There are perhaps few, at least among the less read Greek writers, who, in small compass and at no great expense of trouble, throw more negative light on Greek criticism than [Sidenote: _Maximus Tyrius._] Maximus Tyrius.[161] This rhetorician or philosopher (he would probably have disclaimed the first epithet and modestly demanded promotion to the second) has left us, in a style as easy as that of Aristides is difficult, and showing at least a strong velleity to be Platonic, some forty essays, or dissertations, or theses. They are on questions or propositions of the usual kind, as these: “Pleasure may be a good but is not a stable thing.” “On Socratic Love” (an amiable but slightly ludicrous example of whitewashing everybody, from Socrates himself to Sappho). “On the God of Socrates and Plato,” &c., &c. Several of them might, at any rate from the titles, seem to touch our subject; two at least might seem to be obliged to touch it. These are the Tenth (in Reiske’s order), “Whether the poets or the philosophers have given the soundest ideas of the gods?” and the Twenty-third, “Whether Plato was right in banishing Homer from his Republic?” Yet, apt to slip between our fingers as we have found and shall find apparently critical theses of this sort, hardly one (at least outside Plutarch) is so utterly eel-like as those of Maximus of Tyre. As to the first,[162] he suggests that the very question is a misunderstanding—as no doubt it is, though not quite in his sense. Philosophy and poetry are really the same thing. Poetry is a philosophy, “senior in time, metrical in harmony, based on fiction as to its arguments.” Philosophy is a poetry “renewed in youth, more lightly equipped in harmony, more certain in sense.” They are, in short, as like as my fingers to my fingers, “and there are ænigmas in both.” If you are wise you will interpret the poets allegorically, but go to the philosophers for clear statements. And we must allow, to the credit of the former, that there is no poet who talks such mischievous nonsense as Epicurus. Footnote 161: Ed. Reiske (after Davies and Markland), 2 vols. (or at least parts), Leipsic, 1774. Footnote 162: Ed. cit., Part i. pp. 166-187.