rator, or
even an historian, being taught to speak the language of the Saracens.
[70] The mythology of Homer would have provoked the abhorrence of those
stern fanatics: they possessed in lazy ignorance the colonies of the
Macedonians, and the provinces of Carthage and Rome: the heroes of
Plutarch and Livy were buried in oblivion; and the history of the world
before Mahomet was reduced to a short legend of the patriarchs, the
prophets, and the Persian kings. Our education in the Greek and Latin
schools may have fixed in our minds a standard of exclusive taste; and
I am not forward to condemn the literature and judgment of nations, of
whose language I am ignorant. Yet I know that the classics have much
to teach, and I believe that the Orientals have much to learn; the
temperate dignity of style, the graceful proportions of art, the forms
of visible and intellectual beauty, the just delineation of character
and passion, the rhetoric of narrative and argument, the regular fabric
of epic and dramatic poetry. [71] The influence of truth and reason
is of a less ambiguous complexion. The philosophers of Athens and Rome
enjoyed the blessings, and asserted the rights, of civil and religious
freedom. Their moral and political writings might have gradually
unlocked the fetters of Eastern despotism, diffused a liberal spirit of
inquiry and toleration, and encouraged the Arabian sages to suspect
that their caliph was a tyrant, and their prophet an impostor. [72] The
instinct of superstition was alarmed by the introduction even of the
abstract sciences; and the more rigid doctors of the law condemned
the rash and pernicious curiosity of Almamon. [73] To the thirst of
martyrdom, the vision of paradise, and the belief of predestination, we
must ascribe the invincible enthusiasm of the prince and people. And the
sword of the Saracens became less formidable when their youth was drawn
away from the camp to the college, when the armies of the faithful
presumed to read and to reflect. Yet the foolish vanity of the Greeks
was jealous of their studies, and reluctantly imparted the sacred fire
to the Barbarians of the East. [74]

[Footnote 70: Abulpharagius (Dynast. p. 26, 148) mentions a Syriac
version of Homer's two poems, by Theophilus, a Christian Maronite of
Mount Libanus, who professed astronomy at Roha or Edessa towards the end
of the viiith century. His work would be a literary curiosity. I
have read somewhere, but I do not believe, tha