70 ON THE DATE AND ORIGIN 
the age, in which it is certain that letters had their origin. Our 
veneration for antiquity should be moderated by our desire for truth, 
and we should avail ourselves freely of the well-founded doubts 
with which chronology* anterior to and for some time after the first 
Olympiad* is everywhere obscured. 
Our perplexity, which, on chronological® distrust alone, is suffi- 
vernacular languages of Europe. The crest of Sinai, hallowed by the presence 
of the real Jehovah, was defiled by one foot (the impression is still visible to 
the credulous eye of the Musselman) of the mighty camel which transported 
the apostle of God to the seventh or tenth heaven, into the presence of an 
ideal deity. Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo in Egypt, have claimed the re- 
maining three feet of that veritable beast, whose incarnation was of five or six 
hundred miles by geographical inference, and whose bulk, impelled on dusky 
vanes, must have eclipsed the orb of day. “ The medley of pagan idolatry 
and fabulous superstition,” (Zncy. Brit. art. Confucius) “of the Chinese, the 
mortal-infant-god Lama of Thibet” (ibid. see Lama), “and the unparalleled 
legends of the christian monks of the dark ages of modern Europe, all (not to 
accumulate instances) justify our distrust in the written documents of early 
authors. We cannot, however, pass over the congregations of Ida and 
Olympus, which, though they might exercise a salutary influence over the 
uneducated mob of Greece, must have excited the aversion and contempt of 
her philosophers. The pious of later ages receive with a smile or reject with 
disdain the theologies of Homer and Hesiod. 
a “Tf we admit the common chronology,” says the eloquent and luminous 
historian of Greece, Dr. Gillies, “ there is reason to believe that the scattered 
fragments of Grecian history were preserved, during thirteen centuries, by 
oral tradition.”—(Vol. i. 8vo, note 3). Again, “ All this,” say the writers of 
the Encyclopedia Britannica, after having summed up the causes that perplex 
historic chronology, “has thrown so much obscurity over chronology, that 
it appears to be beyond all human capacity to disperse it.” (art. Chronology.) 
5 The date of the first Olympiad is a matter of discussion amongst the 
learned, and Sir Isaac Newton, in common with many other eminent men, has 
dispensed with the first twenty-eight Olympiads, ora period of 112 years, and 
dates his first 776 years B.c. But even this date must rest during 250 years 
on tradition, if we attach credit to Pliny—Nat. Hist. v. cap. 29—that alpha- 
betic writing commencedwe suppose in Greece) about six centuries before 
Augustus. 
6 “The first prose writers, or more properly the first writers, were Phere- 
cides of Syros, Acusilaus of Argos, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Hecatzeus, and Di- 
onynus, both of Miletus, the last of whom flourished in the 65th Olympiad, 
or 520 years before Christ.”—Gillies, ibid. That the history of the Trojan 
adventures and heroes, which occupied the attention of mankind till the 
period of the above-mentioned authors, was traditional, and consequently in- 
authentic, is to be concluded from the following remarks of Heyne, in his 
learned Excursus ad Aineidos librum secundum :—“ Aliquamdiu res Trojanze 
communi aliqua inter scriptores consensu erant traditee, prout ab Homero et 
poetis cyclicis, ex majorum fama ac narratione hoc est poeticad fuerant exposi- 
te.” Here, then, the fountain of all this history is admitted to be tradi- 
