An isle unnamed, unknown, shall stand upright,
The worse shall beat the stronger in the fight.
What happened within a short time—that the Romans mastered the Carthaginians, and brought the war with Philip to a finish, |D| that Philip met the Aetolians and Romans in battle and was defeated, and, lastly, that an island rose out of the depths of the sea, with much fire and boiling waves—could not all be set down to chance and spontaneous occurrence. Why, the order emphasizes the foreknowledge, and so does the time predicted to the Romans, some five hundred years before the event, as that in which they were to be at war with all the races at once, which meant the war with the slaves after their revolt. In all this nothing is unascertainable, the story is not left in dim light to |E| be groped out with reference to Fortune “in Infinity”, it gives many securities, and is open to trial, it points the road which the destined event is to tread. For I do not think that any one will say that the agreement with the details as foretold was accidental. Otherwise, what prevents some one else from saying that Epicurus did not write his Leading Principles for our use, Boethus, but that the letters fell together by chance and just spontaneously, and so the book was finished off?’
XII. While we were talking thus, we were moving forward. |F| In the store-house of the Corinthians we were looking at the golden palm tree, the only remnant of their offerings, when the frogs and water-snakes embossed round the roots caused much surprise to Diogenianus, and, for the matter of that, to us. For the palm tree is not, like many others, a marshy or water-loving plant, nor have frogs anything specially to do with the Corinthians. Thus they must be a symbolical or canting device of that city, just as the men of Selinus are said to have dedicated a golden plant of parsley (selinon), and those of Tenedos the axe, because of the crabs found round the place which they |400| call Asterium, the only ones, it appears, with the brand of an axe on the shell. Yet the God himself is supposed to have a partiality for crows and swans and wolves and hawks, for anything rather than beasts like crabs. Serapion observed that the artist intended a veiled hint at the sun drawing his aliment and origin from exhalations out of moist places, whether he had it from Homer,
Leaving the beauteous lake, the great sun scaled
The brazen sky,[[96]]
or whether he had seen the sun painted by the Egyptians as a newly-born child seated on a lotus. I laughed: ‘Where have you got to again, my good Sir,’ I said, ‘thrusting the |B| Porch in here, and quietly slipping into our discussion their “Conflagrations” and “Exhalations”? Thessalian women fetch the sun and the moon down to us, but you are assuming that they are first born and then watered out of earth and its waters. Plato[[97]] dubbed man “a heavenly plant”, rearing himself up from a root on high, namely, his head; but you laugh down Empedocles when he tells us how the sun, having been brought into being by reflection of heavenly light around the earth
Beams back upon Olympus undismayed!
Yet, on your own showing, the sun is a creature or plant of the marshes, naturalized by you in the country of frogs or |C| water-snakes. However, all this may be reserved for the Stoics and their tragedies; here we have the incidental works of the artists, and let us examine them incidentally. In many respects they are clever people, but they have not in all cases avoided coldness and elaboration. Just as the man who designed Apollo with the cock in his hand meant to suggest the early morning hour when dawn is coming, so here the frogs may be taken for a symbol of the spring season when the sun begins to have power over the air and to break up winter; always supposing |D| that, with you, we are to reckon Apollo and the sun one God, not two.’ ‘What?’ said Serapion, ‘do you not agree? Do you hold the sun to be different from Apollo?’ ‘As different as the moon from the sun;’ I replied, ‘only she does not hide the sun often or from all the world,[[98]] whereas the sun has made, we may almost say, all the world ignorant of Apollo, diverting thought by sensation, to the apparent from the real.’
XIII. Next Serapion asked the guides the real reason why they call the chamber not after Cypselus, the Dedicator, but |E| after the Corinthians. When they were silent, being, as I privately believe, at a loss for a reason, I laughed, and said: ‘What can these men possibly know or remember, utterly dazed as they must be by our high celestial talk? Why, it was only just now that we heard them saying that, after the tyranny was overthrown, the Corinthians wished to inscribe the golden statue at Pisa, and also this treasure-house, with the name of the city. So the Delphians granted it as a right, and agreed; but the Corinthians passed a vote to exclude the Eleians, who had shown jealousy of them, from the Isthmian meetings, and from that time to |F| this there has been no competitor from Elis. The murder of the Molionidae by Hercules near Cleonae has nothing to do with the exclusion of the Eleians, though some think that it has. On the contrary, it would have been for them to exclude the Corinthians if that had been the cause of collision.’ Such were my remarks.