With time the fable grows and the truth grows less; from
this it comes that all the origins of peoples are absurd. Thus the
Egyptians had been governed by the gods for many centuries; then they
had been governed by demi-gods; finally they had had kings for eleven
thousand three hundred and forty years; and in that space of time the
sun had changed four times from east to west.
The Phoenicians of Alexander's time claimed to have been established
in their country for thirty thousand years; and these thirty thousand
years were filled with as many prodigies as the Egyptian chronology. I
avow that physically it is very possible that Phoenicia has existed
not merely thirty thousand years, but thirty thousand milliards of
centuries, and that it experienced like the rest of the world thirty
million revolutions. But we have no knowledge of it.
One knows what a ridiculously marvellous state of affairs ruled in the
ancient history of the Greeks.
The Romans, for all that they were serious, did not any the less envelop
the history of their early centuries in fables. This nation, so recent
compared with the Asiatic peoples, was five hundred years without
historians. It is not surprising, therefore, that Romulus was the son of
Mars, that a she-wolf was his foster mother, that he marched with a
thousand men of his village of Rome against twenty-five thousand
combatants of the village of the Sabines: that later he became a god;
that Tarquin, the ancient, cut a stone with a razor, and that a vestal
drew a ship to land with her girdle, etc.
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