I am addressing men who are too enlightened to ignore what the ancients have said in this respect. Heraclides, whom I have already cited, is not the only one who has given this impression. Strabo assures positively that ancient poetry was only the language of allegory,[1] and he refutes Eratosthenes who pretended that the aim of Homer was only to amuse and please. In this he is in accord with Denys of Halicarnassus who avows that the mysteries of nature and the most sublime conceptions of morals have been covered with the veil of allegory.[2] Phurnutus goes farther: he declares that the allegories used by Hesiod and by Homer do not differ from those which other foreign poets have used before them.[3] Damascius said as much of the poems of Orpheus,[4] and Plutarch confirms it in a passage which has been preserved to us by Eusebius.[5]
In the first ages of Greece, poetry, consecrated to the service of the altars, left the enclosures of the temples only for the instruction of the people: it was as a sacred language in which the priests, entrusted with presiding at the mysteries of religion, interpreted the will of the gods. The oracles, dogmas, moral precepts, religious and civil laws, teachings of all sorts concerning the labours of the body, the operations of the mind, in fact all that which was regarded as an emanation, an order, or a favour from the Divinity, all was written in verse. To this sacred language was given the name Poetry, that is to say, the Language of the Gods: a symbolic name which accords with it perfectly, since it expressed at the same time its origin and its usage.[6] It was said to have come from Thrace,[7] and the one who had invented it and caused its first accents to be heard was,
- ↑ Geogr., l. i.
- ↑ Antiq. rom., l. ii.
- ↑ In his book entitled (
Greek characters) ch. 17.],
- ↑ In his book entitled (Greek characters) ch. 3. Court de Gébelin cites these works. (Génie allég.)
- ↑ Præp. Evang., l. iii., c. 1.
- ↑ Court de Gébelin, Génie allég., p. 149.
- ↑ Strabo positively assures it. See Bannier, Mythol., ii., p. 252.
