The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

tell me with the same phlegmatic air that the Greeks of the time of Homer knew neither how to read nor how to write; that this poet himself, assuming that he really existed, did not know the letters of the alphabet"; but that his existence is a fancy,* and that the works attributed to him are the crude productions of certain plagiarist rhapsodists.' Further on I see, to complete the singularity, a research worker who finds, doubtless to the support of all this, that the first editor of the poems of Homer, the virile legislator of Sparta, Lycurgus in short, was a man ignorant and unlettered, knowing neither how to read nor write'': quite an original idea and a comparison wholly bizarre, between the author and the editor of the Iliad ! But this is nothing; Here is an archbishop of Thessalonica, who, animated by a righteous indignation, declared that Homer may have been an instrument of the devil,' and that one may be damned in reading him. That one shrugs the shoulders at the allegories of this poet, that one finds them not in the least interesting, that one falls asleep even, let all that pass; but to be damned ! I have said that Bacon, drawn along unfortunately by that fatal prejudice which makes one judge without understanding, had calumniated the philosophy of the Greeks; his numerous disciples have even surpassed him upon this point. Condillac, the coryphSe of modern empiricism, has seen in Plato only delirious metaphysics unworthy of occupying his time, and in Zeno only logic deprived of reasoning and principles. I would that Condillac, so great an amateur of analysis, had endeavoured to analyse the metaphysics of the one and the logic of the other, the modem sculptors would have said that the ancients failed as much in pattern as in colouring.

o Wood, Essai sur le Ginie orig. d'Homire, p. 220.

* Bryant, cit6 par Desalles, Hist. d'Homire, p. 18.

" Wolf et Klotz, cit6s par le mâne. lUd., p. 36 et 117.

<* Paw, Recherches sur les Grecs, t. ii., p. 355.

' C'est un certain Gr^goire, cit6 par Leo AUazi,} dans son Livre de Patrid Homeri. Voltaire, Diet, philos., art. Epopee.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 191

to prove to me that he understood at least what he found so unworthy of taking up his time; but that was the thing about which he thought the least. Open whatever book you will; if the authors are theologians, they will say to you that Socrates, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Kong-Tse or Confucius, as they call him, are pagans," whose damnation is, if not certain, at least very probable; they will treat their theosophy with the most profound contempt : if they are physicists, they will assure you that Thales, Leucippus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Aristotle, and the others are miserable dreamers ; they will jeer at their systems : if they are astronomers, they will laugh at their astronomy : if they are naturalists, chemists, botanists, they will make jest of their methods, and will take into consideration their credulity, their stupidity, their bad faith, the numerous wonders that they no longer understand in Aristotle and in Pliny. None will take the trouble to prove their assertions; but, like people blinded by passion and ignorance, they state as fact what is in question, or putting their own ideas in place of those that they do not understand they will create phantoms for the sake of fighting them. Never going back to the principles of anything, stopping only at forms, adopting without examination the commonest notions, they will commit on all sides the same mistake that

" The name of Pagan is an injurious and ignoble term derived from the Latin Paganus, which signifies a rustic, a. peasant. When Christianity had •entirely triumphed over Greek and Roman poljrtheism, and when by the order of the Emperor Theodosius, the last temple dedicated to the gods of the nations had been destroyed in the cities, it was found that the people in the country still persisted a considerable time in the ancient cult, which caused them and all their imitators to be called derisively Pagans. This appellation, which could suit the Greeks and Romans in the fifth century who refused to submit to the dominating religion in the Empire, is false and ridiculous when one extends it to other times, and to other peoples. It cannot be said without at once offending chronology and common sense, that the Romans or Greeks of the time of Cassar, of Alexander, or of Pericles; the Persians, Arabs, Egyptians, Indians, the Chinese, ancient or modem, were Pagans; that is to say, peasants disobedient to the laws of Theodosius. These are poljrtheists, monotheists, mythologists, whatever one wishes, idolators perhaps, but not Pagans.

192 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras they have committed with respect to the genethliatical science, the principles of which I have shown in my last Examination; and confounding this science of the ancients with the astrology of the moderns, they will consider in the same light Tiresias and Nostradamus, and will see no difference between the oracle of Ammon, or of Delphi, and the lucky chance of the most paltry fortune-teller.