Heavy hyperboreans denounce thy servants
as frivolous.... A formidable _Panbaeotia_, a league of fools, weighs
down upon the world with a pall of lead. Thou must fain despise even
those who pay thee worship. Dost thou remember the Caledonian who half
a century ago broke up thy temple with a hammer to carry it away with
him to Thule? He is no worse than the rest.... I wrote in accordance
with some of the rules which thou lovest, O Theonoe, the life of the
young god whom I served in my childhood, and for this they beat me
like a Euhemerus and wonder what my motives can be, believing only in
those things which enrich their trapezite tables. And why do we write
the lives of the gods if it is not to make the reader love what is
divine in them, and to show that this divine past yet lives and will
ever live in the heart of humanity?
"Dost thou remember the day when, Dionysodorus being archon, an ugly
little Jew, speaking the Greek of the Syrians, came hither,
passed beneath thy porch without understanding thee, misread thy
inscriptions, and imagined that he had discovered within thy walls an
altar dedicated to what he called the Unknown God? Well, this little
Jew was believed; for a thousand years thou hast been treated as an
idol, O Truth! for a thousand years the world has been a desert
in which no flower bloomed. And all this time thou wert silent, O
Salpinx, clarion of thought. Goddess of order, image of celestial
stability, those who loved thee were regarded, as culprits, and now,
when by force of conscientious labour we have succeeded in drawing
near to thee, we are accused of committing a crime against human
intelligence because we have burst the chains which Plato knew not.
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