To the Nations 2.16

But some, they say, pointed out the crops and the necessities of life. I ask you: when you say that they discovered them, do you not confess that the things to be discovered existed beforehand? Why then do you not rather honor the author, whose gifts these are, instead of transferring the author's honor to the discoverers? Surely the discoverer himself, before anything else, gave thanks to the author; surely he recognized as God the one to whom the ministry of the founder truly belongs, by whom both the discoverer himself and the very thing to be discovered were established. No one at Rome knew the green African fig when Cato brought one before the senate, to show how near was the enemy province which he was always pressing them to subdue. Gnaeus Pompeius first spread the cherry from Pontus through Italy. These men, for all I care, might have earned the proclamation of divinity as the discoverers of new fruits among the Romans! It is as vain as holding men to be gods for the inventions of the arts. If the craftsmen of our own age were compared with them, how much more fittingly would consecration have belonged to the later than to the earlier! I ask you, has not antiquity become obsolete in all the crafts, as daily use everywhere supplies novelty? And so those whom you sanctify for the arts you injure in the arts themselves, and you provoke them with rivals who surpass them.