XIV

OF THE SCYTHIANS AND GOMERANS

LET US leave Gomer just after coming out of the arch to go and subjugate Gaul, and in a few years people it: let us leave Tubal to go into Spain, and Magog into the north of Germany, about the time that the son of Cham produced an amazing number of children completely black, towards Guinea and Congo. These disgusting impertinences have been obtruded in so many books, that they are not worth mentioning; children begin to ridicule them. But by what weakness, or by what secret malignity, or by what affectation to display ill-placed eloquence, have so many historians made such great eulogiae upon the Scythians, whom they knew nothing of?

Why does Quintus Curtius, in talking of the Scythians, who were situated to the north of Sogdia, beyond the Oxus (which he mistakes for the Tanais, fifty leagues distant) why, I say, did Quintus Curtius put a philosophical harangue into the mouth of those Barbarians? why does he imagine that they reproached Alexander with his thirst of conquest? why does he make them say, that Alexander is the most famous robber upon the earth, those who had practiced rapine all over Asia, so long before him? why, in fine, does Quintus Curtius represent these Scythians as the justest of men? The reason is, that placing the Tanais towards the Caspian sea, like a bad geographer, he speaks declamatorily of the supposed disinterestedness of the Scythians.

If Horace, in contrasting the manners of the Scythians to those of the Romans, gives an harmonious panegyric upon those barbarians. If he says,

Campestreo milias Scithae
Quorum plaustra vagas rite trahunt domos
Vivunt & rigidi Getae;

 

Happy the Scythians, houseless train!
Who roll their vagrant dwellings o’er the plain;
Happy the Getes, fierce and brave;

it is that Horace speaks as a poet somewhat satirical, who is willing to honor strangers at the expense of his own country.

For the same reason Tacitus exhausts himself in the praise of the barbarous Germans, who pillaged the Gauls, and immolated men to their abominable Gods. Tacitus, Quintus Curtius, and Horace, are like those pedagogues, who, in order to excite an emulation in their disciples, are lavish of their praises before them of strange children, however unworthy of their applause.

The Scythians are those same Barbarians, whom we have since called Tartars: they are the same who long before Alexander repeatedly ravaged Asia, and have been the depredators of a great part of the continent. At one time bearing the name of Monguls or Huns, they subjected China and Judea; at another, under the name of Turks, they drove out the Arabs, who had conquered part of Asia. From these extensive plains the Huns went forth in order to reach Rome. These are the disinterested and just men, whose equity our compilers so highly celebrate when they copy Quintus Curtius. In this manner are we pestered with ancient histories, without choice and without judgment; they are read with nearly the same kind of taste as they are written, and the natural offspring of this sort of erudition must be error.

The Ruffians at this time inhabit the ancient European Scythia: this people have furnished history with some very astonishing facts. There have been revolutions upon earth that have more struck the imagination; but there are none that give so much satisfaction to the human mind, and do it so much honor as this. Conquerors and devastations have made their appearance; but that a single man should, in the course of twenty years, change the manners, the laws, and the sentiments of the greatest empire upon earth; that all the arts should have flocked together to embellish deserts, is really worthy of admiration. A woman, who could neither read nor write, brought to perfection the work which Peter began; another woman, named Elizabeth, extended still farther those noble essays. Another empress has gone beyond either of the two former; her subjects have imbibed her genius; the revolutions of the palace have not retarded a single moment the progress of the empire towards felicity. In a word, half a century has more enlightened the court of Scythia, than ever were Greece and Rome.