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yet more ancient? from the authors of Egypt, Israel, Canaan, Syria, Persia, and India? Fortunately for the decision of this question. four voluminous classical authors remain, who confess the fact, that the earliest poets and historians, astronomers and sages, of Ionia, with the earliest architects, painters, and statuaries, of Greece, imported their science, art, and style, from venerable Egypt, Chaldea, Israel, and Syria. 1st. Lycurgus discovered the ballads of Homer in his travels in Crete: the separate ballads were marked with their separate titles: the portions which we denominate books, are, by Aristotle, quoted under these old titles; "The Wrath of Achilles," "The Valor of Diomede :" it was a late editor who collected the whole into one poem, and divided them into books. Macpherson, without success, has attempted to compound the separate Irish ballads of Ossian into a continued poem.

Homer, remote as his real age appears to a modern critic, was not the earliest writer on the wars of Troy; Aristotle, in his Poetic, remarks, that " a little Iliad" preceded his grander work: Herodotus, in his first three pages, has recorded the genealogy of the family of Priam, from Persian poets, and Egyptian and Tyrian annalists, with numerous facts on their wars, which Homer has only abbreviated. To my utter astonishment, in the 5th, 6th, and 7th volumes of the Asiatic Researches, the Tale of Troy is given from the Sanscrit authors, and some of its episodes are laid, as Homer himself has laid them, in Egypt. If from one epic poem we move to the next in the order of time, the same Sanscrit authors record the Argonautic voyage, and the name of Jason. Herodotus discovered traditions of Jason in the authors of Egypt. The same Indoo authors deliver narratives, similar to the Grecian writers of tragedy, on Labdacus and Laius, on Edipus and the Theban war: these ancient kings are plainly named.

That the structure, or at least the fundamental and component materials, of an epic poem, (for Aristotle first laid out the rules of the epos,) was invented at an earlier period in India, and Canaan, and Egypt, than in Ionia, the country of Homer, we possess the decisive attestation of history, sacred and profane. We mentioned above, that the present books of Homer were primarily ballads : now not merely the patriarchs, Moses and Job, were anterior to Homer, but Isaiah and Ezekiel.

In the book of Genesis are many inspired, in Exodus many military, songs; in Job a regulated drama, with a prologue and epilogue in prose, and the intermediate dialogue. In Ecclesiastes, a similar

drama, of a moralising nature, is to be traced. In the Sanscrit is a poem, which is partly ethical, and in part martial, the Bhagavat Gheeta. In Isaiah and Ezekiel, the major part of the prophecies are epic and military descriptions; many chapters were collected into a series of poems by Dr. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, and in that form they resembled the battles of Homer, and the rage of Ossian. That the same epic style of writing was known and invented in ages prior to Homer, we obviously discover from a perusal of the Maha-Baarat, or Great War, a Sanscrit poem, the date of which is contained in one of the Vedas, and that date ascends to the 20th century before Christ!

A second proof arises from a passage, which we may call "the Prophecy of the king Nebuchadnezzar," and which is preserved in a Greek historian of Persia, as translated from the Persic tongue : the very idiom is oriental. Josephus and Eusebius quote the words.

Herodotus also mentions that it was the custom of the Easterns to advance to battle, singing the poems of their ancestors, and their feats in arms. The Book of Kings, of Esther, and of Daniel, and Herodotus and Diodorus, appeal with confidence to the annals of Tyre and Persia; nay, Josephus, Eusebius, and Diodorus, quote largely from the Greek translators of such Tyrian, Coptic, Syriac, Persian, and even Indoo historians!

This collation of facts clearly indicates, that Homer and Ionia, Thucydides and Greece, possessed Eastern models, which they imitated in their poetry and their histories.

2. Lyric poetry, which Pindar raised into esteem, and carried to its highest state, saw examples in the Odes of Moses, David, and the Prophets; in the writings of many Syrians and Persians, whom Plato highly commends; and of the Egyptians, with whom Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, spent years of familiarity, and of improvement. The British collectors of Sanscrit works have detected Sanscrit odes of an indisputable antiquity, and of an age antecedent to Homer and Pindar.

The mysteries of Bacchus, of Isis and Osiris, and of Cybele, are known to have been introduced during the barbarous age prior to the founding of Thebes, into Greece, from India, Egypt, and Asia; in these many lyric odes were sung; the primitive words, as Herodotus and Wilford report with truth, are, in part, preserved, and are translated in the Asiatic Researches, as purely Sanscrit phrases.

Several tragedies, comedies, and pastoral poems are, in our

age, translated from the Sanscrit, of a date far anterior to Alexander, and even to Sophocles, Euripides, Eschylus, Menander, and Aristophanes.

The amusement of the theatre, Herodotus and Diodorus observe, was popular and fashionable in Persia; Plato repeatedly notices the fabular drama of the Syrians.

That biography originated early in Palestine, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, and India, (while it slowly introduced itself into Greece in the age of Plutarch, Elian, and Diogenes Laertius,) is apparent from the oriental authors quoted by the judges of Israel, by Diogenes Laertius, by Diodorus, by Pliny, the Naturalist, by Josephus and Eusebius. Tully, in his book, De Claris Oratoribus, traces the progress of style from the Asiaticum tumidum, &c. to the Ionians, and thence to the simple Attic.

That the science of ethic, or moral philosophy, was copied by the Greeks from the Easterns, we read in the honorable confession of their most learned authors. Diogenes Laertius asserts, that Thales was of Syrian race, and that the seven sages, his contemporaries, derived their knowledge from a Phoenician source: Plato owns his vast obligations to Syriac books: Pythagoras boasted of his acquisitions from the Brachmans, the Magi, and the Egyptians. The geography, the astronomy, the mythology, the heroic virtues, and heroic vices, of Homer, appear to every oriental scholar of Punic derivation. But the strongest authority on which we build this opinion, is a chapter in Diodorus, in which he delineates this fact, and the above remarkable circumstances: the opinions of the Epicureans, of the Stoics, and of the Peripatetics, are, in our times, found minutely in the above Indoo poem, the MahaBaarat; and even the logic of Aristotle is verbally translated from one of the Sanscrit Vedas, which were written 2000 years before the Christian era. I Sir Wm. Jones detected these points of coincidence, and naturally suspected, that Alexander the Great, or his attendant Greek Philosophers, had imparted the system of logic to Aristotle, who published it as an original invention.

Now the reader will admit, that a system so complex and so perfect, so novel, and yet so extensive and universal in its powers of application, could not have been the work of a few years: for it pervades the three works of that great master, his Poetic, Music, and Logic. Yet Socrates, and Plato, his teacher, knew neither its terms nor its modes of infinite subdivision. D. Laertius, who traces the slow growth of Grecian astronomy, assigns no such

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gradual improvement to logic. In the above Veda, which is certainly more ancient than the conquests by Alexander, and which is largely 'quoted by Plutarch in the very words of that conqueror's captains, that system is matured and complete. Herodotus had confessed, that the Indoos were the wisest of nations; and Alexander's generals, quoted by Strabo and by Plutarch, give us ample specimens of Indian ethics, as very similar to the Grecian. From Diogenes Laertius we learn, that the early moralists of Greece borrowed with freedom from the moralising sages of Phoenicia and Syria; and from the lives of Pythagoras and Plato, as freely from the dogmas of the sacred writers of Israel.

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The Voyages of Ulysses, and of Jason, are proved above to have been copied, and probably embellished, from similar poems on men of similar name, in the oldest Coptic; for similar romances have been lately translated from the Sanscrit language. The real Voyages of Hanno to (Sierra Leona) the centre of the African shore; and of Himilco to the ports (of Prussia) of the land of Amber, beyond the tin-islands; and the Cimbrian Chersonese, are still preserved: they are translations from the Phoenician tongue. Prior to Homer, and to Herodotus, that commercial people had published such tours to distant countries; and from such authorities Herodotus was inspired with an enthusiatic love for topography, Diodorus compiled his minuter and antiquarian book, Pliny, the Naturalist, drew his materials for his ponderous volumes, and Strabo for his accurate geography.

Herodotus, who lived nearly 400 years before Christ, roundly asserts, that Homer lived 400 years before his age, ❝ and no more." Two difficulties will hence arise to any reflecting mind. By what means had the Greek language, in the era of Homer, deviated so exceedingly in its grammar, and in its words, from the Hebrew, or coeval Eastern Grammar, and words? In the thema, indeed, of many hundred Hebrew and Greek terms, a coincidence both of sense and of sound is discoverable; but in many thousand expressions in the two languages, the utmost discrepancy, and the widest difference, it must be admitted, are visible. The very character of the two speeches is opposite. The Greek loves vowels, the Hebrew consonants; the former is smooth and harmonious, the latter rough and guttural: the Hebrew grammar is simple, short, imperfect; it contains only three tenses, its nouns admit no cases, its participles are indeclinable, its adjectives admit the distinction VOL. IV. No. VIII.

B

of genders, but not of cases. The Greek grammar, how complicate is it, even when we have acquired that of its dialect, the Latin.

Hence we must infer, that the earliest Greeks were the rude savages, (prior to Homer) whom Thucydides, in his first book, and Diodorus describe; that they formed a new language, and forgot the oriental idiom and grammar; that as numerous tongues are always invented by petty hordes of barbarians, (of which fact we see the examples, in our age, in the Indian tribes of America, in the Negro clans of Africa, in the Mountaineer sects of the farther India) so the oral speeches of Phrygia, Thrace, and Greece, partly agreed, and partly varied; but that at length a colony of Phoenicians settled at Thebes, and of Egyptians at Athens, who imported letters, writing, and books, and oriental words; and a host of poets, mixing the words of each Grecian state, as the Bards of Romance mixed the Provençal with the Tascan and Catalan ; and like the early Arabians of Job's time, combining into one book, not one grammar, 100 dialects; poured from Thrace the Phoenician mythology, and the solemn rites. Homer succeeded to the fame, and improved upon the improvements of these bards. His ballads were composed in a loftier and a smoother strain, the use of all the provincial terminations, or the dialects, gave a variety to the cadence, and to the grammar of his verse; his genius, martial, and romantic in the Iliad, chivalrous, adventurous, and picturesque in his Odyssey, not merely was adapted to an age emerging from gross manners, but raised the human mind and the character of his coevals, to aspire after the highest virtues. Herodotus was a Homer in a more enlightened age, and Socra tes was a similar luminary in moral philosophy. Still, however, my second difficulty remains unresolved: Whence gained Homer this excellence of style and of sentiment? K.

ON THE

LYRICAL METRES OF ANACREON.

NO III.

Choephora, p. 44. v.9. the two lines

ξυμμέτρον τε δια βίου,

πνέονθ ̓ ἃ κυνοφρῶν ὕπνῳ,

are said not to agree, but if we consider the first foot as containing a licence in the féis, or second part of it, and as admit

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