43. What say you, O offspring and descendants of the Supreme Deity? Did these souls, then, wise, and sprung from the first causes, become acquainted with such forms of baseness, crime, and bad feeling? and were they ordered to dwell here,473    The ms. reads, habitare atque habitare juss-e-r-unt. All edd. omit the first two words, the first ed. without further change; but the active verb is clearly out of place, and therefore all other edd. read jussæ sunt, as above. Oehler, however, from habitare omitted by the others, would emend aditare, “to approach,”—a conjecture with very little to recommend it. and be clothed with the garment of the human body, in order that they might engage in, might practise these evil deeds, and that very frequently? And is there a man with any sense of reason who thinks that the world was established because of them, and not rather that it was set up as a seat and home, in which every kind of wickedness should be committed daily, all evil deeds be done, plots, impostures, frauds, covetousness, robberies, violence, impiety, all that is presumptuous, indecent, base, disgraceful,474    These are all substantives in the original.and all the other evil deeds which men devise over all the earth with guilty purpose, and contrive for each other’s ruin?

XLIII. Quid dicitis, o soboles, ac primi progenies numinis? Ergone sapientes illae, atque ex causis principalibus proditae genera haec animae turpitudinum, criminum, malitiarumque noverunt, atque ut exercerent, ut gererent, ut percelebrarent haec mala, habitare jussae sunt has partes, et humani corporis circumjectione vestiri? Et mortalium quisquam est rationis alicujus accipiens sensum, qui ordinatum existimet mundum per has esse, ac non potius sedem ac domicilium constitutum, in quo omne quotidie perpetraretur nefas, maleficia cuncta confierent, insidiae, fraudes, doli, avaritia, rapinae, vis, scelus, audacia, obscoenitas, turpitudo, flagitium, mala omnia 0883B caetera, quae in orbe homines toto mente noxia pariunt, et labem machinantur in mutuam?