Given to fashions, that their garb may please, Hot baths, and couches where they loll at ease. And therefore also he brings in Ulysses directing the musician thus,— Leave this, and sing the horse, out of whose womb The gallant knights that conquered Troy did come;[35] evidently teaching us that poets and musicians ought to receive the arguments of their songs from sober and understanding men. And in the other fable of Juno he excellently shows that the conversation of women with men, and the favors they receive from them procured by sorcery, witchcraft, or other unlawful arts, are not only short, unstable, and soon cloying, but also in the issue easily turned to loathing and displeasure, when once the pleasure is over. For so Jupiter there threatens Juno, when he tells her,— Hear this, remember, and our fury dread, Nor pull the unwilling vengeance on thy head; Lest arts and blandishments successless prove Thy soft deceits and well dissembled love.[36] For the fiction and representation of evil acts, when it withal acquaints us with the shame and damage befalling the doers, hurts not but rather profits him that reads them. For which end philosophers make use of examples for our instruction and correction out of historical collections; and poets do the very same thing, but with this difference, that they invent fabulous examples themselves. There was one Melanthius, who (whether in jest or earnest he said it, it matters not much) affirmed that the city of Athens owed its preservation to the dissensions and factions that were among the orators, giving withal this reason for his assertion, that thereby they were kept from inclining all of them to one side, so that by means of the differences among those statesmen there were always some that drew the saw the right way for the defeating of destructive counsels. And thus it is too in the contradictions among poets, which, by lessening the credit of what they say, render them the less powerful to do mischief; and therefore, when comparing one saying with another we discover their contrariety, we ought to adhere to the better side. As in these instances:— The Gods, my son, deceive poor men oft-times. _Ans._ ’Tis easy, sir, on God to lay our crimes. ’Tis comfort to thee to be rich, is’t not! _Ans._ No, sir, ’tis bad to be a wealthy sot. Die rather than such toilsome pains to take. _Ans._ To call God’s service toil’s a foul mistake.