Against Apion | Page 4

ourselves nor other men; for I am convinced that the very reverse is the truth of the case.
I mean this, - if we will not be led by vain opinions, but will make inquiry after truth
from facts themselves; for they will find that almost all which concerns the Greeks
happened not long ago; nay, one may say, is of yesterday only. I speak of the building of
their cities, the inventions of their arts, and the description of their laws; and as for their
care about the writing down of their histories, it is very near the last thing they set about.
However, they acknowledge themselves so far, that they were the Egyptians, the
Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians (for I will not now reckon ourselves among them) that
have preserved the memorials of the most ancient and most lasting traditions of mankind;

for almost all these nations inhabit such countries as are least subject to destruction from
the world about them; and these also have taken especial care to have nothing omitted of
what was [remarkably] done among them; but their history was esteemed sacred, and put
into public tables, as written by men of the greatest wisdom they had among them. But as
for the place where the Grecians inhabit, ten thousand destructions have overtaken it, and
blotted out the memory of former actions; so that they were ever beginning a new way of
living, and supposed that every one of them was the origin of their new state. It was also
late, and with difficulty, that they came to know the letters they now use; for those who
would advance their use of these letters to the greatest antiquity pretend that they learned
them from the Phoenicians and from Cadmus; yet is nobody able to demonstrate that they
have any writing preserved from that time, neither in their temples, nor in any other
public monuments. This appears, because the time when those lived who went to the
Trojan war, so many years afterward, is in great doubt, and great inquiry is made,
whether the Greeks used their letters at that time; and the most prevailing opinion, and
that nearest the truth, is, that their present way of using those letters was unknown at that
time. However, there is not any writing which the Greeks agree to he genuine among
them ancienter than Homer's Poems, who must plainly he confessed later than the siege
of Troy; nay, the report goes, that even he did not leave his poems in writing, but that
their memory was preserved in songs, and they were put together afterward, and that this
is the reason of such a number of variations as are found in them. (3) As for those who set
themselves about writing their histories, I mean such as Cadmus of Miletus, and
Acusilaus of Argos, and any others that may be mentioned as succeeding Acusilaus, they
lived but a little while before the Persian expedition into Greece. But then for those that
first introduced philosophy, and the consideration of things celestial and divine among
them, such as Pherceydes the Syrian, and Pythagoras, and Thales, all with one consent
agree, that they learned what they knew of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, and wrote but
little And these are the things which are supposed to be the oldest of all among the
Greeks; and they have much ado to believe that the writings ascribed to those men are
genuine.
3. How can it then be other than an absurd thing, for the Greeks to be so proud, and to
vaunt themselves to be the only people that are acquainted with antiquity, and that have
delivered the true accounts of those early times after an accurate manner? Nay, who is
there that cannot easily gather from the Greek writers themselves, that they knew but
little on any good foundation when they set to write, but rather wrote their histories from
their own conjectures? Accordingly, they confute one another in their own books to
purpose, and are not ashamed. to give us the most contradictory accounts of the same
things; and I should spend my time to little purpose, if I should pretend to teach the
Greeks that which they know better than I already, what a great disagreement there is
between Hellanicus and Acusilaus about their genealogies; in how many eases Acusilaus
corrects Hesiod: or after what manner Ephorus demonstrates Hellanicus to have told lies
in the greatest part of his history; as does Timeus in like manner as to Ephorus, and the
succeeding writers do to Timeus, and all the later writers do to Herodotus (3) nor could
Timeus agree with Antiochus and Philistius, or with Callias, about the Sicilian History,
no more than do the several writers of the Athide follow