divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy to submit to the view of
the Creator, before he assuaged the strife of warring chaos, and
before form had put on its garb of matter, the ideal types, in
order to demonstrate the archetypal universe to its author, so
that the world of sense might be modelled after the supernal
pattern. O tearful sight! where the moral Socrates, whose acts
were virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced
political justice from the principles of nature, is seen enslaved
to some rascal robber. We bemoan Pythagoras, the parent of
harmony, as, brutally scourged by the harrying furies of war, he
utters not a song but the wailings of a dove. We mourn, too, for
Zeno, who lest he should betray his secret bit off his tongue and
fearlessly spat it out at the tyrant, and now, alas! is brayed
and crushed to death in a mortar by Diomedon.

In sooth we cannot mourn with the grief that they deserve all the
various books that have perished by the fate of war in various
parts of the world. Yet we must tearfully recount the dreadful
ruin which was caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the
Alexandrian war, when seven hundred thousand volumes were
consumed by fire. These volumes had been collected by the royal
Ptolemies through long periods of time, as Aulus Gellius relates.
What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to have then perished:
including the motions of the spheres, all the conjunctions of the
planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the prognostic generations
of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the ether!
Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where ink is
offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of crackling
parchment were encarnadined with blood, where the devouring
flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth was