Be not so bitterly hostile toward the barbarians, O men of Greece, nor begrudge them their teachings. For which of your pursuits did not derive its origin from the barbarians? The most esteemed of the Telmessians invented divination by dreams; the Carians, prognostication by the stars; the Phrygians and the most ancient of the Isaurians, augury by the flight of birds; the Cyprians, the art of sacrifice; the Babylonians, astronomy; the Persians, magic; the Egyptians, geometry; the Phoenicians, instruction by letters. Therefore cease to call your imitations discoveries. For Orpheus taught you to compose poetry and to sing, and the same man taught you the mysteries; the Etruscans, modeling in clay; the Egyptian records of times, the composing of histories. From Marsyas and Olympus you took flute-playing; both of these Phrygians, rustics, devised harmony by means of the pipe. The Tyrrhenians invented the trumpet, the Cyclopes the working of bronze, and the writing of letters a woman who once ruled the Persians, as Hellanicus says; her name was Atossa. Lay aside, then, this conceit, and do not put forward elegance of words, you who, praised by your own selves, have only those at home as your advocates. The man of sense ought to await the testimony of others, and to be in harmony in the very utterance of speech. But it has befallen you alone not even to speak the same language in your conversations; for the Dorians do not have the same speech as those of Attica, nor do the Aeolians speak like the Ionians. And when there is such division among those where there ought not to be, I am at a loss whom I must call a Greek. For the most absurd thing of all is that you have honored renderings not akin to you, and by sometimes abusing barbarian words you have made your own dialect a confused jumble. For this reason we have renounced the wisdom that is among you, even if anyone was very revered in it. For according to the comic poet, "These are mere gleanings and chatter, nests of swallows, spoilers of art." Those who pursue it become hoarse in the throat and emit the cry of ravens. For you established rhetoric for injustice and slander, selling for hire the freedom of your words and often presenting what is now just as afterward not good; and poetry, that you might compose battles and the loves of the gods and the corruption of the soul.