ousands of years to the foundation
of Cumaea and Magna Graecia, of which it was the pioneer settlement.
That the civilization of the latter had already become effete when
Pythagoras, the great pupil of Aryan Masters went to Crotone. And,
having no biblical bias to overcome, he feels persuaded that, if it took
the Celtic and Gaelic tribes Britannicae Insulae, with the ready-made
civilizations of Rome before their eyes, and acquaintance with that of
the Phoenicians whose trade with them began a thousand years before the
Christian era; and to crown all with the definite help later of the
Normans and Saxons--two thousand years before they could build their
medieval cities, not even remotely comparable with those of the Romans;
and it took them two thousand five hundred years to get half as
civilized; then, that instead of that hypothetical period, benevolently
styled the childhood of the race, being within easy reach of the
Apostles and the early Fathers, it must be relegated to an enormously
earlier time. Surely if it took the barbarians of Western Europe so
many centuries to develop a language and create empires, then the
nomadic tribes of the "mythical" periods ought in common fairness--since
they never came under the fructifying energy of that Christian influence
to which we are asked to ascribe all the scientific enlightenment of
this age--about ten thousand years to build their Tyres and their Veii,
their Sidons and Carthagenes. As other Troys lie under the surface of
the topmost one in the Troad; and other and higher civilizations were
exhumed by Mariette Bey under the stratum of sand from which the
archeological collections of Lepsius, Abbott, and the British Museum
were taken; and six Hindu "Delhis," superposed and hidden away out of
sight, formed the pedestal upon which the Mogul conqueror built the
gorgeous capital whose ruins still attest the splendour of his Delhi;
so when the fury of critical bigotry has quite subsided, and Western men
are prepared to write history in the interest of truth alone, will the
proofs be found of the cyclic law of civilization. Modern Florence
lifts her beautiful form above the tomb of Etruscan Florentia, which in
her turn rose upon the hidden vestiges of anterior towns. And so also
Arezzo, Perugia, Lucca, and many other European sites now occupied by
modern towns and cities, are based upon the relics of archaic
civilizations whose period covers ages incomputable, and whose na