Many such deceptions can be practised on men
when they put faith in those who exaggerate everything they tell. Therefore I am now afraid on my
own account that you who have just come to town
and are about to hear me for the first time may
expect to find amber and swans here, and after
a while may go away laughing at the men who
promised you that ‘such treasures were abundant in
my discourse. But I swear that neither you nor
anyone else ever heard me make such boasts about
my compositions, and never will! Others, to be
sure, you can find in plenty of the Eridanus kind:
their words distil very gold instead of amber, and
they are far more melodious than the swans of
poetry. But as for my talk, you already see how
simple and matter-of-fact it is, and that there is no -
music to it. So look out that you do not set your
hopes of me too high, and thereby have an experience
like people who see things under water. They expect
them to be as large as they looked through the
water, from above, when the image was magnified
under the light; and when they fish them up, they
are annoyed to find them a great deal smaller. I
warn you, therefore, at the ‘outset—don’t expect
that when you have bailed out the water and
exposed my thoughts you will make a great haul, or
else you will have yourselves to blame for your
expectations!


 

 
It need hardly be said that this belongs to the domain of
belles lettres, not of science. Like the Italian poets of the
Renaissance, the rhetoricians of the decadence delighted to
show their cunning by “praising” all manner of things good,
bad, and indifferent.