“He lay, his thick neck bent aside; and him
All-conquering Sleep had seized.”
These Homer transferred to the Cyclops.[947] And Hesiod writes of Melampous:
“Gladly to hear, what the immortals have assigned
To men, the brave from cowards clearly marks;”
and so forth, taking it word for word from the poet Musæus.
And Aristophanes the comic poet has, in the first of the Thesmophoriazusæ, transferred the words from the Empiprameni of Cratinus. And Plato the comic poet, and Aristophanes in Dædalus, steal from one another. Cocalus, composed by Araros,[948] the son of Aristophanes, was by the comic poet Philemon altered, and made into the comedy called Hypobolimæus.
Eumelus and Acusilaus the historiographers changed the contents of Hesiod into prose, and published them as their own. Gorgias of Leontium and Eudemus of Naxus, the historians, stole from Melesagoras. And, besides, there is Bion of Proconnesus, who epitomized and transcribed the writings of the ancient Cadmus, and Archilochus, and Aristocles, and Leandrus, and Hellanicus, and Hecatæus, and Androtion, and Philochorus. Dieuchidas of Megara transferred the beginning of his treatise from the Deucalion of Hellanicus. I pass over in silence Heraclitus of Ephesus, who took a very great deal from Orpheus.
From Pythagoras Plato derived the immortality of the soul; and he from the Egyptians. And many of the Platonists composed books, in which they show that the Stoics, as we said in the beginning, and Aristotle, took the most and principal of their dogmas from Plato. Epicurus also pilfered his leading dogmas from Democritus. Let these things then be so. For life would fail me, were I to undertake to go over the subject in detail, to expose the selfish plagiarism of the Greeks, and how they claim the discovery of the best of their doctrines, which they have received from us.