In the history of antiquity those are the sole incontestable
epochs that we have.
Let us give serious attention to these marbles brought back from Greece
by Lord Arundel. Their chronicle begins fifteen hundred and eighty-two
years before our era. That is to-day (1771) an antiquity of 3,353 years,
and you do not see there a single fact touching on the miraculous, on
the prodigious. It is the same with the Olympiads; it is not there that
one should say _Graecia mendax_, lying Greece. The Greeks knew very well
how to distinguish between history and fable, between real facts and the
tales of Herodotus: just as in their serious affairs their orators
borrowed nothing from the speeches of the sophists or from the images of
the poets.
The date of the taking of Troy is specified in these marbles; but no
mention is made of Apollo's arrows, or of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or
of the ridiculous combats of the gods. The date of the inventions of
Triptolemy and Ceres is found there; but Ceres is not called _goddess_.
Mention is made of a poem on the abduction of Prosperine; it is not said
that she is the daughter of Jupiter and a goddess, and that she is wife
of the god of the infernal regions.
Hercules is initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis; but not a word on
his twelve labours, nor on his passage into Africa in his cup, nor on
his divinity, nor on the big fish by which he was swallowed, and which
kept him in its belly three days and three nights, according to
Lycophron.
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