Benjamin Constant

.... Origin of the religion of the Greeks.—They received a new

system of Theology from their Eastern invaders, which they

blended with their own.—Hence the partial coincidence of the

Grecian with the Egyptian and Phenician Mythology.—Error of

Mythologists in attempting to trace all the fables of antiquity, and

the various systems of Pagan Theology, up to one common source.

Reflections on the study of Mythology.—The uncertainty and

unprofitableness of such researches.—The ancient Greeks

characterised by a spirit of supersitition...^77

Narrow in one sense, Tytler’s lectures were nonetheless extraordinarily

wide-ranging in every other way: he gave his students a history of the

Western World (Egypt, Greece, Rome, then the Middle Ages to the

seventeenth century), tracing the rise and fall of civilizations, the origin of

laws, the nature of the first governments, and the growth of the English
constitution. Tytler did not neglect the importance of religion, philosophy

or the arts and sciences. One section of his course may well have had a

determining influence on Constant:

Institutions respecting religious worship.—Origin of Idolatry and

Polytheism.—Metamorphoses of the Gods.—Apotheosis of

heroes.—Institution of the priesthood, and its connection with the

regal dignity.^78

Were Tytler’s lectures the spark that began a long slow-burning passion,

‘le seul interet de ma vie’, ‘the only interest in my life’, as Constant would
call it,^79 that culminated in his books De la religion (Concerning Religion)

and Du polythéisme romain (Concerning Roman Polytheism)? For all his

dismissiveness about mythological researches—no doubt an additional

spur to an intellectually rebellious young man—Tytler urged on his

students, ‘The necessity of prosecuting the study of History according to a
regular plan.... Fruitlessness of the desultory perusal of detached

histories’.^80 According to Ma Vie the idea of writing a history of

polytheism came to Constant while in Brussels in the late summer and

autumn of 1785, that is only a few months after leaving Edinburgh,
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but it

may have been conceived earlier still. Did he remember Tytler and apply
to his work on religions that sustained attention Tytler recommended?

Constant’s book was destined to become a refuge from the many political

and emotional conflicts in which he would find himself. And persevering

with it as he did was perhaps some tangible link with a lost scholarly Eden

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