Chapter 6: On the heathen philosophers

1. Philosophers are so-called by a Greek name, which in Latin means _amatores sapientiae_. For he is a philosopher who has a knowledge of divine and human things, and keeps wholly to the way of right living.

2. The name of the philosophers is said to have first originated with Pythagoras. For when the ancient Greeks boastfully named themselves sophists, that is, wise men, or teachers of wisdom, he was asked what he professed to be, and he modestly replied that he was a philosopher, that is, lover of wisdom, since to make a profession of wisdom seemed very arrogant.

3. And so in later times it became the practice to give only the name of philosopher, no matter how great the learning in matters pertaining to wisdom each seemed to himself or to others to possess. And these philosophers are divided into three classes: for they are either natural philosophers (_physici_), or moral (_ethici_), or rational (_logici_).

4. The natural philosophers are so-called because they treat of nature....

5. The moral philosophers are so-called because they discuss morals....

6. The rational philosophers are so named because they add reason to nature and morals.... These are divided into their schools, some having names from their founders, as _Platonici_, _Epicurei_, _Pythagorici_; others from their places of meeting, as _Peripatetici_, _Stoici_, _Academici_.

7. The _Platonici_ are named from the philosopher Plato. They assert that God is the creator of souls, the angels of bodies; they say that after many cycles of years souls return to different bodies.

9. [The Stoics] assert that no one is happy without virtue. They claim that every sin is equally sinful, saying: “He is as guilty who steals chaff as he who steals gold, he who kills a waterfowl as he who kills a horse; for it is not the thing but the spirit (_non animal sed animus_) that makes the sin.”

10. These also say that the soul perishes with the body. They love the virtue of self-control, and seek eternal glory although they assert that they are not immortal.

11. The _Academici_ are named from Academia, Plato’s villa at Athens, where he taught. These believe that all things are uncertain; but although it must be admitted that many things which God willed to surpass the understanding of man, are uncertain and hidden from us, yet there are very many things which can be received by the senses and apprehended by man.

15. The Epicureans are named from Epicurus, a certain philosopher, a lover of vanity not of wisdom, whom the very philosophers themselves called a swine because he wallowed in carnal filth and asserted that bodily pleasure was the highest good, and even said that the universe was not formed and ruled by a divine Providence.

16. But he assigned the origin of things to atoms, that is, to indivisible material bodies, from the chance combination of which all things arise and have arisen. He said that God did nothing, that all things are corporeal, that the soul is not different from the body. And so he said, “I shall not exist after I die.”

22. These errors of the philosophers have given rise also to heresies in the church....

23. When it is said that the soul perishes, Epicurus is honored; and the denial of the resurrection of the flesh is taken from all the philosophers; and where matter is put on an equality with God, it is the teaching of Zeno; and where anything is read about a God of fire, Heraclitus comes in. The same material is used and the same errors are embraced over and over by heretics and philosophers.

Chapter 7. On poets.

1. Tranquillus thus tells why poets were so named: “When men putting off savagery first began to have a settled mode of life and to obtain a knowledge of themselves and their gods, they contrived a modest way of living and necessary words for themselves, but sought for magnificence in each for the worship of their gods.

2. And so, just as they made temples more beautiful than the homes of that time, and images larger than men’s bodies, so they thought that [the gods] must be honored with an eloquence even more stately, and they extolled their merits in splendid words and pleasure-giving verse.”

10. The function of a poet is in this, that by the aid of a figurative and indirect mode of speech he gracefully changes and transforms to a different aspect what has really taken place. But Lucan is not placed in the number of poets because he seems to have composed a history, not a poem.