NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

Homiletical.fleeing from the sirens’ songs. 661 Familiarity with evil words is a sure road to evil deeds,wherefore every possible precaution must be taken to prevent our souls from unconsciouslyimbibing evil influences through literary gratification, like men who take poison in honey.We shall not therefore praise the poets when they revile and mock, or when they describelicentious, intoxicated characters, when they define happiness as consisting in a laden tableand dissolute ditties. Least of all shall we attend to the poets when they are talking aboutthe gods, specially when their talk is of many gods, and those in mutual disagreement. Foramong them brother is at variance with brother, parent against children, and children wagea truceless war against parents. The gods’ adulteries and amours and unabashed embraces,and specially those of Zeus, whom they describe as the chief and highest of them all,—thingswhich could not be told without a blush of brutes,—all this let us leave to actors on thestage. 662I must make the same remark about historians, specially when they write merely toplease. And we certainly shall not follow rhetoricians in the art of lying.…I have been taughtby one well able to understand a poet’s mind that with Homer all his poetry is praise ofvirtue, and that in him all that is not mere accessory tends to this end. A marked instanceof this is his description of the prince of the Kephallenians saved naked from shipwreck.No sooner did he appear than the princess viewed him with reverence; so far was she fromfeeling anything like shame at seeing him naked and alone, since his virtue stood him in thestead of clothes. 663 Afterwards he was of so much estimation among the rest of the Phæaciansthat they abandoned the pleasures amid which they lived, all looked up to him and imitatedhim, and not a man of the Phæacians prayed for anything more eagerly than that he mightbe Ulysses,—a mere waif saved from shipwreck. Herein my friend said that he was the interpreterof the poet’s mind; that Homer all but said aloud, Virtue, O men, is what you haveto care for. Virtue swims out with the shipwrecked sailor, and when he is cast naked on thecoast, virtue makes him more noble than the happy Phæacians. And truly this is so. Otherbelongings are not more the property of their possessors than of any one else. They are likedice flung hither and thither in a game. Virtue is the one possession which cannot be takenaway, and remains with us alike alive and dead.It is in this sense that I think Solon said to the rich,lxvi᾽Αλλ᾽ ἡμεῖς αὐτοῖς οὐ διαμειψόμεθα661 Hom., Od. xii. 158. cf. Letter i. p. 109.662 This shews that the shameless and cruel exhibitions of earlier days had not died out even in the fourthcentury. cf. Suetonius, Nero xi., xii., Tertullian, Apol. 15. On the whole subject, see Bp. Lightfoot’s note on St.Clem. Rom., Ep. ad Cor. vi., where Δαναΐδες καὶ Δίρκαι is probably a misreading for νεάνιδες παιδισκαι. Herefers for illustrations to Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, ii. 234.663 Od. vi. 135 κ.τ.λ.115