INDEX OF THE FABLES OF ANCIENT WISDOM CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK. 1. CASSANDRA, or Plainness 17. CUPID, or the Atom. of Speech. 2. TYPHON, or the Rebel. 4. NARCISSUS, or Self-love. 6. PAN, or Nature. 7. PERSEUS, or War. 8. ENDYMION, or the Favour ite. 18. DIOMEDES, or Zeal. 19. DEDALUS, or the Mechanic. 20. ERICTHONIUS, or Impos ture. 21. DEUCALION, or Restoration. 22. NEMESIS, or the Vicissitude of Things. 23. ACHELOUS, or the Battle. 24. DIONYSUS, or Desire. 9. THE SISTER OF THE GI- 25. ATALANTA, or Profit. PREFACE. THE most ancient times (except what is preserved of them in the scriptures) are buried in oblivion and silence to that silence succeeded the fables of the poets to those fables the written records which have come down to us. Thus between the hidden depths of antiquity and the days of tradition and evidence that followed there is drawn a veil, as it were, of fables, which come in and occupy the middle region that separates what has perished from what survives. Now I suppose most people will think I am but entertaining myself with a toy, and using much the same kind of licence in expounding the poets' fables which the poets themselves did in inventing them ; and it is true that if I had a mind to vary and relieve my severer studies with some such exercise of pleasure for my own or my reader's recreation, I might very fairly indulge in it. But that is not my meaning. Not but that I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it. Neither have I forgotten that there has been old abuse of the thing in practice; that many, wishing only to gain the sanction and rev erence of antiquity for doctrines and inventions of their own, have tried to twist the fables of the poets into that sense; and that this is neither a modern vanity nor a rare one, but old of standing and frequent in use; that Chrysippus long ago, interpreting the oldest poets after the manner of an interpreter of dreams, made them out to be Stoics; and that the Alchemists more absurdly still have discovered in the pleasant and sportive fictions of the transformation of bodies, allusion to experiments of the furnace. All this I have duly examined and weighed; as well as all the levity and looseness with which people indulge their fancy in the matter of allegories; yet for all this I cannot change my mind. For in the first place to let the follies and licence of a few detract from the honour of parables in general is not to be allowed; being indeed a boldness savouring of profanity; seeing that religion delights in such veils and shadows, and to take them away would be almost to interdict all communion between divinity and humanity. But passing that and speaking of human wisdom only, I do certainly for my own part (I freely and candidly confess) incline to this opinion, that beneath no small number of the fables of the ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and an alle(gory. It may be that my reverence for the primitive time carries me too far, but the truth is that in some of these fables, as well in the very frame and texture of the story as in the propriety of the names by which the persons that figure in it are distinguished, I find a conformity and connexion with the thing signified, so close and so evident, that one cannot help believing such a signification to have been designed and med itated from the first, and purposely shadowed out. For who is there so impenetrable and that can SO shut his eyes to a plain thing, but when he is told that after the Giants were put down, Fame sprang up as their posthumous sister, he will at once see that it is meant of those murmurs of parties and seditious rumours which always circulate for a time after the suppression of a rebellion? Or again who can hear that the Giant Typhon cut off and carried away Jupiter's sinews, and that Mercury stole them from Typhon and gave them back to Jupiter; without at once perceiving that it relates to successful rebellions, by which kings have their sinews both of money and authority cut off; yet not so but that by fair words and wise edicts the minds of the subjects may be presently reconciled, and as it were stolen back, and so kings recover their strength? Or who can hear that in that memorable expedition of the gods against the giants the braying of Silenus's ass had a principal stroke in putting the giants to flight, and not be sure that the incident was invented in allusion to the vast attempts of rebels, dissipated as they commonly are by empty rumours and vain terrors? Then again there is a conformity and significancy in the very names, which must be clear to everybody. Metis, Jupiter's wife, plainly means counsel; Typhon, swelling; Pan, the universe; Nemesis, revenge; and the like. And what if we find here and there a bit of real history underneath, or some things added only for ornament, or times confounded, or part of one fable transferred to another and a new allegory introduced? Such things could not but occur in stories invented (as these were) by men who both lived in |