And if we ourselves were not able to arrive at these advantages, nor even taste them with our senses, still we ought to admire them even when we saw them in others.... And indeed, we have constantly heard from men of the greatest eminence and learning that the study of other sciences was made up of learning, and rules, and regular method; but that a poet was such by the unassisted work of nature, and was moved by the vigor of his own mind, and was inspired as it were by some divine wrath. Wherefore rightly does our own great Ennius call poets holy; because they seem to be recommended to us by some especial gift, as it were, and liberality of the gods. Let then, judges, this name of poet, this name which no barbarians even have ever disregarded, be holy in your eyes, men of cultivated minds as you all are. Rocks and deserts reply to the poet's voice; savage beasts are often moved and arrested by song; and shall we who have been trained in the pursuit of the most virtuous acts refuse to be swayed by the voice of poets? The Colophonians say that Homer was their citizen; the Chians claim him as theirs; the Salaminians assert their right to him; but the men of Smyrna loudly assert him to be a citizen of Smyrna, and they have even raised a temple to him in their city. Many other places also fight with one another for the honor of being his birthplace. They then claim a stranger, even after his death, because he was a poet: shall we reject this man while he is alive, a man who by his own inclination and by our laws does actually belong to us? especially when Archias has employed all his genius with the utmost zeal in celebrating the glory and renown of the Roman people? For when a young man, he touched on our wars against the Cimbri and gained the favor even of Caius Marius himself, a man who was tolerably proof against this sort of study. For there was no one so disinclined to the Muses as not willingly to endure that the praise of his labors should be made immortal by means of verse. They say that the great Themistocles, the greatest man that Athens produced, said when some one asked him what sound or whose voice he took the greatest delight in hearing, "The voice of that by whom his own exploits were best celebrated." Therefore, the great Marius was also exceedingly attached to Lucius Plotius, because he thought that the achievement which he had performed could be celebrated by his genius. And the whole Mithridatic war, great and difficult as it was, and carried on with so much diversity of fortune by land and sea, has been related at length by him; and the books in which that is sung of, not only make illustrious Lucius Lucullus, that most gallant and celebrated man, but they do honor also to the Roman people. For while Lucullus was general, the Roman people opened Pontus, though it was defended both by the resources of the king and by the character of the country itself. Under the same general the army of the Roman people, with no very great