# 5. Changes of Religion and of Language, together with such Misfortunes as Floods or Pestilences, obliterate the Records of the Past

To those philosophers who want to make out that the world is eternal, I think the answer might be that, if it really were as old as all this, it would be reasonable to expect there would be records going back further than five thousand years, did we not see how the records of times gone by are obliterated by diverse causes, of which some are due to men and some to heaven. Those which are due to men are changes in religious institutions and in language. For, when a new religious institution comes into being, i.e. a new religion, its first care is, for the sake of its own reputation, to wipe out the old one; and, when the founders of a new religion happen to speak a different tongue, the old one is easily abolished. This becomes clear if we consider the measures which Christianity adopted vis-à-vis Paganism; how it abolished all pagan institutions, all pagan rites, and destroyed the records of the theology of the ancients. It is true that Christianity did not succeed in wiping out altogether the record of what outstanding men of the old religion had done; which was due to the retention of the Latin language, for this they had to retain so that they might use it in writing down their new laws. Had they been able to write them in a new tongue, there would, if we bear in mind the way they persecuted in other matters, have been no record of the past left at all.

Whoever reads of the measures taken by Saint Gregory and other heads of the Christian religion, will see what a fuss they made about getting rid of all records of the past, how they burnt the works of poets and historians, destroyed images and spoiled everything else that betokened in any way antiquity. So much so that, if to this persecution there had been conjoined a new language, in a short time one would have found all traces of the past wiped out. One can well believe, therefore, that what Christianity did with regard to Paganism,42 Paganism did to the religion that preceded it; and, as there have been two or three changes of religion in five or six thousand years, the record of what happened before that has been lost; or, if of it there remains a trace, it is regarded as a fable and no credence is given to it; as has happened with regard to the History of Diodorus Siculus, which covers a period of some forty or fifty thousand years, but is looked upon as untrustworthy, as I believe it to be.

The causes due to heaven are those which wipe out a whole generation and reduce the inhabitants in certain parts of the world to but a few. This is brought about by pestilence or by famine or by a flood and of these the most important is the last alike because it is more widespread and because those who survive are all of them rude mountain-dwellers who have no knowledge of antiquity and so cannot hand it down to posterity; and should there be among the survivors anyone who has such knowledge he will conceal it or distort it in his own fashion so as to establish his own reputation and that of his family, with the result that there will remain to his successors just so much as he has chosen to record and nothing more.

That these floods, pestilences and famines happen, I do not think anyone can doubt, for plenty of them are recorded everywhere in history, their effect in obliterating the past is plain to see, and it seems reasonable that it should be so. For, as in the case of simple bodies, when nature has accumulated too much superfluous material, it frequently acts in the same way and by means of a purge restores health to the body. Similarly in the case of that body which comprises a mixture of human races, when every province is replete with inhabitants who can neither obtain a livelihood nor move elsewhere since all other places are occupied and full up, and when the craftiness and malignity of man has gone as far as it can go, the world must needs be purged in one of these three ways, so that mankind, being reduced to comparatively few and humbled by adversity, may adopt a more appropriate form of life and grow better.

There was, then, as we have said before, a time when Tuscany was a powerful country, full of religion and of virtue, with its own customs and its own language, all of which we know was wiped out by the power of Rome, so that of it, as has been said, there remains nought but the remembrance of its name.





Book Two



[DISCOURSES 6–10]


[Colonization and War: Its Causes and Cost]