Oration to the Greeks 35

I have set out these things not from hearsay but from what I learned myself, having traveled over much of the earth. I taught your learning as a sophist, I came across many arts and ideas, and finally I stayed in the city of the Romans and studied the many kinds of statues brought there from your lands. For I do not try, as many do, to strengthen my own views with other people's opinions; I wish to set down a record of what I have myself come to understand about everything I am going to reject. So, having said goodbye both to the arrogance of the Romans and to the frigid talk of the Athenians, incoherent teachings as they are, I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy. I had begun to write how it is older than your pursuits, but put this aside because of the more urgent explanation; now that the time has come, I will try to speak about its teachings. Do not be annoyed at our instruction, and do not work up a rebuttal against us full of nonsense and buffoonery, saying, “Tatian, setting himself above the Greeks and above the countless multitude of philosophers, is bringing in the novel teachings of barbarians.” For what is so hard about people who have shown themselves ignorant being refuted now by a man with the same nature as theirs? And what is absurd, as your own sage says, about growing old while always learning everything?