Away with the tears
for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of
the broken covenant!' (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388,
391.)
Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of
the days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is
rescued from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage
which may be recited as the earliest instance of that 'whitewashing
of great men,' as it has been called, which is so popular in our
own day, when Catiline and Clodius are represented as honest and
far-seeing politicians, when EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed
for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from his heritage of infamy as an
accomplished DILETTANTE whose moral aberrations are more than
excused by his exquisite artistic sense and charming tenor voice.
But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the
ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which
may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of
Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a
column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on
earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and
heroes of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose
achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,'
and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the
treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to
present the plausible residuum as actual truth.
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