But Colotes, who is somewhat celebrated and remarkable for his loquacity among the pupils of Epicurus, has even recorded in a book the bitter reproaches which he aims at him.

But since the other arguments which he foolishly urges have no connection with the dream of which we are now talking, we will pass them over at present, and attend only to the calumny which will stick both to Cicero and Plato, unless it is silenced.

He says that a fable ought not to have been invented by a philosopher, since no kind of falsehood is suitable to professors of truth.

For why, says he, if you wish to give us a notion of heavenly things and to teach us the nature of souls, did you not do so by a simple and plain explanation?
Why was a character invented, and circumstances, and strange events, and a scene of cunningly adduced falsehood arranged, to pollute the very door of the investigation of truth by a lie?
Since these things, though they are said of the Platonic Er, do also attack the rest of our dreaming Africanus.
VIII.

This occasion incited Scipio to relate his dream, which he declares that he had buried in silence for a long time.
For when Laelius was complaining that there were no statues of Nasica erected in any public place, as a reward for his having slain the tyrant, Scipio replied in these words: "But although the consciousness itself of great deeds is to wise men the most ample reward of virtue, yet that divine nature ought to have, not statues fixed in lead, nor triumphs with withering laurels, but some more stable and lasting kinds of rewards." "What are they ?" said Laelius.