To the Nations 1.8

Plainly, we are called “the third race.” Dog-faced men, perhaps, or Shadow-feet? Or some Antipodes from under the earth? If you have any reasoning at all in this, I should like you to state the first and second race, so that the third may thus be established. Psammetichus, indeed, thought he had found out by his ingenuity which race was born first. For he is said to have handed over infants fresh from birth, cut off from all human intercourse, to be reared by a nurse whose tongue he had cut out for this very purpose, so that, wholly exiled from the human voice, they might form their speech not by hearing, but, bringing out their own, might mark out as the first nation the one whose sound nature had dictated. The first word reported was BEKKOS; its meaning is the Phrygians' word for bread; so from then on the Phrygians are held to be the first race. But this will be one of the vanities of your fables that we must not handle idly, since by it we are eager to show that your belief is given to vanities rather than to truths. Is it at all credible that, with such a member cut out, the very instrument of the soul laid waste and severed at the root, the throat mutilated (which is dangerously wounded even from outside), the gore then flowing back into the chest, and finally with nourishment cut off for some time, the life of that nurse endured? Come now, suppose she prolonged her life with the remedies of Philomela, whom wiser people take to have been mute not from the cutting out of her tongue but from the blush of shame. If, then, she lived, she could blurt out something dull. And an inarticulate sound, a ringing without the shaping of the lips, can be forced from an open mouth, with the tongue lifeless, from the throat alone. Perhaps the infants, because it was the only sound they heard, imitated it the more easily and a little more tunefully, having tongues, and so stumbled on something that seemed to have a meaning. Let the Phrygians now be first; the Christians are still not third. For how many other successions of nations are there after the Phrygians? But reflect, lest those whom you call the third race should hold the first place, since there is no nation that is not Christian. So whatever nation is first is nonetheless Christian. With ridiculous madness you call us the newest and name us the third. But it is in respect of religion that we are counted the third race, not of nation: so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians. But where are the Greeks? Or if they are reckoned among the religions of the Romans, since indeed Rome courted even the gods of Greece, where at least are the Egyptians, who also, as far as I know, have a religion peculiar and curious? Moreover, if those in the third place are so monstrous, what are we to think of those who go before them in the first and second?