Dio Cocceianus, also known as Chrysostom, "goldvoice", was born in Prusa in Bithynia (modern Bursa in Turkey) and lived c. 40 – 112 CE. He was a Greek politician, philosopher, rhetorician, and sophist. Like Ovid, he found himself banished from Rome for a period, and during his exile also made his way to some of the most remote regions of the Greek and Roman world in the northern Black Sea colonies where he perhaps encountered Scythians, Sarmatians, and Getae about whom he wrote a lost history. His extensive body of remaining works include a series of some 80 discourses covering a range of subjects.
I’ve chosen the quote below from the Borysthenitic Discourse, not because of its relevance to the Scythians or Sarmatians, but because of its relevance to writers and literature generally. We’re all merely “attendants of the Muses.” Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional.
For the chances are, indeed, that poets as a class are not utterly bad marksmen when they speak of sacred things and that they are not missing the mark when they use such expressions as that repeatedly; on the other hand, it is not likely that they have received a real initiation according to the rites and regulations of true initiates, or that with reference to the universe they know anything, if I may say so, which is true and clear. But we may think of them as merely like the attendants at the rites, who stand outside at the doors, decking portals and the altars which are in full view and attending to the other preparations of that kind but never passing within. Indeed that is the very reason why the poets call themselves 'attendants of the Muses,' not initiates or any other august name. So, as I was saying, it is reasonable to suppose that not only do those who busy themselves near some ritual, hard by the entrance to the sanctuary, gain some inkling of what is going on within, when either a lone mystic phrase rings out loudly, or fire appears above the enclosure, but also that there comes sometimes to the poets—I mean the very ancient poets—some utterance from the Muses, however brief, some inspiration of divine nature and of divine truth, like a flash of fire from the invisible. This is what happened to Homer and Hesiod when they were possessed by the Muses. But the poets who came after them in later days, bringing to stage and theatre naught but their own wisdom, uninitiate addressing uninitiate, have ofttimes disclosed imperfect patterns of holy rites; but, being applauded by the multitude, they tried in their own right to initiate the mob, actually, as we might say, building open booths for Bacchic rites at tragic crossroads.
—Dio Chrysostom, Borysthenitic Discourse
Discourses 31-36, Loeb Classical Library,
Translated by J.W. Cohoon, H. Lamar Crosby,
Harvard University Press, 1940
Pg 451, 453
For Dio’s complete Borysthenitic Discourse
For more of Dio’s fascinating discourses, start here