~Tabula Cebetis philosophi so=~ cratici-cũ Iohãnis Aeſticãpiani Epiſtola. [Illustration: _Fab. Cebetis, 1507._] Plate 1^a [Illustration: _Tableau of Human Life from Cebes B C 390_] Thus, the _Tablet of Cebes_, a work by one of the disciples of Socrates, about B.C. 390, is an explanation, in the form of a Dialogue, of a picture, said to have been set up in the temple of Kronos at Athens or at Thebes, and which was declared to be emblematical of Human Life. One of the older Latin versions, printed in 1507, presents the foregoing illustrative frontispiece. As the book has come down to modern times it is, generally, what has sometimes been named, _nudum Emblema_, a naked Emblem, because it has neither device nor artistic drawing, but, like Shakespeare’s comparison of all the world to a stage in which man plays many parts, the course of Life, with its discipline, false hopes and false pleasures, is in the Tablet so described,—in fact so delineated,[13] as to have enabled the Dutch designer and engraver, Romyn de Hooghe, in 1670, to have pictured “the whole story of Human Life as narrated to the Grecian sage.” The Moral of the Allegory may not be set forth with entire clearness in the picture, but it can be given in the words of one of the _Golden Sentences_ of Democritus,—see Gale’s _Opus. Mythol._:— “That human happiness does not result from bodily excellencies nor from riches, but is founded on uprightness of mind and on righteousness of conduct.” Coins and medals furnish most valuable examples of emblematical figures; indeed some of the Emblem writers, as Sambucus in 1564, were among the earliest to publish impressions or engravings of ancient Roman money, on which are frequently given very interesting representations of customs and symbolical acts. On Grecian coins, which Priestley, in his _Lectures on History_, vol. i. p. 126,—highly praises for “a design, an attitude, a force, and a delicacy, in the expression even of the muscles and veins of human figures,”—we find, to use heraldic language, that the owl is the crest of Athens,—a wolf’s head, that of Argos,—and a tortoise the badge of the Peloponnesus. The whole history of Louis XIV. and that of his great adversary, William III., are represented in volumes containing the medals that were struck to commemorate the leading events of their reigns, and though outrageously untrue to nature and reality by the adoption of Roman costumes and classic symbols, they serve as records of remarkable occurrences.