The Battle of the Books; with selections from the literature of the Phalaris controversy/Appendix 5
DR. BENTLEY'S DISSERTATIONS ON THE
EPISTLES OF PHALARIS,
AND THE FABLES OF ÆSOP,
EXAMIN'D BY THE HONOURABLE
CHARLES BOYLE, ESQ.
[1698]
[pp. 2–10]
About four or five years ago, the worthy Dean of Christ Church, Dr Aldrich, of whose College I was then a member, desired me to undertake an edition of Phalaris. I could deny him nothing to whom I owed so much, and therefore, as unfit as I thought myself for such a task, I undertook it. In order to it, a manuscript Phalaris in the King's Library was to be consulted. It was of no age or worth, I heard, being written but just before the Restoration of Letters; however, it was a manuscript, and therefore not to be neglected, especially since we had no ancient copies, either in England or anywhere else, that I could hear of. I sent to Mr Bennet, my bookseller in London, to get the manuscript, and desired him to apply himself to Dr Bentley, in my name, for the use of it, not doubting in the least a ready compliance with such a request from one of his station and order, and who besides was at that very time in a lecture of some honour and profit that had lately been set up by one of my family, especially since the book which I desired to borrow was of so little importance that it had scarce been a favour to have lent it me if I had not asked it. After an expectation of many months, Mr Bennet sent me at last a collation of part of the manuscript with this account: that he had with a great difficulty, and after long delays, got the manuscript into his hands; that he had it but a very few days, when Dr Bentley came to demand it again, and would by no means be prevailed upon to let him have the use of it any longer, though he told him the collation was not perfected; and that he denied this request in a very rude manner, throwing out several slight and disparaging expressions, both of me and the work I was about.
This I had reason to take very ill of Dr Bentley, and therefore in that part of my Preface where I gave an account of the MSS. that were consulted in that edition, I inserted these words collatas etiam curavi usque ad Epistolam 40 cum MS° in Bibliotheca Regia; cujus mihi copiam ulteriorem Bibliothecarius, pro singulari sua humanitate, negavit; which considering the usage I had had from him, was as soft a thing as I could well allow myself to say. The Epistles were no sooner published but Dr Bentley sent me a letter, wherein after expressing himself with great civility to me, he represented the matter of fact quite otherwise than I had heard it. I returned him immediately as civil an answer, to this effect: that Mr Bennet, whom I employed to wait on him in my name, gave me such an account of his reception, that I had reason to apprehend myself affronted, and since I could make no other excuse to my reader, for not collating the King's MS., but because 'twas denied me, I thought I could do no less than express some resentment of that denial; that I should be very much concerned, if Mr Bennet had dealt so ill with me as to mislead me in his accounts, and if that appeared, should be ready to take some opportunity of begging his pardon; and, as I remember, I expressed myself so that the Doctor might understand I meant to give him satisfaction as publicly as I had injured him. Here the matter rested, and I thought Dr Bentley was satisfied, especially since I found Mr Bennet persisted in his account, and supported it with further proofs, and the Doctor seemed willing to let the dispute drop, by his not writing to me any further about it, or discoursing Mr Bennet concerning it, to whom my letter plainly referred him. In this mistake was I for two years and a half after the edition of Phalaris; till at last Dr Bentley's Dissertation came out, and convinced me that he had had vengeance in his heart all the time, and suspended his blow only till he could strike, as he thought, to purpose. In this angry discourse of his, he tells the world the same story, bating a circumstance or two which he has altered, that he had told me before in his letter. . . .
Startled at these assertions thus revived after a long silence, and improved in print, I examined Mr Bennet again very strictly and particularly. He assured me that every word he had writ to me upon this occasion was punctually true, and that Dr Bentley's account, where it differed from his, was entirely false. He drew up the matter of fact in writing, and set his hand to it, giving me liberty to make it public, and to assure the world that he was ready to justify the truth of what he had written, with his oath, when it should be duly required of him. He added that Mr. Gibson, the collator, could confirm some circumstances of his account, and that his brother, who was his apprentice at that time, and was sent by him both to Dr Bentley and to the collator, would have attested the truth of the whole had he been alive; but he died some months after this matter happened. However, if his own testimony and the collator's should be liable to suspicion, yet still there was a gentleman of known credit in the world—Dr King of the Commons—who was witness to all that passed at one meeting between him and Dr Bentley, and would, he hoped, be so just to him as to give an account of it. He was not mistaken; for Dr King, being applied to by a friend of mine, presently wrote him the following letter, which together with the several certificates of Mr Bennet and Mr Gibson, I here offer to the reader.
Whereas the Reverend Dr Bentley has thought fit, in the Appendix to Mr Wotton's Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning (pp. 66 and 67), to insert the following words as matter of fact, viz., A bookseller came to me in the name of the Editors &c.: I think myself obliged to give the world the following account, wherein I have faithfully related what passed on that occasion.
I was employed by the Honourable Mr Boyle, and by him only, to borrow the MS. of Phalaris from Dr Bentley. After about nine months solicitation, it was delivered into my custody, without any time limited for the return of it. Within few days after, Dr Bentley called upon me to have it restored, and then told me that he was to go into the country. He stayed till I sent to the collator, and word was brought by the messenger that it was not collated. I then begged him to let me have it but till Sunday morning: it was Saturday noon when he came, and I engaged to oblige the collator to sit up all Saturday night to get it finished. But he utterly refused to leave it with me any longer, demanding to have it sent that day to Westminster, which was done accordingly; and not giving me any the least hopes that if I applied to him upon his return out of the country, I should have leave to get the collation perfected. These circumstances I am thus particular in, because I had occasion to recollect 'em not long afterwards, when Mr Boyle's book came out and letters passed between him and Dr Bentley concerning the passage in his Preface.
It may not be proper, considering my employment, for me to add an account of the reflections Dr Bentley was pleased to make from time to time, when I spoke to him, from Mr Boyle, for the use of the MS. He has represented me as having said too much on that subject. But, by good fortune, Dr King was present at one of the meetings, and heard all that passed there. I hope he will do justice on this occasion.
July 13, 1697. Thomas Bennet.
I very well remember that Mr Bennet sent his man to me for Phalaris's Epistles, whilst I was collating 'em, and being unwilling to part with them before I had gone through 'em, I sent the man back without them. But he presently returned, and told me that the gentleman that owned them stayed at their shop for them, and could not spare them any longer. This is the true reason why I could collate no more of the abovesaid Epistles.
July 15, 1697.Geo. Gibson.
Sir,
I am bound in justice to answer your request by endeavouring, as far as I can, to recollect what passed between Mr Bennet and Dr Bentley concerning a MS. of the Epistles of Phalaris. I cannot be certain as to any other particulars than that, among other things, the Doctor said that if the MS. were collated it would be worth nothing for the future; which I took the more notice of, because I thought a MS. good for nothing, unless it were collated. The whole discourse was managed with such insolence, that after he was gone, I told Mr Bennet that he ought to send Mr Boyle word of it; that for my own part (I said then, what I think still) I did not believe that the various readings of any book were so much worth, as that a person of Mr Boyle's honour and learning should be used so scurvily to obtain 'em. That scorn and contempt which I have naturally for pride and insolence, makes me remember that which otherwise I might have forgot.
Doctors Commons, Octob. 13, 1697.
The case, then, between me and Dr Bentley stands thus: there is, on the one side, Dr Bentley's single assertion in his own cause; and these several concurring accounts from persons of probity and worth, on the other. The question now is (if it be a question), which of these ought to be credited? The point to me is so clear that I dare trust the most partial friend Dr Bentley has, to determine it.
Mr Bennet and Mr Gibson, I think, are so little interested in this dispute that they may be entirely depended upon. However, Dr King is a witness without exception, and the account he gives of one of those free conferences Dr Bentley held with Mr Bennet is full and home: and I do assure our learned critic, that whatever becomes of Phalaris's Letters, this of Dr King's is not spurious. I have the original of it by me, under his own hand, as I have the originals, too, of the other papers; which shall be at Dr Bentley's or any man's service, that pleases to command a sight of 'em.
And now had I not reason to say what I did, and much more than I did, of Dr Bentley, in my Preface to Phalaris? Could I resent the harsh treatment he had given me, in gentler terms than I there made use of? Since he had denied me so common a favour, and spoken of me with so much contempt, I was at liberty, I think, to have returned his civilities in what way I pleased, and to have given him any language whatever that it was not below me to give; and that is a restraint which I hope I shall always be able to lay upon myself whatever the provocation be.
Dr Bentley, then, considering all things, was really obliged to me for using him with so much tenderness. What way did he take of owning his obligations? He immediately entered upon the honourable and Christian design of exposing me, and resolved, whatever time or pains it might cost him, to prove that the Epistles I had put out, were a ridiculous cheat; and that I (or whoever the Editor was) was to be pitied for giving myself so much trouble about them.
I see Monsieur Rochefoucauld drew his observation from Nature when he said, "We often pardon those that injure us, but we can never forgive those that we injure."
[pp. 91–112]
Hitherto Dr Bentley has kept himself pretty well within his province, and criticised chiefly upon words, and phrases, and dialects; in his next general proof he ventures to criticise upon things, and to show the Letters an imposture, from the matter and business of 'em. "They are a fardle of commonplaces," he says, "without any life or spirit from action and circumstance. When you come to 'em, you find, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with a dreaming pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an active, ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, &c. All that takes or affects you, is a stiffness, and stateliness, and operoseness, of style, &c. which is quite aliene from the character of Phalaris, a man of business and despatch."
Stiffness, and stateliness, and operoseness, of style is indeed quite aliene from the character of a man of business and despatch; for which reason anybody that reads Dr Bentley, would easily guess that he is not a man of business. And not being a man of business, but a Library-keeper, it is not over-modestly done of him to oppose his judgement and taste, in this case, to that of Sir William Temple, who is certainly a man of business, and knows more of these things than Dr Bentley does of Hesychius and Suidas. For as his friend, Mr Wotton, has with great sagacity observed, "It is universally acknowledged, that he who has studied any subject, is a better judge of that subject than another man who did never purposely bend his thoughts that way, provided they be both men of equal parts." Sir William Temple has spent a good part of his life in transacting affairs of state; he has written to kings, and they to him; and this has qualified him to judge how kings should write, much better than all Dr Bentley's correspondence with foreign professors; especially if they be such professors as have the judgement to admire him and his humanity. I shall not therefore offer a word, on the general part of this head, in justification of the Epistles: I shall barely set down the passage in which Sir William Temple expresses his sense of this matter, and shall then leave it to the reader whose opinion he'll think fit to take—either his, or the Library-keeper's at St James's. Sir William's admirable words are, "I think he must have but little skill in painting that cannot find out this to be an original: such diversity of passions upon such variety of actions, and passages of life and government; such freedom of thought; such boldness of expression; such bounty to his friends; such scorn of his enemies; such honour of learned men; such esteem of good; such knowledge of life; such contempt of death; with such fierceness of nature, and cruelty of revenge, could never be represented but by him that possessed 'em, and I esteem Lucian to have been no more capable of writing, than of acting, as Phalaris did. In all one writ you find the scholar or the sophist, and in all the other writ, the tyrant and the commander." It is plain Sir William Temple does not write 'like a dreaming pedant, with his elbow on his desk,' and therefore the reader, perhaps, will be apt to take his judgement, when he tells him that Phalaris does not write like one neither.
I cannot but observe that Dr Bentley is here, and elsewhere, very liberal in distributing the reproach of pedantry; which is to me, I confess, a plain proof that he has no just notions of it: for if he had, it is so high an offence against good manners and good sense, that methinks he should impute it more sparingly. I will endeavour, therefore, to set him right; which perhaps I shall be the better able to do, because having conversed much a late with some writings where this beauty of style prevails, I have very strong and sensible impressions of it.
Pedantry is a word of a very various and mixed meaning, and therefore hard to be defined: but I will describe it to the Doctor as well as I can, by pointing out some of the chief marks and moles of it.
The first and surest mark of a pedant is to write without observing the received rules of civility and common decency, and without distinguishing the characters of those he writes to or against; for pedantry in the pen is what clownishness is in conversation—it is written ill-breeding.
It is pedantry to affect the use of an hard word where there is an easy one, or of a Greek or Latin word, where there is an English one that signifies the very same thing. And these two meanings of the word my Lord Roscommon seems to have hinted in those fine verses of his, which are worth at least half a dozen pages of Dr Bentley's scraps of Callimachus, notes and all:
Must be well purg'd from rank, pedantic weeds.
Apollo starts, and all Parnassus shakes,
At the rude rumbling Baralipton makes;
For none were e'er with admiration read,
But who, beside their learning, were well bred.
Essay on Translated Verse.
How Dr Bentley will, on these articles, excuse his familiar treatment of Sir William Temple, and his coarse compliments to me, how he will bring off his Greek and Latin proverbs, his aliene, and negoce, and concede, and repudiating a vernacular idiom, with an hundred other such elegances of speech, I leave him to consider at his leisure.
To over-rate the price of knowledge, and to make as great ado about the true rendering of a phrase or accenting of a word, as if an article of faith or the fortune of a kingdom depended upon it, is pedantry. And so is an assuming and positive way of delivering oneself, upon points, especially, not worth our concern, and not capable of being perfectly cleared. And whether Dr Bentley be guilty in this respect or no, the reader will be able to judge when he has cast his eye on the margin, and considered how many times the Doctor in his Dissertation has freely used the word demonstrate of his own performances[1], and withal how fond he is of negatives, a very dangerous way of speech, and that in cases oftentimes where the contrary affirmative is most certainly true; as it is and shall be proved to be, in all those instances, which this mark [2] refers to.
To depart from the common ways of writing or speaking, and such as have been used by the best pens, on purpose to show oneself more exact and knowing than the rest of the world, is a piece of affectation that savours of pedantry. Tauromenium is the word that is generally used by both ancient and modern writers. Dr Bentley has reformed our spelling, and will have it Taurominium because Pliny and Solinus (and perhaps somebody else) have happened to call it so. And here I must beg the reader's excuse, if I go a little out of the way to do right to Sir William Temple, in a case of the like nature. Mr Wotton tells him, with great plainness of speech, that he, of all men, ought not to have arraigned the modern ignorance in grammar, who puts Delphos for Delphi everywhere in his Essays. A capital mistake, and worthy to be chastised by the acute pen of Mr Wotton! But is he sure that putting Delphos for Delphi is an offence against grammar? I thought always that what was according to propriety and the received use of a tongue, could not be against grammar. It may indeed be against some general rule of grammar, but so wise a man as Mr Wotton is, should have known that grammar has not only general rules, but particular exceptions too; and that the common custom and usage of a tongue is capable of creating an exception, at any time, and is as good a rule as any in the grammar. Now Delphos for the Latin word Delphi is used by all the finest writers of our tongue, and best judges of it, particularly by Mr Waller twice in some of his last copies, which though they are worse poetry than the rest, yet are in correcter English; by Mr Dryden four or five times in his Life of Plutarch; by Mr Duke, and Mr Creech, often, in their several Lives of Theseus and Solon; and because, perhaps, one old divine may weigh more with Mr Wotton than all these modern witnesses, by the Reverend and learned Dr Jackson in his volumes on the Creed. Mr Wotton might have said indeed that Delphos in the singular number is not good Latin or good Greek: but when he says 'tis 'bad English' he only shows that he does not converse with so good authors as he ought to do. This digression might have been spared, but that Mr Wotton, when he was purging his book of some unbecoming passages in a second edition of it, thought fit still to retain this grammatical reflection there: perhaps in a third edition he'll take care that this too shall bear the rest company.
Dr Bentley will forgive me this short visit to his friend, now I return to him.
Pedantry consists also in low and mean ways or speech, which are a vicious affectation of what is natural and easy, as hard words are of learning and scholarship. And whether Dr Bentley has not offended this way by those familiar expressions of Mother Clito the Herb-woman, and going to pot, and setting horses together, and roasting the old woman, and by his apt simile drawn from bungling tinkers mending old kettles, anybody but pedants can tell.
An itch of contradicting great men, or established opinions, upon very slight grounds, is another instance of pedantry, and (not to mention anything that relates to the present dispute,) something of this kind there was, I'm afraid, in Dr Bentley's brisk censure of Grotius and Scaliger for not knowing the measure of an anapaestic verse, when 'tis plain, as I shall show before I lay down my pen, that the Doctor would never have censured 'em if he had known it himself. Castelvetro, an Italian pedant, was famous for such a snarling faculty as this. "He was," as Balzac says very well of him, "a public enemy, that could not endure anybody should have merit or reputation, but himself."
The subject is fruitful, but I will confine myself to one particular more of the pedant's character, and that is, a love of quoting books or passages not extant, or never seen by him, in order to amaze and confound his poor reader, and make himself terrible in the way of learning. "As Aristotle says in his lost Treatise of the Sicilian Government," says the Doctor: though that Treatise be so far lost that Aristotle did really never write it. And agen he tells us what Monsieur de Méziriac has done in his Life of Æsop, and yet owns, in the very next line, that he never met with this book, but only guessed what was in it. He produces the unknown authors Diodorus transcribed, as so many witnesses on his side, and in another place he gives a very particular account of what Aulus Gellius said in a lost chapter, not from any other writer that had quoted it, but merely by dint of conjecture.
These are all the marks and moles of pedantry that I can now stay to point out to the Doctor: if he be still at a loss to know what the pedant's character is, and where to apply it, I refer him to a passage in Bruyere where I think this matter is very succinctly and fully handled. "There are," says he, "in learning, as in war, a sort of inferior and subaltern officers, men who seem made only for registers and magazines to store up the productions of better writers. Collectors they are, transcribers, plagiaries; they never think themselves; they tell you only what others have thought before them. They heap together matter in abundance, without choice or distinction, and care not how worthless it is, so there be but enough on't. They know nothing but just as they learn it from their books, and learn nothing but what everybody else desires to be ignorant of. They have a vain, dry, insipid sort of knowledge, that is disagreeable and useless; can neither enliven conversation, nor conduce to business. We are sometimes surprised at their reading, but always tired with their discourse or their writings. These are they, who, among all the little men and some great ones, go for scholars, but among the wise and sensible part of mankind, for pedants."
This account of pedantry has drawn me a little out of my way: I shall now return again into it, and consider the particular instances Dr Bentley has brought to justify his general assertion, that the matter and business of the letters betrays 'em not to be genuine.
The first is 'an improbable and absurd story' (as he thinks) about Stesichorus, who dying at Catana, the Himereans desired to have his ashes brought back into his native city Himera: but the Cataneans would not part with them. This occasioned a fierce contest between the two towns, which Phalaris appeased by prevailing with the Himereans to let Stesichorus's ashes sleep in peace at Catana, and build a temple to the honour of him at home. Now what is there in this story either absurd or improbable? that the Himereans should be so concerned to get the ashes of Stesichorus, and the Cataneans to keep them? This very thing happened afterwards in the case of Euripides, whose bones the Athenians sent a solemn embassy to Macedonia to retrieve, as Aulus Gellius informs us, and that not in a lost chapter. And after the denial of this request, we learn from Pausanias, that the Athenians built a noble monument to the memory of Euripides, which continued even to his time. Somewhat of the same honour was paid to Hesiod's remains, which being buried where Hesiod was murdered, a great way off Ascra, the Orchomenians, Plutarch tells us, endeavoured all they could to get 'em into their possession: but they that had 'em would not be prevailed upon to part with 'em. And if Euripides and Hesiod were honoured with such contentions as these, after their deaths, why might not Stesichorus?
"Ay, but," says the Doctor, "a temple and deification were a little too extravagant an honour to be paid to a poet's memory." I thought such things as these could not have surprised a man of the Doctor's polymathy; but I find he knows nothing of the several temples erected to Homer at Smyrna and in other places, as Strabo and Aelian expressly affirm, nor so much as remembers that known passage in Tully's Oration pro Archia poeta which is no secret even to the first beginners in learning. "Homer," says he, "the Smyrnaeans claim as a native of theirs, and therefore they have erected a temple to him." From whence, also, Dr Bentley may please to learn the reason why Phalaris would have the Himereans content themselves with erecting a temple to Stesichorus, because that would declare to posterity that he was born there.
Nay it happens, a little unluckily, that an ancient marble is preserved to this day, which perhaps belonged to some temple erected to the honour of Homer, in some of the places that contended for his birth, where the apotheosis, or deification, of that poet is described; and a learned man, Cuperus, has writ a large comment upon it, which methinks the Doctor should have been acquainted with, though he be not a foreign professor.
Ere I quit this particular I must observe a little slip of the Doctor's in telling us that Himera, in Tully's time, was called Thermae. I believe it was not, because Tully himself assures us that Himera and Thermae were two different towns, and the latter built at some distance from the ruins of the former; and without this distinction between Himera and Thermae, 'tis impossible to understand Diodorus where he says that after Himera was sacked, and rased by the Carthaginians, it continued altogether uninhabited even to his days; which could not be true if Himera and Thermae were the same, for that Thermae was well inhabited in Diodorus's time, is past dispute. I will not deny but that some careless passages may perhaps have dropped from the pens of old authors, where these two are not nicely distinguished, but it is not in works where they set up for being severe upon other men's mistakes, and their want of exactness therefore may be forgiven them. But Dr Bentley, who professes to give no quarter, should take care not to want any.
His last objection happily arose from contemplating the matter of one single Epistle: the Doctor will now compare the Epistles together and confute one by another. "There is an inconsistency," he says, "between the LIst and the LXIXth, because, in the LIst, Phalaris's wife is dead, and in the LXIXth she is alive again." As if it were necessary that these Epistles should have been written just in the same order that they stand, which is different in the printed copies, from what it is in the MSS., and different in one MS. from what it is in another. Upon such an unreasonable supposition as this, how many inconsistencies might be found in Tully's Epistles? or even in those of St Paul? And yet, if this supposition do not take place, there is no manner of inconsistency between these two Epistles of Phalaris. The penetrating Dr Bentley seems to have had some suspicions that this argument was of itself a little too weak to stand its ground, and therefore has backed it with a strong reserve of four other suppositions; and if all these hold good, he will still prove the Epistles spurious. First he supposes that Erythia was poisoned by Python not long after Phalaris's banishment, because otherwise he supposes she could not want opportunities to follow him; then he supposes Erythia was poisoned in the island Astypalaea, where he supposes that her poisoner dwelt. Here's more postulatums than Euclid required to build the whole body of his elements upon, and yet he must be very kind to Dr Bentley that will grant him any one of them, since there is nothing, either in the Epistles themselves or in any other history I have had the luck to meet with, that can give 'em the least countenance. At present, therefore, I take the same liberty to deny every one of these suppositions as he has to assume them: if hereafter he can prove them in another language, 'twill then be time enough to show that they are nothing to the purpose.
In some other Epistles the Doctor has discovered a 'scene of putid and senseless formality.' A man of quality, in Syracuse, whose wife was lately dead, sends his brother to Phalaris with a request that he would endeavour to prevail with Stesichorus to write an elegy upon her. Phalaris tries and prevails; but is not so successful in a second attempt of the same nature, that he makes at the instance of another Sicilian gentleman. I protest I can see no harm in all this: there may indeed, for aught I know, be 'putid formality' in it, because I can't well tell what those hard words mean; but I see nothing unnatural there, or misbecoming the character of Phalaris. "No!" says the Doctor, "What? can anyone believe that such stuff as this busied the head of the tyrant?" As low thoughts as the Doctor has of the Epistles, I find he has very high ones of Phalaris; he seems to have represented him to himself as some mighty monarch that had vast dominions, and was too great, and too busy, to attend such trifles: whereas he was only a petty prince of one town in Sicily, and as such, I hope, the office here given him was no ways below him. Indeed the Doctor has, for the honour of Phalaris, represented that town as exceeding populous; for Diodorus, he says, counts 200,000 souls in Agrigent, and others 800,000. Diodorus, I grant, in the place cited, says there were such numbers in it when the Carthaginians took it, Olymp. LXXXXIII. 3, when as he tells us in the same place, it was in its most prosperous and flourishing estate: but must there needs be as many inhabitants in it 150 years before in the reign of Phalaris? As for his other witness, Laertius, his 800,000 are given up by the learned as a gross mistake, which Bochart supposes to have risen from the change of a numeral Κ into a Π; or however that may be, the account, he says, is 'incredible and utterly false.' Incredible as it is, the Doctor vouchsafes to take up with it, and it grows under his hands; for by that time we are got to the end of this article, these 800,000 are a million of subjects—the 200,000 are thrown in carelessly to make it a round number. Let it be a million: yet there have been tyrants, with many millions of subjects at their command, who have thought fit to employ and entertain themselves much after this manner. Has the Doctor, who deals so much in fragments, never seen those of Augustus's letters to Horace? Has he never heard that we owe the Fourth Book of Horace's Odes, and the finest of all his Epistles, to that Prince's importunity, who pressed, and obliged him to write, and to make mention of him in his poems? And such stuff, I presume, may very well be allowed to busy Phalaris's head, which found room in the thoughts of Augustus.
"But why so much ado?" says our keen observer, "could not the Syracusian have written to Stesichorus, and at the price of some present met with success?" I agree with the Doctor that a present is sometimes an expeditious method of doing business. I have known several things, in my lifetime, stick for want of it. However here it was improper, for Stesichorus was not only the greatest poet but one of the greatest men in Sicily. His brother Helianax was a law-giver [νομοθέτης], Suidas tells us, and he himself probably in the government of Himera, or at least consulted by 'em in extraordinary cases, as appears by his apologue in Aristotle's Rhetoric; and the true way of prevailing with such a man to employ his excellent pen, was to offer him, not money, but a subject that deserved it. Some of his brother poets, indeed, were to be tempted this way; but they were men of mean birth and education, and were to make their fortunes by their pens, and no wonder therefore that they were mercenary.
It is objected that if these letters about the elegy were Phalaris's he would have expressed himself properly, and not have called the same copy of verses μέλος and ἐλεγεῑον; which are as different from one another as Theognis is from Pindar: "an egregious piece of dulness says the Doctor, and which proves him to be a mere asinus ad lyram!" Now to see the different cast of men's heads: allowing the error in this case, so egregiously dull am I, that I should have reasoned just the other way from it—that if a sophist had writ these letters, he would never have confounded these two words, the distinct sense of which was so well settled before his time by the grammarians. But in Phalaris's time the meaning of these terms of art might not be so strictly marked out, or a Prince might not think himself obliged to take notice of it, and to write with all the exactness of a scholar. So that from this very mistake, if it were one, I should have inferred something in favour of the letters; but to our misfortune here is no mistake. Phalaris did but as a nicer man than he might have done: he calls the poem ἐλεγεῑον when he asks it of Stesichorus and did not know in what verse it would be composed by him, and he calls it μέλος afterwards when he had it, and found it was in lyric measures.
Ἔλεγος and ἐλεγεῖον originally signified only a mournful or funeral song, an elegy as we say in English, referring to the subject of the song, and not to the measure. But elegies being generally writ in hexameters and pentameters, the word came afterwards to be applied purely to the measure, without any regard to the subject. However, this second sense of the word did not so far prevail as absolutely to extinguish the first: still ἔλεγος and ἐλεγεῖον were now and then employed in a looser meaning than what the grammarians put upon 'em, and of this I will give the Doctor one plain instance from a darling author of his—Dion Chrysostome, who in his 4th book De Regno calls the heroic verses written on Sardanapalus's tomb ἐλεγεῖον, and Aristophanes, speaking of the nightingale, has this passage:
ἈντιψάλλειIn Ὄρνιθ.
where ἐλέγοις can signify nothing but a melancholy tune, or mournful song; unless our grammarian can prove that the nightingales in that part of the world sung in elegiac measure. And the misfortune of it is that these very ἔλεγοι are called μέλη but a few verses before:
Ἐλελιζομένη διεροῖς μέλεσι.
And I hope Aristophanes understood Greek, and was no asinus ad lyram. As strong proofs as these may seem, I have still behind one authority more, which will go farther with Dr Bentley than any I have yet brought: 'tis his own. He, p. 139 of his Dissertation, tells us that somebody made an edition of Æsop's Fables, in elegiac verse, and after giving us several instances of the kind, he adds that some of them (i. e. of the elegiac fables) were all in hexameters. I'd advise him, therefore, to call in this criticism, and his dirty proverb along with it, for fear it should stick where he has not a mind it should.
He has still one way left of disproving this piece of 'putid formality,' and that is by denying that Stesichorus and Phalaris were acquainted. 'Tis a negative, and therefore pretty hard to be made out; let us see how he sets about it. He observes, that Lucian says nothing of this acquaintance. Lucian mentions it not by name indeed, but he speaks in general of Phalaris's conversation with learned men, and their great esteem of him; and then gives an instance in Pythagoras, the most celebrated scholar of his time, and after him there needed no other instances. Had a less skilful hand been employed in making this oration, he would probably have heaped up all he knew of Phalaris, and overacted his part by too great and circumstantial a nicety. But Lucian had more art: he knew when to leave off, that the piece might not look stiff and unnatural. Besides, if Lucian's silence be an exception to Stesichorus's acquaintance with Phalaris, it is to Abaris's too; which yet our critic has before, for the sake of Aristotle and Jamblichus, been graciously pleased to allow.
But Plato is silent, as well as Lucian, in this matter, and that in an Epistle written to a tyrant of Sicily, where he is reckoning up the friendships of learned men with tyrants and magistrates. Neither has Plato mentioned anything in that Epistle of the acquaintance between Phalaris and Pythagoras, which had been as proper and as domestic an instance as the other. And yet the Pythagoreans all agree, that their master and Phalaris were acquainted, and Doctor Bentley grants it: why should Plato's ill memory be a proof against the one, and no proof against the other? But I rather think it was his good judgement than his ill memory that occasioned this omission. Phalaris's name was detested and infamous in Sicily, and to have brought him in, therefore, among his other instances, would have spoiled the compliment to Dionysius, who might like well enough to have the parallel drawn between him and Hiero, or Pericles, or Periander, or Croesus, but would not have thought it a civility, I believe, to have been compared with Phalaris, whose character when taken at the best, and as drawn in these Epistles, is not so amiable as that any man should be pleased with resembling him; especially one who could not but be conscious to himself, that he had made use of his methods, and had reason to expect his fate. Plato was a great master of decency, and he never showed it more than in this dexterous management, which I am not surprised to find that our Library-keeper has no relish of.
His last argument is from Pindar, who speaks of Phalaris's cruelty, with detestation. And what follows from thence? that he never heard of his extraordinary dearness with Stesichorus, for the sake of which, Pindar, had he known it, would certainly have forborn giving him so vile a character? This indeed is demonstration, and not to be withstood! I will not attempt to answer it: only I will put the Doctor in mind of one false colour that he has given to his argument; for it does not appear, from any expression in this Ode, that Pindar is there exhorting Hiero to be kind to poets and men of letters. There is not a word of being kind to poets and men of letters, mentioned in the verses themselves, whatever guess the Scholiast (who perhaps knew as little of Pindar's intentions as I, or Dr Bentley, do) may make at their remote meaning. Pindar only praises Hiero for his humanity and hospitality at large, and tells him Croesus was renowned for these virtues, and Phalaris infamous for the want of 'em. Which I would have observed, because if he be not speaking here of beneficence to poets and men of letters, Dr Bentley might as well have undertaken to prove his point from ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ as from the passage he has produced. He has lamed it in his quotation; I will give it the reader entire, "Croesus," says he, "will always be renowned for his humanity and benevolence, but the memory of the savage and inhuman Phalaris is everywhere detested." Could a better panegyric be made upon Hiero, in fewer words? Could anything be more artful than the pitching upon these two opposite instances, to set out his character by? Were a man to compliment some person in Dr Bentley's station, could he do it more effectually than by saying of him, that he had all the humanity and good nature of the Library-keeper at Cambridge,[3] and none of the disobliging, rude qualities of him at St James's?
After all, the Dr's opinion and mine upon this point are not so very distant as he may imagine, for I agree with him, that there was no extraordinary dearness between Stesichorus and Phalaris; nor do the Letters themselves imply that there was. They say indeed that Phalaris obliged and courted Stesichorus, out of vanity, or a real esteem of his merit. And Stesichorus could not but pay some regard to Phalaris on this account, though he could never love him or his character; nor is there any proof from the Epistles that he did. Phalaris, after he had given him his life, desired only his friendship in return, and Stesichorus was obliged, both in gratitude and prudence, not to stand off, but to be in as good terms as he could with a man that was able to do him so much mischief. We have a lively account of just such a management as this between Julius Cæsar and Tully, in the Epistles of the latter. When Cæsar had got the better of Pompey, (whose side Tully took,) either out of a true esteem for Tully's virtues, or out of design, he took all methods of making him his own; paid him a great many civilities; and did him a great many services. Tully could never from his heart love a tyrant: but we may imagine how he behaved in this case: he accepted Cæsar's proffered friendship, wrote civilly to him, and lay still. No more than this, that I can see, ever passed between Stesichorus and Phalaris, to speak upon the foot of the letters; and if so, what becomes of Dr Bentley's harangue about the silence of authors, in relation to this fancied intimacy and dearness? Good writers must needs say nothing of that which never happened. Stesichorus's love for Phalaris could no more be the subject of any of the pens that went before us, than Dr Bentley's humanity will be of any of the pens that shall come after us. . . .
- ↑ —even demonstrated that the Epistles of Phalaris are spurious, p. 5
—that demonstrate Anaxilaus to have lived—p. 26
—Demonstrate the Doric dialect to have been, &c., p. 42
—but which is plain demonstration, p. 48
—I'll demonstrate 'em by and by to be an imposture, p. 116
—I shall demonstrate ours to be of a modern date, p. 138
—is a demonstrative proof, p. 141 - ↑ There was no such thing as Tragedy while he tyrannised at Agrigentum, p. 40
προδεδωκότα never used by the ancients in that sense, p. 52
By that time I have done with 'em it will be no more a controversy whether they are spurious, p. 89
There is no MS above CCC years old that has the Fables according to that copy, p. 146
In all that tract of time not one single author that has given us the least hint that Æsop was ugly, p. 149
Astypalaea, a city in Greece, never mentioned by any geographer, p. 44
A discovery in geography that could not be learnt anywhere else, p. 58
Eustathius, who appears never to have seen the true Athenæus, p. 20. - ↑ Mr Laughton.