Truth, the primary virtue of ideas. How great a fault there is in untruth. Thence, of false epigrams.
We take up now the question of ideas, and postulate again that these too must conform both to the subject and to men's character. Ideas agree with the subject if they are true, if they are appropriate, and if they so to speak get into the insides of the thing. They are in accord with men's character if they fit in with natural aversions or desires.
The primary virtue of ideas is truth. Whatever is false is at variance with external reality, nor is there any beauty in falsity except in so far as it pretends to truth. From this you may gather that truth is the source of beauty, falsity of ugliness. The latter, in fact, is out of keeping not only with reality but also with human nature. For we possess an innate love of truth and an aversion to falsehood, so that what delights us when it seems to be true becomes disagreeable and unpleasant when its falseness is made manifest. This principle applies to those learned men whom we have mentioned several times now, and has led to the exclusion from this anthology of many epigrams in which the point rests on a falsehood: for example, there is the well-known one by Grotius, though simply as a poem it is noble enough: