeks, whom they countenance
against me." Is it not a noble farce wherein kings, republics, and
emperors have so many ages played their parts, and to which the vast
universe serves for a theatre? Seven Grecian cities contended for his
birth, so much honour even his obscurity helped him to!

"Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenm."

The other is Alexander the Great. For whoever will consider the age at
which he began his enterprises, the small means by which he effected so
glorious a design, the authority he obtained in such mere youth with the
greatest and most experienced captains of the world, by whom he was
followed, the extraordinary favour wherewith fortune embraced and
favoured so many hazardous, not to say rash, exploits,