How, Although We Preferred the Works of the Ancients, We have Not Condemned the Studies of the Moderns

Although the novelties of the moderns were never disagreeable to our desires, who have always cherished with grateful affection those who devote themselves to study and who add anything either ingenious or useful to the opinions of our forefathers, yet we 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:

The hearts of all men after gold aspire;
Few study to be wise, more to acquire:
Thus, Science! all thy virgin charms are sold,
Whose chaste embraces should disdain their gold,
Who seek not thee thyself, but pelf through thee,
Longing for riches, not philosophy.

And further on:

Thus Philosophy is seen
Exiled, and Philopecuny is queen,

which is known to be the most violent poison of learning.

How the ancients indeed regarded life as the only limit of study, is shown by Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many examples. Carneades, he says, was a laborious and lifelong soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety years, the same day put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his ninety-fourth year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the same when nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not desire to live longer than he should be able to write, as he says himself in the prologue to the Noctes Atticae.

The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as Gellius tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians, hating the people of Megara, decreed that if any of the Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman’s dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who would not de............