Inventors and Thieves

And the barbarians were the inventors not only of philosophy but of very nearly every art. The Egyptians were the first to bring astrology to people, and the Chaldeans did the same. The Egyptians were the first to show how to burn lamps; they divided the year into twelve months; they forbade intercourse with women inside the temples, and made it a rule that no one was to enter a temple straight from a woman without washing. They were the inventors of geometry as well. Some say the Carians invented forecasting from the stars. The Phrygians were the first to watch the flight of birds. The Etruscans, Italy’s neighbors, were masters of the haruspex’s art. The Isaurians and the Arabians invented augury, and the Telmessians divination by dreams. [a]

The Etruscans invented the trumpet and the Phrygians the flute, for Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygians. Cadmus, who brought letters to the Greeks, was a Phoenician, as Ephorus says; which is why Herodotus writes that they were called Phoenician letters. They say too that the Phoenicians and the Syrians were the first to invent letters, and that Apis, a native Egyptian, invented the healing art before Io came into Egypt — though afterwards, they say, Asclepius improved it. Atlas the Libyan was the first to build a ship and sail the sea. Kelmis and Damnaneus, Idaean Dactyls, first discovered iron on Cyprus, and another Idaean discovered how to temper bronze — a Scythian, according to Hesiod. The Thracians first invented what is called the harpē, a curved sword, and were the first to use shields on horseback; the Illyrians in the same way invented the peltē. Besides this they say the Etruscans invented the potter’s craft, and that Itanus, a Samnite, first made the oblong shield, the thyreos. Cadmus the Phoenician invented stone-cutting and found the gold mines on Mount Pangaeus. Another nation again, the Cappadocians, first invented the instrument called the nabla, and the Assyrians in the same way the two-stringed lyre. The Carthaginians were the first to build a trireme, and it was built by Bosporus, a native of the place. Medea, the daughter of Aeetes the Colchian, first invented the dyeing of hair. And the Noropes — a Paeonian people, now called the Norici — worked copper, and were the first to purify iron. Amycus, king of the Bebryces, was the first to invent boxing straps.

In music, Olympus the Mysian practiced the Lydian mode, and the people called Troglodytes invented the sambuca, a musical instrument. The curved pipe is said to have been invented by Satyrus the Phrygian, diatonic harmony likewise by Hyagnis, another Phrygian, and the notes by Olympus, a Phrygian; and the Phrygian mode too, and the half-Phrygian and the half-Lydian, by Marsyas, who came from the same country as the men just named. The Dorian was invented by Thamyris the Thracian.

We have heard that the Persians were the first to make the chariot, the bed and the footstool, and the Sidonians the first to build a trireme. The Sicilians, close to Italy, were the first inventors of the phorminx, which is not much inferior to the lyre, and they invented castanets. In the days of Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, linen clothing is said to have been invented. And Hellanicus says that Atossa, queen of the Persians, was the first to compose a letter. These things are reported by Scamon of Mitylene, Theophrastus of Ephesus and Cydippus of Mantinea, and also by Antiphanes, Aristodemus and Aristotle, and besides them by Philostephanus and by Strato the Peripatetic in his books On Inventions. I have taken a few details from them in order to establish the inventive and practically useful genius of the barbarians, from whom the Greeks got the good of their own studies.

And if anyone objects to their barbarous speech, Anacharsis says: “To me all Greeks speak Scythian.” This is the man the Greeks held in admiration, and he also said: “My covering is a cloak; my supper, milk and cheese.” You see that the barbarian philosophy professes deeds, not words. The apostle speaks this way: “So with you: unless you speak words with your tongue that can be understood, how will anyone know what is being said? You will be speaking into the air. There are, it may be, so many kinds of sound in the world, and not one of them is without meaning. So if I do not know the force of the sound, I will be a barbarian to the man who is speaking, and the man who is speaking will be a barbarian to me.” And again: “Let the one who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret.”

What is more, it was late before the teaching and the writing of set discourses reached Greece. Alcmaeon of Croton, the son of Peirithous, was the first to compose a treatise on nature, and it is said that Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, the son of Hegesibulus, was the first to publish a book in writing. The first to set music to poetry was Terpander of Antissa, who put the laws of the Spartans to music. Lasus of Hermione invented the dithyramb; Stesichorus of Himera the hymn; Alcman the Spartan the choral song; Anacreon of Teos love songs; Pindar the Theban the dance accompanied by singing. Timotheus of Miletus was the first to perform on the lyre, with dancing, the compositions called nomoi. The iambus was invented by Archilochus of Paros and the choliambus by Hipponax of Ephesus. Tragedy owed its beginning to Thespis the Athenian and comedy to Susarion of Icaria. The grammarians hand down their dates, but it would take too long to give them exactly; in due course, though, Dionysus — the god for whose sake the Dionysian shows are held — will be shown to be later than Moses.

They say that Antiphon of Rhamnus, the son of Sophilus, first invented lessons in speaking and the figures of rhetoric, and that he was the first to plead a case for a fee and the first to write a courtroom speech for another man to deliver, as Diodorus says. Apollodorus of Cyme was the first to take the name of critic and to be called a grammarian; though some say Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first so called, since he published two books he entitled Grammatica. The first man to be called a grammarian in the sense we now give the word was Praxiphanes, the son of Dionysophanes of Mitylene. Zaleucus the Locrian was reported to be the first to frame laws in writing; others say it was Minos the son of Zeus, in the time of Lynceus. He comes after Danaus, in the eleventh generation from Inachus and Moses, as we will show a little further on. And Lycurgus, who lived many years after the taking of Troy, made laws for the Spartans a hundred and fifty years before the Olympiads. We have spoken already of the age of Solon. Draco — he was a lawgiver too — is found to have lived about the thirty-ninth Olympiad. Antilochus again, who wrote of the learned men from the time of Pythagoras to the death of Epicurus, which fell on the tenth day of the month Gamelion, makes the whole span three hundred and twelve years. Some say that Phanothea, the wife of Icarius, invented the heroic hexameter, others that it was Themis, one of the Titanesses. Didymus, however, in his work On Pythagorean Philosophy, says that Theano of Croton was the first woman to take up philosophy and to compose poems.

So Greek philosophy, according to some, laid hold of the truth by accident, dimly and in part; others will have it that philosophy was set going by the devil; and several suppose that certain powers came down from heaven and inspired the whole of it. But even if Greek philosophy does not take in the whole reach of the truth, and even if it has no strength to do what the Lord commands, it still prepares the way for the teaching that is truly royal. It trains a man after a fashion, it shapes his character, and it makes the one who believes in Providence ready to receive the truth.

But, they say, it is written: “All who came before the Lord’s coming are thieves and robbers.” All, then, who are in the Word — and it is these who came before the Word took flesh — are taken in generally. But the prophets, sent and inspired by the Lord, were not thieves but servants. Scripture says accordingly, “Wisdom sent out her servants, calling with a loud proclamation to her bowl of wine.” [q]

But philosophy, they say, was not sent by the Lord: it came by theft, or it was given by a thief. Then it was some power or angel that had learned something of the truth and did not stay in it that inspired these things and taught them — not without the Lord’s knowledge, who knew before each thing was made how what was to come would turn out, but without his forbidding it.

For the theft that reached people then did carry some advantage. Not that the one who committed it had any usefulness in view; but Providence directed the outcome of that reckless act to a useful end. I know that many are forever attacking us with the claim that not to prevent a thing from happening is to cause it. The man who takes no precaution against a theft, they say, or does not stop it, is the cause of it — as the man who does not put a fire out at the start is the cause of the blaze, and the master of a ship who does not reef his sail is the cause of the wreck. And certainly the law punishes people who cause such things, for blame for what happens attaches to the man who had the power to prevent it.

Our answer to them is that causing is seen in doing, working, acting, while not preventing does nothing at all in that respect. Causing belongs to activity — as the shipwright stands to the making of a ship, and the builder to the raising of a house. But the thing that does not prevent is separate from what takes place. So the effect will still come about, because what could have prevented it neither acts nor prevents. What activity does a thing exert by not preventing?

Their claim comes out absurd if they are going to say that the cause of a wound is not the spear but the shield, for not preventing the spear from going through; or if they blame not the thief but the man who did not stop the theft. Let them say, then, that it was not Hector who burned the ships of the Greeks but Achilles — since Achilles had the power to stop Hector and did not, but out of anger (and it rested with him whether to be angry) did not hold the fire back, and so was a contributing cause. Now the devil had free will, and he could have repented as readily as he could steal; so it was he who was the author of the theft, and not the Lord, who did not prevent him. And in any case the gift did no harm, such that a prevention needed to come in.

But if we must be exact with them, let them understand this. What does not prevent — in the theft we say took place — is no cause at all, while what does prevent is the thing caught in the charge of causing. The man who covers another with a shield is the cause of his not being wounded, since he prevents the wound. So too the divine sign of Socrates was a cause, not by failing to prevent, but by urging — even if, strictly speaking, it did not urge. And neither praise nor blame, neither rewards nor punishments, are right if the soul has no power to lean toward a thing or away from it, and evil is not willingly done. So the man who prevents is a cause, while the one who does not prevent passes a just verdict on the soul’s own choice. In no way, then, is God the author of evil.

But since free choice and the leaning of a man’s will are what start sins, and since a mistaken judgment sometimes takes hold — a judgment we take no trouble to back out of, ignorance and stupidity though it is — punishments are rightly imposed. Catching a fever is not something a man wills; but when a man brings the fever on himself by his own excess, we blame him. Evil, then, is not willingly done, for no one prefers evil as evil: a man is drawn on by the pleasure in it, takes it for something good, and so counts it worth having. That being so, it rests with us to free ourselves from ignorance and from an evil, pleasure-seeking choice, and above all to withhold our assent from those deceiving appearances.

The devil is called “thief and robber,” for he mixed false prophets in among the prophets as weeds are mixed with wheat. “All, then, who came before the Lord were thieves and robbers” — not absolutely every person, but all the false prophets and all who were not properly sent by him. The false prophets held the name of prophet dishonestly: prophets they were, but prophets of the liar. For the Lord says: “You are from your father the devil, and you want to do what your father craves. He was a murderer from the beginning and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie he speaks from what is his own, for he is a liar and the father of the lie.”

But among their lies the false prophets also told some true things. And in fact they prophesied out of their senses, as servants of the apostate. And the Shepherd, the angel of repentance, says to Hermas about the false prophet: “He does speak some truths. For the devil fills him with his own spirit, in the hope that he may knock down someone who stands upright.”

Everything, therefore, is dispensed from heaven for good, “so that through the church the many-sided wisdom of God might be made known, according to the eternal foreknowledge which he purposed in Christ.” Nothing withstands God and nothing opposes him, since he is Lord and all-powerful. Further, the plans and the doings of those who have rebelled are only partial, and they come out of a bad disposition as bodily diseases come out of a bad constitution; but they are steered by universal Providence toward a healthy outcome, even when the cause is one that breeds disease. It is the greatest achievement of divine Providence not to let the evil that sprang from a willing revolt lie useless and good for nothing, and not to let it turn out harmful in every respect. For it is the work of God’s wisdom and excellence and power not only to do good — that is, so to speak, God’s nature, as it is the nature of fire to warm and of light to shine — but above all to see that what comes about through the evils some have hatched arrives at a good and useful end, and to turn to advantage the things that look like evils, the witness that comes out of testing included.

There is, then, in philosophy — stolen like the fire of Prometheus — a small spark that can be fanned into flame, a trace of wisdom and a stirring from God. Well, let it be that “the thieves and robbers” are the philosophers among the Greeks, who before the Lord’s coming took fragments of the truth from the Hebrew prophets without full knowledge of them and claimed these as teachings of their own — disguising some points, handling others cleverly like sophists, and finding out other things for themselves; for perhaps they had “a spirit of perception.” Aristotle too agreed with Scripture and declared that sophistry had stolen wisdom, as we said earlier. And the apostle says, “These things we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Holy Spirit.” For of the prophets it is said, “We have all received of his fullness” — that is, of Christ’s. So the prophets are not thieves. “And my teaching is not mine,” says the Lord, “but the Father’s, who sent me.” And of those who steal he says, “The one who speaks from himself is looking for his own glory.” That is what the Greeks are: “lovers of self, boasters.” When Scripture speaks of such men as wise, it is not branding those who really are wise, but those who are wise only in appearance.