So in the fable that Achilles was brought up
under Chiron, the centaur, who was part a man and part a beast,
expounded ingeniously but corruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth
to the education and discipline of princes to know as well how to
play the part of a lion in violence, and the fox in guile, as of the
man in virtue and justice. Nevertheless, in many the like
encounters, I do rather think that the fable was first, and the
exposition devised, than that the moral was first, and thereupon the
fable framed; for I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus,
that troubled himself with great contention to fasten the assertions
of the Stoics upon the fictions of the ancient poets; but yet that
all the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure and not
figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely of these poets which are now
extant, even Homer himself (notwithstanding he was made a kind of
scripture by the later schools of the Grecians), yet I should
without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no such
inwardness in his own meaning.
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