Oration to the Greeks 1

Do not be so very hostile toward the barbarians, men of Greece, and do not begrudge them their teachings. For which of your practices did not take its origin from barbarians? The most eminent of the Telmessians invented divination by dreams; the Carians, foreknowledge by the stars; the Phrygians and the most ancient of the Isaurians, divination by the flight of birds; the Cyprians, divination by sacrifice; the Babylonians, astronomy; the Persians, magic; the Egyptians, geometry; the Phoenicians, instruction by letters. So stop calling imitations inventions. It was Orpheus who taught you to compose poetry and to sing, and the same man taught you to be initiated into mysteries; the Tuscans taught you sculpture; the annals of the Egyptians taught you to write history. You took flute-playing from Marsyas and Olympus, and these two, both Phrygians and rustics, devised the harmony of the panpipe. The Tyrrhenians invented the trumpet; the Cyclopes, metalworking; and letter-writing, the woman who once ruled the Persians, as Hellanicus says: her name was Atossa. So put away this conceit, and do not parade fine words, you who are praised by yourselves and keep your advocates at home. A person of sense ought to wait for the testimony of others, and to be in harmony also in the way he speaks. But as it is, you alone have come to the point of not even speaking alike in ordinary conversation: the Dorians do not use the same diction as those from Attica, and the Aeolians do not speak like the Ionians. And since there is so great a discord where there ought to be none, I am at a loss whom I should call a Greek. And the most absurd thing of all: you have honored modes of expression not native to you, and by sometimes misusing barbarian words you have made your dialect a jumble. For this reason we have renounced your wisdom, even if someone in it was very distinguished. For, as the comic poet says, “These are leavings and chatter, choirs of swallows, spoilers of art.” Those who pursue it bawl, and give out the voice of ravens. You have devised rhetoric for injustice and false accusation, selling for pay the freedom of your speech, and often representing what is just today as not good tomorrow; and poetry, so that you may compose battles and the loves of the gods and the corruption of the soul.