As for poets, rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and so on, they are like grasshoppers: they must sing in summer and waste away in winter, for there is no advancement for them. They were just the same from the beginning, if you believe that delightful tale Socrates told the handsome Phaedrus beneath a plane tree on the banks of the Ilissus. It was about noon, the day was hot, and the grasshoppers were making a noise. He took that pleasant opportunity to tell how grasshoppers had once been scholars, musicians, poets and the like, before the Muses were born. They lived without food or drink, and for that reason Jupiter turned them into grasshoppers.

And they may be turned again “into Tithonus’s cicadas or the Lycians’ frogs,” for all the reward I can see them likely to receive. Or else, meanwhile, I wish they could live as those creatures did, without any provisions, like so many manucodiatae—those Indian birds we commonly call birds of paradise. I mean the ones that live on air and the dew of heaven and need no other food.

As things stand, their rhetoric serves only to curse their bad luck. Many, for lack of money, are driven to desperate expedients. From grasshoppers they turn into bumblebees and wasps, outright parasites; they make the Muses into mules to fill their starving bellies and obtain a meal.

To tell the truth, the usual lot of most scholars is servility and poverty: they complain pitifully and display their needs to unheeding patrons, as Cardano does, and Xylander, and many others. As happens all too often in dedicatory letters, the hope of gain makes them lie and flatter, magnifying and extolling an unlearned, unworthy fool for his excellent virtues with extravagant praises and compliments. As Machiavelli observes, they should instead denounce and abuse him outright for his notorious crimes and vices.

So they sell themselves like fiddlers or tradesmen working for pay, to serve the purposes of great men for a small reward. They are like Indians: they possess abundant gold but do not know its value. For I share Synesius’s opinion that King Hiero gained more from knowing Simonides than Simonides gained from knowing him. Great men receive their best education, sound instruction and all their accomplishments from us; when they do well, their honour and immortality also come from us. We are their living tombs and records, the trumpeters of their fame. What was Achilles without Homer? Alexander without Arrian and Curtius? Who would have known the Caesars but for Suetonius and Dio?

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, But all lie unwept and unknown, Pressed beneath the long night, Because they lack a sacred poet.

Great men owe more to scholars than scholars owe to them. But scholars undervalue themselves and so are kept down by those great men. Let them possess the whole circle of knowledge, all the learning in the world: they must keep it to themselves, live despised and starve, unless they submit all their abilities, all their distinctions in arts and virtues, as Budé well puts it, to servile dependence on some unlearned ruler. They must live beneath his insolent Worship or Honour like parasites “who eat another’s bread like mice.” For, in truth, as that great astrologer Guido Bonatti could foresee, “these arts are not profitable”: these are no money-making arts, “but starving and famished”—poor and hungry.

Galen gives wealth, Justinian gives honours, But genus and species are forced to go on foot.

The rich physician and honoured lawyers ride, While the poor scholar walks beside them.

Poverty is the Muses’ inheritance. As poetic theology teaches us, when Jupiter’s daughters were each married to the gods, the Muses alone were left unmarried, Helicon abandoned by every suitor. I believe the reason was that they had no dowries.

Why did Calliope live unmarried for so long? Because she had no dowry to count out.

Why did Calliope remain so long a maid? Because she had no dowry to be paid.

Ever since, all their followers have been poor, abandoned and left to fend for themselves. So much so that, as Petronius argues, you will probably recognize them by their clothes. “A fellow happened to join me,” he says, “whose appearance was far from smart. That sign alone told me he was a scholar, one of those whom rich men commonly hate. I asked what he was; he answered, ‘A poet.’ I then asked why he was so ragged. He told me that this kind of learning had never made anyone rich.”

He who trusts the sea raises himself on great returns; He who seeks battles and the public platform is girded with gold. The worthless flatterer lies drunk in embroidered purple; Eloquence alone shivers in frost-covered rags.

A merchant earns great profits at sea; A soldier is covered in gold. A flatterer lies drunk in splendid clothes; Only a scholar is ragged to behold.

Our ordinary university students see all this very clearly: how unprofitable poetic, mathematical and philosophical studies are, how little respect they receive, how few patrons they have. They hasten into the three lucrative professions of law, medicine and divinity, dividing themselves among them. Meanwhile they reject these other arts—history, philosophy, philology—or pass lightly over them as amusing trifles fit only for table talk and material for conversation.