You have been the inventress of laws; you have been our instructress in morals and discipline; to you we fly for refuge; from you we implore assistance; and as I formerly submitted to you in a great degree, so now I surrender up myself entirely to you.

For one day spent well, and agreeably to your precepts, is preferable to an eternity of error.

Whose assistance, then, can be of more service to me than yours, when you have bestowed on us tranquillity of life, and removed the fear of death?
But Philosophy is so far from being praised as much as she has deserved by mankind, that she is wholly neglected by most men, and actually evil spoken of by many.

Can any person speak ill of the parent of life, and dare to pollute himself thus with parricide, and be so impiously ungrateful as to accuse her whom he ought to reverence, even were he less able to appreciate the advantages which he might derive from her?
But this error, I imagine, and this darkness has spread itself over the minds of ignorant men, from their not being able to look so far back, and from their not imagining that those men by whom human life was first improved were philosophers; for though we see philosophy to have been of long standing, yet the name must be acknowledged to be but modern.
III.

But, indeed, who can dispute the antiquity of philosophy, either in fact or name?
For it acquired this excellent name from the ancients, by the knowledge of the origin and causes of everything, both divine and human.