Publius.

"Your poet's verses are pretty and appropriate," Aristarchus now said,
"and I am very happy to find myself compared to the children who catch
the falling drops. There was a time--which came to an end, alas! with
the great Aristotle--when there were men among the Greeks, who fed the
ocean of which you speak with new tributaries; for the gods had bestowed
on them the power of opening new sources, like the magician Moses, of
whom Onias, the Jew, was lately telling us, and whose history I have read
in the sacred books of the Hebrews. He, it is true--Moses I mean--only
struck water from the rock for the use of the body, while to our
philosophers and poets we owe inexhaustible springs to refresh the mind
and soul. The time is now past which gave birth to such divine and
creative spirits; as your majesties' forefathers recognized full well
when they founded the Museum of Alexandria and the Library, of which I am
one of the guardians, and which I may boast of having completed with your
gracious assistance. When Ptolemy Soter first created the Museum in
Alexandria the works of the greatest period could receive no additions in
the form of modern writings of the highest class; but he set us--children
of man, gathering the drops--the task of collecting and of sifting them,
of eliminating errors in them--and I think we have proved ourselves equal
to this task.

"It has been said that it is no less difficult to keep a fortune than to
deserve it; and so perhaps we, who are merely 'keepers' may nevertheless
make some credit--all the more because we have been able to arrange the
wealth we found under hand, to work it profitably, to apply it well, to
elucidate it, and to make it available. When anything new is created by
one of our circle we always link it on to the old; and in many
departments we have indeed even succeeded in soaring above the ancients,