Part 4

LVIII. Dionysius the first, of Sicily, is stigmatized for one of the most merciless tyrants the world ever knew; insomuch that we never hear his name mentioned without the addition of the epithet Tyrant. Notwithstanding this, there is room to doubt whether he was deserving of this treatment. The historian Philistus, who applauds and defends him, is known to have wrote his history while he was in a state of banishment from Syracuse, his own country, into which he had been sent by this very Dionysius; which is a circumstance that ought to weigh with all those that don’t reason like Pausanias and Plutarch, who say he flattered Dionysius, in hopes of being recalled from his banishment. But this is pure conjecture, and cannot alter the fact; which is, that while he lived out of his dominions, and had cause to be dissatisfied with him, he praised him. The case of Thucydides with Pericles was similar to this; and no one scruples to regard as sincere the commendations which Thucydides gives of that leader, or doubts the justness of the applause the author bestows on his virtue at a time when he was banished from Athens, and persecuted by that same Pericles.

SECT. XXV.

_Apelles and Campaspe._

LIX. It is told, that when Apelles was painting the picture of Campaspe, the beautiful concubine of Alexander, naked, which he was ordered to do by that prince; he, while he was employed in executing the task, fell violently in love with the object of his pencil; of which Alexander being informed, manifested a piece of generosity and liberality, which had scarce ever been heard of before, in ceding Campaspe to be possessed by Apelles. Thus Pliny and Ælian relate the thing; but this seems improbable and incompatible with what Plutarch says, who tells us, that the first woman with whom Alexander began to be incontinent, was Barsene, the beautiful widow of Memnon; and, upon a critical examination of things, we shall find the account of Apelles with Campaspe prior to the amour of Alexander with Barsene.

SECT. XXVI.

_Sextus, Tarquin, and Lucretia._

LX. Whenever the adventure of Sextus the son of Tarquin, with the beautiful Lucretia, is talked of, people generally suppose that insult was perpetrated by means of immediate and rigorous violence; which is a circumstance that would greatly have aggravated the crime of the invader, and have apologized for the innocence and virtue of that generous Roman lady. But the thing, as Titus Livius and Dionysius Halicarnassus relate it, happened in the following manner. Sextus, in the dead of night, came to the bed-side of Lucretia, with a drawn sword in his hand, and after waking her intimated to her, first of all, that she should be quiet and not make a noise, for that, upon the first shriek she gave, he would plunge the sword into her bosom. To this intimation succeeded intreaties; and to the intreaties promises; which he carried so far, according to one of the before-named authors, as to assure her, that upon her condescending, he would make her his queen. When Sextus found that neither promises nor intreaties would avail, he proceeded to threatenings. He told her he would instantly put her to death, if she did not comply with his desires. This was not capable of vanquishing the constancy of Lucretia; and finally perceiving all other stratagems useless, the cunning youth had recourse to one of signal force and efficacy; which was, trying to overcome honour with honour; for this, like a diamond, resists the impression of all other entities, and can only be wrought or penetrated by those of its own species. He intimated to Lucretia, that, if she did not consent, he would not only murder her, but would put to death a slave also, whose dead body he would lay by the side of hers in her own bed; so that when day-light came, and they should be found thus lying together, she would be exposed to the public disgrace of having been an adultress with so vile a person. Lucretia had not fortitude to resist this last attack, but surrendered her honour to escape infamy; for which criminal condescension, she afterwards punished herself with excessive rigour, by taking away her own life.

SECT. XXVII.

_The Burning Glasses of Archimedes and Proclus._

LXI. The artifice, by which we are told Archimedes burnt the Roman ships, which, under the command of Marcellus, were employed in the siege of Syracuse, has been plausibly represented by historians; and has exercised the ingenuity of not a few _mathematicians_, to find out how this could have been effected. It is said, Archimedes did it by concentrating the rays of the sun in the focus of a large burning glass, and reflecting them on the ships. I judge, that this narration, although so much vulgarized in authors, is fabulous; and my reason for being of this opinion is, that none of the antients who treat of the siege of Syracuse relate any such circumstance; nor does there appear the least mention of the burning-glasses of Archimedes, either in Polybius, Livy, Plutarch, Florus, Pliny, or Valerius Maximus: and it is very remarkable, that the three first of these authors, treat very largely and particularly of the machinations and contrivances which Archimedes made use of to destroy the Roman ships. How then is it credible, that they should all have been silent about the effect of the burning-glasses, if there had been any such things used?

The first author in whom we meet with this information is Galen; to whose testimony, besides his not being a historian by profession, and having wrote four hundred years after the siege of Syracuse, may be made another objection; which is, that he does not assert the thing positively, but only speaks of it in the general terms of its being so said.

LXII. Thus much for the fact; but, with regard to the possibility of executing the deed, the mathematicians who have disputed on the subject are of various opinions, some denying the possibility, and others affirming it. All the difficulty in the execution seems to depend upon the distance of the ships from the walls, which some suppose to have been so great, that it was next to impossible to make a burning-glass of such a size that the focus of it would have been capable of reaching them. It is proper to observe here, that the distance to which the focus or burning point may be extended, bears a certain proportion to the diameter of the glass. Some have fancied that they had found out a contrivance, by which the burning-glass might be made to set fire to a thing at any given distance; but the best mathematicians consider as chimerical, the infinite extension of the line of the focus; which being excluded, and the supposed distance the moderns allow to have been between the ships and the walls established, which, according to Father Kircher, who extends it the furthest, was thirty geometrical paces; it will hardly be found possible to have made a glass that was large enough to set the ships on fire. To obviate this difficulty, some have imagined they had recourse to the invention of many concave or parabolical glasses, which reflected the rays from one to the other. But I can’t help remarking on the mathematicians, who have treated of this matter, a great mistake, which they have been led into with regard to the supposed distance: for Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch, place the ships so near the walls, that the people on board them were capable of annoying the besieged with darts and other missive weapons tipped with iron; and Polybius goes so far as to say, that with ladders resting on the ships, the Romans could pass from them to the walls; and if this was the fact, there was no necessity to have recourse to a burning-glass of so large a size, that it was next to impossible to have made, in order to set fire to the ships. Thus it appears to me, that we may safely deny the fact in opposition to the generality of the historians; and affirm the possibility, in opposition to the common opinion of the mathematicians. _Vid. Buffon._

LXIII. It is said of a celebrated mathematician named Proclus, who lived in the reign of the emperor Anastasius, that he did the same with Archimedes, that is, with burning glasses, set fire to the ships with which count Vitalianus besieged Constantinople. The silence of all the authors with respect to this matter, who were prior to Zonaras, and who gave accounts of the war between Anastasius and Vitalianus, is an argument against the probability of it; for neither Evagrius the scholiast, who lived in the same century that war happened, which was the sixth, nor count Marcelinus, who flourished in the seventh, nor Cedrenus, who wrote in the eleventh, speak a word of Proclus or his burning-glasses. Zonaras, who lived in the twelfth, is the first who gives any relation of them, though he does not positively affirm the truth of it, but only tells us the story with an _it is so said_, or reported. I add to this, that count Marcelinus informs us count Vitalianus did not raise the siege of Constantinople because his fleet was destroyed, but because the emperor Anastasius solicited and procured the raising the siege, by means of a large sum of money, and other magnificent presents which he sent to count Vitalianus.

LXIV. I recollect also, that in a work called The Theatre of Human Life, we find Evagrius, and Paul the Deacon, quoted in favour of the story of the burning-glasses of Proclus; but neither in one or other of these authors is there the least mention of such glasses; from whence we may infer that these great compilations are exposed to great mistakes.

SECT. XXVIII.

_Communication of the Red Seas with the Mediterranean._

LXV. We read in various histories, that some princes endeavoured to make a communication between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, by means of a cut from the Red Sea to the Nile; but that, in the execution of the work, they met with such difficulties that were next to insuperable; the principal of which was the apprehension that the Red Sea being much higher than the Nile, its waters would inundate Egypt. In the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, in the year 1702, when they were examining the geographical map which Monsieur Boutier had made of Egypt, they examined this point also, and found that such an apprehension was chimerical: they push’d their enquiries further, and discovered, upon reading some antient historians, that there was great reason to conclude, that in the very remote ages there had been such a canal of communication.

SECT. XXIX.

_Pharamond, the Salique Law, and Twelve Peers of France._

LXVI. We have said before, that Charles Sorrel doubted the existence of Pharamond, whom the French consider as their first king. Mons. du Haillan does not go quite so great a length as this, but denies positively that that prince ever passed to the Gallic side of the Rhine. He denies likewise he instituted the Salique law; and holds as fabulous also the story of Charles the Great having been the institutor of the twelve peers of France.

SECT. XXX.

_The Sacred Oil of Rheims, and the French Fleurs de Lis._

LXVII. The fact of the singular glory resulting to the French monarchy and its kings on account at the coronation of Clodovicus, the oil with which he was consecrated, together with the fleurs de lis, having descended from Heaven, the first brought by a dove, and the second by an angel; I say the certainty of this fact is not so firmly established among the French themselves, as that some of their own authors do not entertain a doubt of it; because when they tell the story, they make use of the expressions, it is so said, it is so reported, and it is believed, &c. The silence of St. Gregory of Turene upon this head, who wrote so extensively upon miracles, and of whom some have remarked, that he was exceedingly credulous, is, with many people, a convincing proof that there never was such a prodigy. The silence of Paulus Emilius also on the matter, who was a noble and general historian of the affairs of France, is an argument, that he looked upon the story as fabulous; because if he had thought it probable, he would surely not have omitted to mention it.

SECT. XXXI.

_Origin of Salutation upon Sneezing._

LXVIII. Some fix the custom of saluting and praying for a blessing on those who sneeze, to have commenced in the reign of St. Gregory, in whose time Rome was visited with a melancholy pestilence, of which a sneeze was the fatal crisis, as immediately after that the patient died; and that the holy pontif ordained, that this salutation and blessing should be established as a remedy to avert the evil; and from thence this benediction and praying for the preservation of any one who sneezed came to be in use ever afterwards. This tradition, although generally received, is evidently fabulous. We are told by Aristotle, that in his time it was the common practice to bless people when they sneezed. In his Problems, sect. xxxiii. quæst. 7. and 9. he enquires into the cause of this custom, and accounts for it in the following manner: that sneezing is an indication that the head, which is the noblest and most sacred part of a man, is well disposed and in good order; on which account people reverence sneezing: _Perinde igitur, quasi bonæ indicium valetudinis partis optimæ, atque sacerimæ, sternutamentum adorant beneque augurantur._ This matter was treated of in the Academy Royal of Inscriptions, where they produced testimonies, that not only among the Greeks and Romans this was a common practice, but that the Spaniards upon their first discovery of the New World, found it established there also. Mons. Morin, a Member of that Academy, tells us, that the common tradition which at present prevails, with respect to the origin of these salutations, was produced by another fabulous tradition of much greater antiquity. This was that of the Rabbins, quoted in the Talmudic Lexicon of Buxtorf; which says, that God, at the beginning of the world, established it as a general law, that men should never sneeze more than once, and that immediately after it they should die; that things went uniformly on in this way, without varying in a single instance, till the days of the patriarch Jacob; who, in a second struggle he had with God, obtained the revocation of this law; and that all the princes of the world, upon being informed of this event, ordained, that their subjects in future, should accompany the act of sneezing with words of thanksgiving and prayers for health. Our tradition bears such an analogy to the rabbinical one, that although it is not quite so extravagant, it seems probable, that the first fable begat the second.

SECT. XXXII.

_Queen Brunequilda._

LXIX. Queen Brunequilda of France is execrated by nearly all sorts of authors as the worst woman the world ever knew. The wickednesses they attribute to her are innumerable and enormous; an unbridled lust, which attended her from her early youth till she attained the age of seventy-one; a furious ambition, to which she sacrificed all obligations, both human and divine; an outrageous cruelty, which sacrificed as victims to her resentment or ambition infinite numbers of innocent people, by poison or the dagger, and among them some of royal race. Who could imagine that any one would venture to stand up in defence of a woman, the relation of whose conduct has stained the page of all histories, which speak of her, with blood? Notwithstanding this, there appears an evidence on her behalf, whose testimony, if you give it the credit his merit and character intitle him to, will avert the force of the accusation, and cause it to vanish in smoke. This is the great Gregory, who, in two letters he wrote to that queen, covers her with eulogiums, and goes so far in one of them, as to congratulate the French nation upon the happiness of being governed by a queen, who was an illustrious pattern of all kinds of virtues: _Præ aliis gentibus gentem Francorum asserimus felicem, quæ sic bonis omnibus præditam meruit habere reginam._ (lib. 1. epist. 8.) It is proper to observe, that the date of these letters, is posterior some years to the perpetration of most of the iniquities with which Brunequilda is charged.

SECT. XXXIII.

_Mahomet._

LXX. It is so currently asserted by all our writers, that the false prophet Mahomet was of low extraction, that the truth of it has come to be believed in all Christian countries, as an historical dogma. But the Arabic authors unanimously agree, that he was descended from the Corasinan family, which was one of the most noble and ancient of Mecca. It is true, that these may be mistaken; but then they are the only people who could know any thing of the matter.

LXXI. On the other hand, Ludovicus Maraccius, an author of eminence, and one who was most learned in Mahometan affairs, in the Prologue to his Prodromus, or refutation of the Alcoran, sufficiently gives us to understand, that in our histories, there are many fables respecting that remarkable Imposture: he says, that the Mahometans laugh at the stories which some of our historians relate of Mahomet; and this judicious author adds, that this serves to confirm and make them stiff in their erroneous belief. I have no doubt but it has this effect, because it is natural to suppose it would beget an aversion in them towards Christians, and a distrust of all they affirm, even with regard to things appertaining to their own dogmas. Therefore those who think they do any service to religion, by relating all the ill things they can pick up of the enemies to it, without a sufficient examination into the truth of them, and especially of the chiefs or leaders of sects, are so far from accomplishing the end they wish to obtain, that thereby they do the cause they mean to serve a notable injury. What purpose, for example, would it answer, to tell a Lutheran, that the leader of his sect was the son of a devil incubate? it would answer no other, than that of irritating and persuading him of the truth of what his doctors had told him, viz. that we invent all kinds of fictions, which may conduce to serve the cause we defend. The same may be said of the sin of Sodomy imputed to John Calvin, if the accusation is not just, which is a point that I am sure I cannot determine; and likewise of all other imputations of this sort. I am very clear, that we should expose all the immoral practices of the founders of false religions, that would tend to render them infamous, provided we can maintain the truth of the allegations we bring against them; and many charges of this sort might be brought against some of them that could be supported, and especially against Luther. But in cases where nothing can be clearly made out, let us not mix the certain with the uncertain; and above all, let us avoid introducing the false.

LXXII. But to return to Mahomet, not only with regard to his birth, but even with respect to those circumstances of his life, which have no connection with, or tendency to clearing up the truth or falsehood of his doctrines, the European and Arabic authors are totally opposite in their accounts of him; and to such a degree do they differ, that Ludovicus Maraccius says, that both one and the other of them, when they are speaking of the same Mahomet, seem as if they were describing two distinct men. There is nothing more firmly established and more generally assented to among us, than that the monk Nestorianus Sergius was his tutor and principal counsellor; but, notwithstanding this, Maraccius thinks, that it was much more likely his master and director was some Jew: the probability of which conjecture, he founds in the many Talmudical and Rabbinical fables with which the Alcoran abounds. Neither is there any certainty in what is said of the tame dove, which was used to put its beak into his ear, and which he pretended was the archangel Gabriel. The history of Mahomet, as given us by Maraccius, the materials for writing which, he affirms, were extracted from the most chosen Arabian authors, sets forth, that the apparitions of the archangel Gabriel to Mahomet, were very frequent; but that he did not come in the shape of a dove, nor in any other form that was perceptible to other people; nor could the apparition be discerned by his wife Cadighe, although she had been often present with him, at the times in which he professed to have seen it. I also know, that Edward Pocock, a writer of great veracity, says, that he never met with the story of the dove in any Arabian author.

LXXIII. We have one, or rather two other fables to refute, with respect to Mahomet, that both relate to the place of his interment. The first says, that he was buried at Mecca; but this is an error, which is not accepted at present by any but the lowest of the vulgar; for it is generally known by other people, that he was interred at Medina, a city of Arabia Felix, distant from Mecca four days journey. The perigrinations of the Mahometans to Mecca, are made on account of their prophet having been born there, and also out of a regard they profess to have for a house in that city, which they say was built by Adam; and after the deluge, was rebuilt and inhabited by Abraham. The second fable, which may be termed a common error, is that of the body being suspended in the air in an iron chest, which is held up, and kept in equilibrio, by the magnetic power of some load-stones placed in the roof of the chapel where it remains. Edward Pocock says, the Mahometans are ready to burst their sides with laughter, when they hear any of us say these tales are firmly credited in the Mahometan countries. The truth is, that it is well known, from the testimony of many credible people who have been in those countries, that there is no such suspension of the body of Mahomet in the air; nor, according to good natural philosophy, is it possible that there should be any such thing; for the magnetic virtue being liable to alterations, the attractive power of the load-stones could not always continue to act with the same force, or in the same proportion; in consequence of which, the equilibrium could not be preserved. Father Cabeus tells us, that with a great deal of labour and difficulty, he accomplished the suspension of a needle between two load-stones, but that the suspension did not continue longer than the time in which you could repeat four hexameter verses, and that then it adhered to one of the load-stones. For this reason, we ought to esteem as fabulous, what some authors relate of an Image of the Sun, which was made of iron, and which remained suspended by load-stones in the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria.

SECT. XXXIV.

_Kings of France, of the Merovingian Line._