Rights in God's Church
Appendix 2. (639).
These historians [who describe the very early history of individual nations] deal with the second cycle of human activity which begins with human degradation and rises to a certain cultural, moral and civil level. A description of the state of extreme barbarism from which these historians set out to follow mankind on its journey (and often overtake it in their imagination) may be found in Homer's passage on the Cyclops, in Euripides (Cyclops), in Cicero (De Inventione, bk. 1; and Pro Sextio), in Diodorus of Sicily (bk. 1, cc. 8, 43), in Lucretius (bk. 5), Horace (Serm., bk. 1, Satyr. 3, and in The Poetic Art), in Manilius (bk. 1), and others. - Historians dealing with the first cycle, which begins with the good state of mankind and follows its successive degradation, are not to be found amongst the Greeks and the Romans. For this, we have to go to the East. Nevertheless, Greeks and Romans did possess confused traces of such ancient traditions in t heir descriptions of the golden age, and of the gods and heroes who preceded mere human beings on earth (cf. Lucretius, bk. 6; Virgil, Georgics, 2; Ovid, Metamorph., 1; Oppianus, Halieut. bk. 2, v. 16 ss.). There is a particularly notable passage in Plato's Timaeus. The author says that the oldest recollections of the fires, volcanic eruptions and floods that swept over Greece had been lost. Greek histories were not very ancient, according to Plato, who mentions Solon's journey to Egypt and recounts what this legislator had heard from priests there:
| He said that he had asked the priests, who were all highly skilled in the matter, about the records of ancient times. He soon found that neither he nor any of the Greeks had the least knowledge of antiquity. Once he was amongst these priests and, by speaking about the ancient events of Athens, of the first Phoroneus, and of Niobe, as well as the flood which covered the world, of Pyrrha and of Deucalion and their posterity and the times in which each of these events took place, provoked them into talking about what interested them. At this point one of the oldest of them said: `Solon, Solon, are you Greeks forever children? Is there not a single ancient in Greece?' When Solon asked him why he said this, the priest replied: `Because your spirit is always young. You have received no ancient opinion from remote tradition, you have no grey-haired knowledge. This has happened because of the many different ways in which people have been and will be exterminated. Fire and flood have been t he worst evils; but there have been many lesser ones. You have a story about Phaethon, the son of the Sun who mounted his father's chariot but was unable to follow his direction. Phaethon burnt up the earth and himself in the heavenly flames. Now although this seems only a story, there is a sense in which it is true. In fact, after a long period of time, the course of the heavens begins to decline and a conflagration bursts out. People who live on the heights where it is dry perish in far greater numbers than those who live near the sea and rivers. Now the Nile, which is useful to us in many ways also keeps away from us the plague of fire. Again when the gods of the waters wash away the dust of the earth under the great rains, the guardians who tend flocks of sheep and oxen on the high pastures escape this danger. But, your cities, lying in the plain, are dragged into the sea by the force of the rivers. In our region, water never comes and never has come from on high. It rises up from the bowels of the earth...' |
He goes on in this way to explain how memories of ancient times are preserved in Egypt and lost in Greece.