Strenuous devotion to the deliverance of mankind from dangers and pests is the " virtue " which, in Prodicus' famous apologue on the Choice of Hercules, the hero preferred to an easy and happy life.
Sir Walter Scott's judgment that the Buke is "a poetical apologue.
In Blanquerna (1283), a novel which describes a new Utopia, Lull renews the Platonic tradition and anticipates the methods of Sir Thomas More, Campanella and Harrington, and in the Libre de Maravelles (1286) he adopts the Oriental apologue from Kalilah and Dimnah.
Indeed, we have evidence of sound, if conventional, principle in Prodicus's apologue of the " Choice of Heracles," and of honourable, though eccentric, practice in the story of Protagoras's treatment of defaulting pupils.