第16章 LETTER 3(6)

Speaking of the Massagetae in his eleventh book,he writes to this effect:that no author had given a true account of them,though several had written of the war that Cyrus waged against them;and that historians had found as little credit in what they had related concerning the affairs of the Persians,Medes,and Syrians:that this was due to their folly;for observing that those who wrote fables professedly were held in esteem,these men imagined they should render their writings more agreeable,if,under the appearance and pretence of true history,they related what they had neither seen nor heard from persons able to give them true information;and that accordingly their only aim had been to dress up pleasing and marvellous relations:that one may better give credit to Hesiod and Homer,when they talk of their heroes,nay,even to dramatic poets,than to Ctesias,Herodotus,Hellanicus,and their followers:that it is not safe to give credit even to the greatest part of the historians who wrote concerning Alexander;since they too,encouraged by the greater reputation of this conqueror,by the distance to which he carried his arms,and by the difficulty of disproving what they said of actions performed in regions so remote,were apt to deceive:that indeed when the Roman empire on one side,and the Parthian on the other,came to extend themselves,the truth of things grew to be better known.

You see,my lord,not only how late profane history began to be written by the Greeks,but how much later it began to be written with any regard to truth;and consequently what wretched materials the learned men,who arose after the age of Alexander,had to employ,when they attempted to form.systems of ancient history and chronology.We have some remains of that laborious compiler Diodorus Siculus,but do we find in him any thread of ancient history,I mean,that which passes for ancient in his time?what complaints,on the contrary,does he not make of former historians?how frankly does he confess the little and uncertain light he had to follow in his researches?Yet Diodorus,as well as Plutarch,and others,had not only the older Greek historians,but the more modern antiquaries,who pretended to have searched into the records and registers of nations,even at that time renowned for their antiquity.

Berosus,for instance,and Manetho,one a Babylonian and the other an Egyptian priest,had published the antiquities of their countries in the time of the Ptolemys.Berosus pretended to give the history of four hundred and eighty years.Pliny,if I remember right,for I say this on memory,speaks to this effect in the sixth book of his Natural History:and if it was so,these years were probably years of Nabonassar.Manetho began his history,God knows when,from the progress of Isis,or some other as well ascertained period.

He followed the Egyptian tradition of dynastics of gods and demi-gods;and derived his anecdotes from the first Mercury,who had inscribed them in sacred characters,on antediluvian pillars,antediluvian at least according to our received chronology,from which the second Mercury had transcribed them,and inserted them into his works.We have not these antiquities;for the monk of Viterbo was soon detected:and if we had them,they would either add to our uncertainty,and increase the chaos of learning,or tell us nothing worth our knowledge.For thus I reason.Had they given particular and historical accounts conformable to the ures of the Jews,Josephus,Julius Africanus,and Eusebius would have made quite other extracts from their writings,and would have altered and contradicted them less.The accounts they give,therefore,were repugnant to sacred writ,or they were defective:they would have established Pyrrhonism,or have balked our curiosity.

II.Of Sacred History What memorials therefore remain to give us light into the originals of ancient nations,and the history of those ages,we commonly call the first ages?The Bible,it will be said;that is,the historical part of it in the Old Testament.But,my lord,even these divine books must be reputed insufficient to the purpose,by every candid and impartial man who considers either their authority as histories,or the matter they contain.For what are they?and how come they to us?At the time when Alexander carried his arms into Asia,a people of Syria,till then unknown,became known to the Greeks:this people had been slaves to the Egyptians,Assyrians,Medes,and Persians,as the several empires prevailed:ten parts in twelve of them had been transplanted by ancient conquerors,and melted down and lost in the east,several ages before the establishment of the empire that Alexander destroyed:the other two parts had been carried captive to Babylon a little before the same era.