? So the edd., reading cog- for the Ms. cogit-amini.
3 Lit., ** be moved with agitation of breathing."

* Lit., ** outside," i.e. before being in bodily forms.
- 5 So Ursinus and LB., reading retin-e-nt for the Ms. -ea-, which can
hardly be correct. There may possibly be an ellipsis of st before this
clause, so that the sentence would run: ‘If they had any natural pro-
perties, [if] they retain all these, what stupidity," etc.
6 Lit., ** deprived of moveableness of feeling."


ARNOB. sy


290 THE SEVEN BOOKS OF [Boox v1.
beings! and endowed with the gift of wisdom and discretion,
sink down before pieces of baked earthenware, adore plates of
copper, beg from the teeth of elephants good health, magis-
tracies, sovereignties, power, victories, acquisitions, gains,
very good harvests, and very rich vintages; and while it is
plain [and] clear that you are speaking to senseless things,
you think that you are heard, and bring yourselves into dis-
grace of your own accord, by vainly and credulously deceiving
yourselves? Oh, would that you might enter into some statue!
rather, would that you might separate? and break up into
parts* those Olympian and Capitoline Jupiters, and behold
all those parts alone and by themselves which make up the
whole of their bodies! You would at once see that these gods
of yours, to whom the smoothness [of their] exterior gives a
majestic appearance by its alluring? brightness, are [only] a
framework of flexible? plates, particles without shape joined
together; that they are kept from falling into ruin and fear
of destruction, by dove-tails and clamps and brace-irons ; and
that lead is run into the midst of all the hollows and where
the joints meet, and causes delay’ useful in preserving them.
