foundations of learning, and these men we consider the most
learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the Latins,
have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius, and
Homer, and had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless
again and again he had read somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar,
whose eloquence he could by no means imitate? What could
Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus, and
in short the whole troop of Latin writers have done, if they had
not seen the productions of Athens or the volumes of the Greeks?
Certes, little would Jerome, master of three languages,
Ambrosius, Augustine, though he confesses that he hated Greek, or
even Gregory, who is said to have been wholly ignorant of it,
have contributed to the doctrine of the Church, if more learned
Greece had not furnished them from its stores. As Rome, watered
by the streams of Greece, had earlier brought forth philosophers
in the image of the Greeks, in like fashion afterwards it
produced doctors of the orthodox faith. The creeds we chant are
the sweat of Grecian brows, promulgated by their Councils, and
established by the martyrdom of many.

Yet their natural slowness, as it happens, turns to the glory of
the Latins, since as they were less learned in their studies, so
they were less perverse in their errors. In truth, the Arian
heresy had all but eclipsed the whole Church; the Nestorian
wickedness presumed to rave with blasphemous rage against the
Virgin, for it would have robbed the Queen of Heaven, not in open
fight but in disputation, of her name and character as Mother of
God, unless the invincible champion Cyril, ready to do single
battle, with the help of the Council of Ephesus, had in vehemence
of spirit utterly extinguished it. Innumerable are the forms as