Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/304

 such a thing, when it is so plain that Tullius in his early works is the greatest of orators, and in his later an eminent philosopher? Besides, while we feel everywhere that Virgil, for instance, is a poet, Tullius is nowhere so. What we read in the Declamations is certainly true, that Virgil's felicity deserted him when he wrote in prose, and Cicero's eloquence when he wrote in verse. And then what am I to say of Plato, who by the consensus of all the greatest judges is not a poet at all, but the prince of philosophers? Turn to Cicero, to Augustine, to other writers who speak with authority, as many of them as you please, and you will find that wherever in their books they have exalted Aristotle above the rest of the philosophers they have always taken pains to declare that PJato is the one exception. What it is that makes Plato a poet I cannot imagine, unless it be a remark of Panætius, quoted by Tullius, where he is denominated the Homer of philosophy. This means nothing more than chief of philosophers; as preëminent among them as Homer among the poets. If we do not explain it so, what are we to say of Tullius himself, when in a certain passage in the letters to Atticus he calls Plato his God? They are both trying in every possible way to express their sense of the godlike nature of Plato's genius; hence the name of Homer, and, more explicit still, that of God.