It is not incumbent upon you, then, to be thus
timorous in respect of praise. If any offence at all
has been perpetrated against divinity in that essay,
you are not accountable for it—unless you think
that to listen makes one accountable ; it is I whom


 

the gods will punish, after first punishing Homer
and the other poets! But to this day they have
not punished the best of the philosophers for saying
that man was God’s image ! Hardly Plato, though he has something similar in the Republic, 501. But to him the universe is God’s image ; see the end of the Timaeus. Perhaps Lucian means Diogenes, who said that good men were images of gods (Diog. Laert. 6, 51).