Message #190773

[Corissa]

3. If we ascend to authority of more remote date, we shall find in "the Golden Verses" themselves this remarkable sentiment: "Men are grown miserable through their own fault." An expression which argues in Pythagoras, as well as Plato, "more acquaintance with the truth than he is inclined to discover."

4. If, from the meditations of philosophers, we pass to the imaginations of poets, we shall find that neither Homer nor Hesiod were ignorant of the degeneracy of mankind. In the poetic fiction of "the Golden Age" we shall recognize a clear trace of the original purity of man, whose fall and corruption may be as clearly traced in the subsequent ages of deterioration. The opinion of Homer, that "few children are like their fathers, the majority worse 2," illustrates the poetical conceit so beautifully imagined by



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