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