PREFACE.

...the History of Fables original: "Historique des Fables"; likely referring to the author's earlier work L'Histoire des Fables éclaircie par l'Histoire, which was the first essay I produced on this subject (1); but at the same time, there seemed to be a desire for a more extensive and more profound Mythology. "This work," enlightened individuals have often told me, "is missing from our language." This is because, to say nothing of the outdated style of those works we have in French on this subject, one finds nothing systematic in them; the Fables are not traced back to any source, nor to any specific time. The origin of the Gods is not developed, and no distinction is made between those Gods who were often the same figures under different names. Finally, if one finds some traces of History there, they are drowned in a mass of arbitrary Allegories and Moralizations (2). Furthermore, the authors of these Mythologies, deprived of the discoveries made by the scholars who followed them, followed unreliable guides; and today we are better equipped than they were to treat this matter. What light, indeed, has been shed upon it by the likes of Meziriac, Bochart, Vossius, and several others? And if these learned men had explained every Fable as they explained those that happened to have some connection to the matters they had undertaken to clarify, we would have no need for a new Mythology.

In order to satisfy what was expected of me, I formed the plan for the work I am presenting today. My Dissertations on various subjects of Mythology, which are printed in the Memoirs of the Academy of Belles-Lettres The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a French learned society devoted to the humanities, and the Explications I added to the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, prove that I never lost sight of this goal.