the misery of him who is about to die, by anxiety as to what is to happen to him after it. And, indeed, if life really is a good, to whom can it be so to have once lived? How much more easy, then, and how much more devoid of all doubts, is it for each of us to put his trust in himself, and guided by our knowledge of what our state has been before birth, to assume that that after death will be the same. CHAP. 57. (56.)—THE INVENTORS OF VARIOUS THINGS. Before we quit the consideration of the nature of man, it appears only proper to point out those persons who have been the authors of different inventions. Father Liber[1363] was the first to establish the practice of buying and selling; he also invented the diadem, the emblem of royalty, and the triumphal procession. Ceres[1364] introduced corn, the acorn having been previously used by man for food; it was she, also, who introduced into Attica the art of grinding corn[1365] and of making bread, and other similar arts into Sicily; and it was from these circumstances that she came to be regarded as a divinity. She was the first also to establish laws;[1366] though, according to some, it was Rhadamanthus. I have always been of opinion, that letters were of Assyrian origin, but other writers, Gellius,[1367] for instance, suppose that they were invented in Egypt by Mercury: others, again, will have it that they were discovered by the Syrians; and that Cadmus brought from Phœnicia sixteen letters into Greece. To these, Palamedes, it is said, at the time of the Trojan war, added these four, Θ, Ξ, Φ, and Χ. Simonides,[1368] the lyric poet, afterwards added a like number, Ζ, Η, Ψ, and Ω; the sounds denoted by all of which are now received into our alphabet.[1369] Aristotle, on the other hand, is rather of opinion, that there were originally eighteen letters,[1370] Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ, and that two, Θ namely and Χ, were introduced by Epicharmus,[1371] and not by Palamedes. Aristides says, that a certain person of the name of Menos, in Egypt, invented letters fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus,[1372] the most ancient of all the kings of Greece, and this he attempts to prove by the monuments there. On the other hand, Epigenes,[1373] a writer of very great authority, informs us that the Babylonians have a series of observations on the stars, for a period of seven hundred and twenty thousand years, inscribed on baked bricks. Berosus and Critodemus, who make the period the shortest, give it as four hundred and ninety thousand years.[1374] From this statement, it would appear that letters have been in use from all eternity. The Pelasgi were the first to introduce them into Latium.