[Sidenote: E] He uses mortal men as ministers and prophets, whom it is his duty to make his care, and to protect, lest they perish at the hands of the bad while serving him. He does not then choose to conceal the truth; what he used to do was to give a twist to its manifestation, which, like a beam of light, is refracted more than once in its passage, and is parted into many rays as it becomes poetry, and so to remove whatever in it was harsh and hard. Tyrants might thus be left in ignorance, and enemies not be forewarned. For them he threw a veil in the innuendoes [Sidenote: F] and ambiguities which hid the meaning from others, but did not elude the intelligence of the actual consultants who gave their whole mind to the answers. Hence, now that things have changed, it is sheer folly to criticize and find fault with the God, because he thinks right to give his aid no longer in the same manner but in another. XXVII. ‘Another thing is this: Language receives no greater advantage from a poetical form than this, that a meaning which is wrapped and bound in metre is more easily remembered and grasped. Now in those days much memory was required. Many things used to be explained orally; local indications, the times when things were to be done, rites of Gods across the seas, secret burying-places of heroes, hard to be discovered by those setting off for lands far from Greece. You know about Chius [Sidenote: 408] and Cretinus, and Nesichus, and Phalanthus, and many other leaders of expeditions, how many clues they needed to find the proper place appointed to each for settlement, while some of them missed the way, as did Battus.[123] He thought that he would be turned out, not understanding what the place was to which he had been sent; then he came a second time loudly complaining. Then the God answered: _Thou that hast never been there, if thou know’st Libya the sheepland Better than I that have been, then wonderful wise is thy wisdom._ So he sent him out again. Then Lysander entirely failed to make out the hill Orchalides,[124] otherwise called Alopecus, and the river Hoplites, _Also the dragon, earthborn, in craftiness coming behind thee_, and was defeated in battle and slain in those very spots by [Sidenote: B] Neochorus, a man of Haliartus, who bore a shield with the device of a serpent. There are many such answers given to the old people, all hard to grasp and remember, which I need not give you at length, since you know them.