have always desired with more undoubting avidity to investigate
the well-tested labours of the ancients. For whether they had by
nature a greater vigour of mental sagacity, or whether they
perhaps indulged in closer application to study, or whether they
were assisted in their progress by both these things, one thing
we are perfectly clear about, that their successors are barely
capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and
of acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by
difficult efforts of discovery. For as we read that the men of
old were of a more excellent degree of bodily development than
modern times are found to produce, it is by no means absurd to
suppose that most of the ancients were distinguished by brighter
faculties, seeing that in the labours they accomplished of both
kinds they are inimitable by posterity. And so Phocas writes in
the prologue to his Grammar:

Since all things have been said by men of sense
The only novelty is--to condense.

But in truth, if we speak of fervour of learning and diligence in
study, they gave up all their lives to philosophy; while nowadays
our contemporaries carelessly spend a few years of hot youth,
alternating with the excesses of vice, and when the passions have
been calmed, and they have attained the capacity of discerning
truth so difficult to discover, they soon become involved in
worldly affairs and retire, bidding farewell to the schools of
philosophy. They offer the fuming must of their youthful
intellect to the difficulties of philosophy, and bestow the
clearer wine upon the money-making business of life. Further, as
Ovid in the first book of the De Vetula justly complains: