Chapter 4: False Wit

But Timaeus is fu1l of other fault we have spoken of—I mean “false wit.” He is a man sufficient in other respects, though, and sometimes not barren in greatness in speeches and writings; he is a poly­ math and is intent on perceiving. Yet he is out to prove the mistakes of others while unconscious of his own, and from his “erotic” passion for always exciting strange conceptions, he often falls into the most adolescent kind of humor. 2. But I shall set down only one or two citations from this fellow, since Caecilius has indeed taken up most of them first. In praising Alexander the Great, he says:

He took over the whole of Asia in fewer years than it took Isocrates to write his “panegyric” speech about the war against the Persians.

Wonderful, this comparative judgment of the Macedonian with the sophist! O Timaeus! It is obvious, you see, that Spartan manhood was left far behind that of Isocrates, since the Spartans took over Messene in thirty years, while he organized his Panegyricus in ten. 3. How does he voice his epigram about the Athenians who were settled in Italy?

Having been impious lo Hermes and having mutilated his statues, they were for this reason punished, and not least on account of one man who was descended from the offended god: Hermocrates, the son of Hermon.

So it makes me wonder, my most pleasing Terentianus, how it was that he did not write also of the tyrant Dionysius:

Since, as we know, he was impious towards Zeus and Heracles, Dion and Heracleides for this reason took away his tyranny.

4. But why ought we speak of Timaeus when even those heroes—I am speaking of Xenophon and Plato (and they were from the Socratic gymnasium! )—sometimes forget themselves because of such trivial graces. Xenophon writes in his The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians:

The Spartans were as silent as stones, their eyes as motionless as those statues, and you would take them to be as modestly virginal as the pupils of their eyes.

It was appropriate for an Amphicrates and not for a Xenophon to speak of the pupils of the eyes as modest virgins—as if, by Heracles, one could be persuaded that the pupils of all those Spartans’ eyes were consistently virginal in their modesty, whereas, they say, the immodesty of anyone is expressed in nothing so much as in the eyes! Homer says of one who is headstrong, “Drunk, with the eyes of a dog.” 5. Timaeus, though, like a thief holding onto some kind of poison, did not leave this piece of false Xenophon tine wit alone. Speaking of Agathocles, how he kidnapped his cousin (who had been given to another man) from her wedding and went Timaeus says:

Who would have done such a thing if he had had modest pupils in his eyes rather than whorish pupils?

6. And again, Plato, divine in other respects, when he wanted to say “writing tablets,” declares:

They shall place their writings m their temples on cypress memorials.

Another time, he writes:

As for the walls, Megillus, I would agree with the Spartans in letting the walls lie down in the earth and sleep there and not arouse them.

7. That Herodotean saying is not much different from this sort of writing, that beautiful women are a “pain in the eyes”—although, of course, there is some consolation in the fact that in Herodotus’ account, barbarians were the ones saying this, and they were in a drunken state; but such words should not come even out of the mouths of barbarians—because of the pettiness of soul involved—for there is no beauty in performing ugly actions before the ages.