Of the other fault we mentioned, I mean frigidity, Timaeus is full: a man competent in other respects, and not unfit at times for greatness in language, learned, ingenious; but most expert in convicting the errors of others while wholly insensible to his own, and so possessed by a passion for forever springing some novel turn that he often plummets into the most childish puerility. §1
I will set down one or two examples, since Caecilius has anticipated the rest. Praising Alexander the Great, Timaeus says, ‘He took the whole of Asia in fewer years than Isocrates spent in writing his Panegyric on the war against the Persians.’ A wonderful comparison, this, between the Macedonian and the sophist! For plainly, Timaeus, the Spartans were so far inferior to Isocrates in courage that, while they took thirty years to capture Messene, he composed his Panegyric in just ten. §2
And how does he comment on the Athenians taken prisoner in Sicily? He says, ‘Because they had outraged Hermes and mutilated his statues, they paid the penalty, not least through one man, who was descended on his father's side from the man wronged: Hermocrates, son of Hermon.’ I wonder, dearest Terentianus, why he does not also write thus of Dionysius the tyrant: ‘Since he had been impious toward Zeus and Heracles, therefore Dion and Heracleides took the tyranny from him.’ §3
But why need we speak of Timaeus when even those heroes, I mean Xenophon and Plato, though sprung from the school of Socrates, sometimes forget themselves through such pettinesses? Xenophon writes in his Spartan Constitution: ‘You would hear the voice of these men less than that of stones, you would more easily turn the eyes of bronze statues than theirs; you would think them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes.’ It belonged to Amphicrates, not to Xenophon, to call the pupils in our eyes ‘bashful maidens.’ And, by Heracles, the conceit that the pupils of every man in turn are modest, when in fact, as people say, in nothing is the shamelessness of certain persons so plainly visible as in their eyes! ‘You drunkard, with the eyes of a dog,’ as Homer says. §4
Timaeus, however, has fastened upon this conceit as on stolen goods and not even left such frigidity to Xenophon. Of Agathocles he says: ‘He carried off his cousin, who had been given in marriage to another, from her unveiling-rites and went his way; an act which only one could have done who had harlots, not maidens, in his eyes.’ §5
What of Plato, divine in all else? Wishing to speak of writing-tablets, he says, ‘Having written upon them, they will deposit cypress memorials in the temples.’ And again: ‘About walls, Megillus, I would side with Sparta in letting walls sleep, lying upon the earth, and not rise up.’ §6
Not far off is the saying of Herodotus, that beautiful women are ‘pains for the eyes.’ Yet here there is some excuse, for in his work the speakers are barbarians and in their cups; still, even from such characters it is not well, out of small-souledness, to disgrace oneself before posterity. §7