Note 534 — GRECIAN WRITERS.

It may appear ungracious, and I am sure it is far from a pleasing task to point out blemishes in a people of so refined a turn as the Grecians, whose ingenuity and elegance have been admired for ages. Nor would I engage in a display of this kind, were it not necessary to shew their prejudices and mistakes, in order to remedy their failures. On our part we have been too much accustomed to take in the gross with little or no examination, whatever they have been pleased to transmit: and there is no method of discovering the truth but by shewing wherein they failed, and pointing out the mode of error, the line of deviation. By unravelling the clue, we may be at last led to see things in their original state, and to reduce their mythology to order. That my censures are not groundless, nor carried to an undue degree of severity, may be proved from the like accusations from some of their best writers; who accuse them both of ignorance and forgery. [534]Hecatæus, of Miletus, acknowledges, that the traditions of the Greeks were as ridiculous as they were numerous: [535]and Philo confesses that he could obtain little intelligence from that quarter: that the Grecians had brought a mist upon learning, so that it was impossible to discover the truth: he therefore applied to people of other countries for information, from whom only it could be obtained. Plato[536] owned that the most genuine helps to philosophy were borrowed from those who by the Greeks were styled barbarous: and [537]Jamblichus gives the true reason for the preference. The Helladians, says this writer, are ever wavering and unsettled in their principles, and are carried about by the least impulse. They want steadiness; and if they obtain any salutary knowledge, they cannot retain it; nay, they quit it with a kind of eagerness; and, whatever they do admit, they new mould and fashion, according to some novel and uncertain mode of reasoning. But people of other countries are more determinate in their principles, and abide more uniformly by the very terms which they have traditionally received. They are represented in the same light by Theophilus: [538]he says, that they wrote merely for empty praise, and were so blinded with vanity, that they neither discovered the truth theirselves, nor encouraged others to pursue it. Hence Tatianus says, with great truth, [539]that the writers of other countries were strangers to that vanity with which the Grecians were infected: that they were more simple and uniform, and did not encourage themselves in an affected variety of notions.