The Ship from the East

You press me to give my views on the nature of things. If there were room, I could repeat for you the views of Lucretius, who follows Epicurus; or those of Aristotle, as the Peripatetics teach them; or those of Plato and Zeno, as the Academics and the Stoics teach them. Turning to the church, where we have the rule of truth, the books of Genesis and the Prophets and Ecclesiastes give us much information on questions of this kind. But if we profess ignorance about all these things, as also about the origin of souls, then in your Apology you ought to have admitted your ignorance of them all alike, and to have asked your slanderers why they had the impudence to force you to answer on this single point, when they themselves know nothing of all those great matters. But oh, how vast was the wealth in that trireme, which had come full of all the wares of Egypt and the East to enrich the poverty of the city of Rome! [a]

If you had not come from the East, that very learned man would still be stuck fast among the astrologers, and all Christians would still not know what can be said against fatalism. You have a right to ply me with questions about astrology and the causes of the sky and the stars, since you brought to land a ship full of such wares as these. I admit my poverty: I have not grown as rich in the East as you have. In your long stay under the shadow of the Pharos you learned what Rome never knew. Egypt taught you lore that Italy did not have until now. [c]