[Sidenote: E] if that is the view which he takes of the God. Thus, while you welcome and admire what the Wise Men of old have written up: “Know thyself”, and “Nothing too much”, not least because of the brevity which includes in a small compass a close hammer-beaten sense, you blame the oracles because they mostly use concise, plain, direct phrases. It is with sayings like those of the Wise Men as with streams compressed into a narrow channel; there is no distinctness or transparency to the eye of the mind, but if you look into what has been written or said about them by those who have wished to learn the full meaning of each, you [Sidenote: F] will not easily find longer treatises elsewhere. The language of the Pythia illustrates what mathematicians mean by calling a straight line the shortest between the same points; it makes no bending, or curve, or doubling or ambiguity; it lies straight towards truth, it takes risks,[126] its good faith is open to examination, and it has never yet been found wrong; it has filled the shrine [Sidenote: 409] with offerings from Barbarians and Greeks, and has beautified it with noble buildings and Amphictyonic fittings. Why, you see for yourselves many buildings added which were not here formerly, many restored which were ruinous or destroyed. As new trees spring up by the side of those in vigorous bearing, so the Pylaea flourishes together with Delphi and is fed upon the same meat; the plenty of the one causes the other to take on shapeliness and figure and a beauty of temples, and halls of meeting and fountains of water, such as it never had in the thousand years before. Now those who dwell about Galaxius [Sidenote: B] in Boeotia felt the manifest presence of the God in the abundance and more than abundance of milk: _From all the kine and every flock, Plenteous as water from the rock, Came welling, gurgling on its way The milk that day. Hot foot they hied them to the task, To fill the pail, to fill the cask; No beechen bowl or crock of clay, No pot or pan had holiday; Wine-skin or flagon, none might stay Within, that day._[127]