3
Come now, do you maintain that without instruction you know as much as we? How can you, unless, like the shepherd of old,Hesiod: see the Theogony29 ff. you once received a branch of laurel from the Muses? Helicon, which the goddesses are said to haunt, you never even heard of, I take it, and your haunts in your boyhood were not the same as ours. That you should even mention the Muses is impious. They would not have shrunk from showing themselves to a shepherd, a hardbitten, hairy man displaying rich tan on his body, but as for the like of you—in the name of your lady of LebanonAphrodite, perhaps, or Astarte; in later times there was a notorious cult of Aphrodite on Lebanon: Eusebius, Vit. Constantini 3, 53. dispense me for the present from giving a full description of you in plain language!—they would never have deigned, I am sure, to come near you, but instead of giving you laurel they would have scourged you with myrtle or sprays of mallow and would have made you keep your distance from those regions, so as not to pollute either Olmeios or Hippocrene, whose waters only thirsty flocks or the clean lips of shepherds may drink.
3
No matter how shameless you are and how courageous in such matters, you would never dare to say that you have had an education, or that you ever troubled yourself to associate intimately with books, or that So-and-so was your teacher and you went to school with So-and-so.
