From an essay of the same title by Dorothy Sayers, I have selected the first four or five and the very last paragraphs for quotation; the whole essay is excellent, but the meat of it (and the part that struck me most profoundly) is here. It may be found in full in 'Letters to a Diminished Church,' a republication of several of her essays.
pigeonholed with the Greeks and Romans
"I owe a certain debt to Cyrus the Persian. I made his acquaintance fairly early, for he lived between the pages of a children's magazine, in a series entitled Tales from Herodotus, or something of that kind. There was a picture of him being brought up by the herdsman of King Astyages, dressed in a short tunic very like the garment worn by the young Theseus or Perseus in the illustrations to Kingsley's Heroes. He belonged quite definitely to classical times; did he not overcome Croesus, that rich king of whom Solon had said, "Call no man happy until he is dead"? The story was half fairy tale--"his mother dreamed," "the oracle spoke"--but half history too: he commanded his soldiers to divert the course of the Euphrates, so that they might march into Babylon along the riverbed; that sounded like practical warfare. Cyrus was pigeonholed in my mind with the Greeks and the Romans.
Sinai marching slap into Greece
"So for a long time he remained. And then, one day, I realized, with a shock as of sacrilege, that on that famous expedition he had marched clean out of our Herodotus and slap into the Bible. Mene, mene, tekel uppharsin--the palace walls had blazed with the exploits of Cyrus, and Belshazzar's feast had broken up in disorder under the stern and warning eye of the prophet Daniel.
"But Daniel and Belshazzar did not live in the classics at all. They lived in the Church, with Adam and Abraham and Elijah, and were dressed like Bible characters, especially Daniel. And here was God--not Zeus or Apollo or any of the Olympian crowd, but the fierce and disheveled old gentleman from Mount Sinai--bursting into Greek history in a most uncharacteristic way and taking an interest in events and people that seemed altogether outside His province. It was disconcerting.
"And then there was Esther. She lived in a book called Stories from the Old Testament, and had done very well for God's chosen people by her diplomatic approach to King Ahasuerus. A good Old-Testament-sounding name, Ahasuerus, reminding one of Ahab and Ahaz and Ahaziah. I cannot remember in what out-of-the-way primer of general knowledge I came across the astonishing equation, thrown out casually in a passing phrase, "Ahasuerus (or Xerxes)." Xerxes!--but one knew all about Xerxes. He was not just classics, but real history; it was against Xerxes that the Greeks had made their desperate and heroic stand at Thermopylae. There was none of the fairy-tale atmosphere of Cyrus about him--no dreams, no oracles, no faithful herdsman--only the noise and dust of armies tramping through the hard outlines and clear colors of a Grecian landscape, where the sun always shone so much more vividly than it did in the Bible.
the synthesis and confutation of history
"I think it was chiefly Cyrus and Ahasuerus who prodded me into the belated conviction that history was all of a piece, and that the Bible was part of it. One might have expected Jesus to provide the link between two worlds--the Caesars were classical history all right. But Jesus was a special case. One used a particular tone of voice in speaking of him, and he dressed neither like Bible nor like classics--he dressed like Jesus, in a fashion closely imitated (down to the halo) by his disciples. If he belonged anywhere, it was to Rome, in spite of strenuous prophetic efforts to identify him with the story of the Bible Jews. Indeed, the Jews themselves had undergone a mysterious change in the blank pages between the Testaments: in the Old, they were good people; in the New, they were bad people--it seemed doubtful whether they really were the same people. Nevertheless, Old or New, all these people lived in Church and were Bible characters--they were not real in the sense that King Alfred was a real person; still less could their conduct be judged by standards that applied to one's contemporaries.
"Most children, I suppose, begin by keeping different bits of history in watertight compartments, of which the Bible is the tightest and most impenetrable. But some people seem never to grow out of this habit--possibly because of never having really met Cyrus and Ahasuerus (or Xerxes). Bible critics in particular appear to be persons of very leisurely mental growth.
"'Altogether man, with a rational mind and human body--.' It is just as well that from time to time Cyrus should march out of Herodotus into the Bible for the synthesis of history and the confutation of history."
