What happened within a short time—that the Romans mastered the Carthaginians, and brought the war with Philip to a finish, [Sidenote: D] that Philip met the Aetolians and Romans in battle and was defeated, and, lastly, that an island rose out of the depths of the sea, with much fire and boiling waves—could not all be set down to chance and spontaneous occurrence. Why, the order emphasizes the foreknowledge, and so does the time predicted to the Romans, some five hundred years before the event, as that in which they were to be at war with all the races at once, which meant the war with the slaves after their revolt. In all this nothing is unascertainable, the story is not left in dim light to [Sidenote: E] be groped out with reference to Fortune “in Infinity”, it gives many securities, and is open to trial, it points the road which the destined event is to tread. For I do not think that any one will say that the agreement with the details as foretold was accidental. Otherwise, what prevents some one else from saying that Epicurus did not write his _Leading Principles_ for our use, Boethus, but that the letters fell together by chance and just spontaneously, and so the book was finished off?’ XII. While we were talking thus, we were moving forward. [Sidenote: F] In the store-house of the Corinthians we were looking at the golden palm tree, the only remnant of their offerings, when the frogs and water-snakes embossed round the roots caused much surprise to Diogenianus, and, for the matter of that, to us. For the palm tree is not, like many others, a marshy or water-loving plant, nor have frogs anything specially to do with the Corinthians. Thus they must be a symbolical or canting device of that city, just as the men of Selinus are said to have dedicated a golden plant of parsley (selinon), and those of Tenedos the axe, because of the crabs found round the place which they [Sidenote: 400] call Asterium, the only ones, it appears, with the brand of an axe on the shell. Yet the God himself is supposed to have a partiality for crows and swans and wolves and hawks, for anything rather than beasts like crabs. Serapion observed that the artist intended a veiled hint at the sun drawing his aliment and origin from exhalations out of moist places, whether he had it from Homer, _Leaving the beauteous lake, the great sun scaled The brazen sky_,[96]