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Sarapion remarked that the artisan had represented allegorically the nurture and birth and exhalation of the sun from moisture, whether he had read what Homer Od. iii. 1. says, Swiftly away moved the Sun, forsaking the beautiful waters, or whether he had observed that the Egyptians, to show the beginning of sunrise, paint a very young baby sitting on a lotus flower. Cf. 355 b, supra. I laughed and said, Where now, my good friend? Are you again slyly thrusting in your Stoicism here and unostentatiously slipping into the discussion their kindlings and exhalations,Von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ii. 652-656 (p. 196). not indeed bringing down the moon and the sun, as the Thessalian women do, Cf. Aristophanes, Clouds, 749; Plato, Gorgias, 513 a; Horace, Epodes, 5. 46; Propertius, i. 1. 19, and especially Lucan, vi. 438-506; cf. also 416 f infra. but assuming that they spring up here from earth and water and derive their origin from here? For PlatoPlato, Timaeus, 90 a; cf. Moralia, 600 f. called man also a celestial plant, as though he were held upright from his head above as from a root. But you Stoics ridicule Empedocles Cf. Diels, Frag. der Vorsokratiker, i. p. 243, Empedocles, no. b 44; cf. also Moralia, 890 b. for his assertion that the sun, created by the reflection of celestial light, about the earth, Back to the heavens again sends his beams with countenance fearless. And you yourselves declare the sun to be an earth-born creature or a water-plant, assigning him to the kingdom of the frogs or water-snakes. But let us refer all this to the heroics of the Stoic school, and let us make a cursory examination of the cursory work of the artisans. In many instances they indeed show elegance and refinement, but they have not in all eases avoided frigidity and over-elaboration. Just as the man who constructed the cock upon the hand of Apollo’s statue showed by suggestion the early morning and the hour of approaching sunrise, so here, one might aver, has been produced in the frogs a token of springtime when the sun begins to dominate the atmosphere and to break up the winter; that is, if, as you say, we must think of Apollo and the Sun, not as two gods, but as one.
