en
his appeal to a divinity is: "Thou that art the beginning of lofty
virtue, Lady Truth, forbid thou that my poem [or composition] should
stumble against a lie, harsh rock of offense."[3] In his tragedy of
the Philoctetes, Sophocles makes the whole play pivot on the remorse
of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, over his having lied to Philoctetes
(who is for the time being an enemy of the Greeks), in order to secure
through him the killing of Paris and the overthrow of Troy. The lie
was told at the instigation of Ulysses; but Neoptolemus repents its
utterance, and refuses to take advantage of it, even though the fate
of Troy and the triumph of Greek arms depend on the issue. The plain
teaching of the tragedy is that "the purposes of heaven are not to
be served by a lie; and that the simplicity of the young son of
truth-loving Achilles is better in the sight of heaven, even when
it seems to lead to failure, than all the cleverness of guileful
Ulysses."[4]

[Footnote 1: Pythian Ode, I, 86.]

[Footnote 2: Olympian Ode, 4, 16.]

[Footnote 3: Bergk's _Pindar_, 183 [221].]

[Footnote 4: Professor Lamberton]

It is admitted on all hands that the Romans and the Germans had a high
ideal as to the duty of truthfulness and the sin of lying.[1] And so
it was in fact with all peoples which had any considerable measure of
civilization in former ages. It is a noteworthy fact that the duty of
veracity is often more prominent among primitive peoples than among
the more civilized, and that, correspondingly, lying is abhorred as a
vice, or seems to be unknown as an expedient in social intercourse.
This is not always admitted in the theories of writers on morals, but
it would seem to be borne out by an examination into the facts of
the case. Lecky, in his study of "the natural history of morals,"[2]
claims that veracity "usually increases with civilization," and he
seeks to show why it is so. But this view of Lecky's is an unfounded
assumption, in support of which he proffers no evidence; while Herbert
Spencer's exhibit of facts, in his "Cyclopaedia of Descriptive
Sociology," seems to disprove the claim of Lecky; and he directly
asserts that "surviving remnants of some primitive races in India have
natures in which truthfulness seems to be organic; that not only to
the surrounding Hindoos, higher intellectually and relatively advanced
in culture, are they in this respect far superior, but they are
superior to Europeans."[3]

[Footnote