Meeting the Dead Reveals Historical Lies — Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's second day at Glubbdubdrib corrects ancient and modern history. He summons Homer and Aristotle before hundreds of commentators and learns the scholars kept the most distant quarters from their principals out of shame for misrepresenting them. Aristotle dismisses Scotus and Ramus; Descartes and Gassendi admit their systems are conjecture and fashion. He dines with Roman emperors, Heliogabalus's cooks who lack materials, and a Spartan helot whose broth he cannot swallow twice. Then the noble pedigrees collapse. Expecting crowned ancestors, Gulliver finds fiddlers, barbers, cardinals, pages, gamesters, and pickpockets interrupting the line. He turns to modern history and finds prostitute writers ascribing war to cowards, counsel to fools, and piety to atheists while bawds and buffoons move courts. Kings confess their promotions ran on corruption; the people who actually served states appear in mean habit, dead in poverty, on scaffolds, or not on any record at all. The Actium captain who broke the enemy line and lost his son gets no ship; the command goes to a boy who never saw the sea, son of Libertina who waited on an emperor's mistress, and Agrippa confirms every word. Gulliver compares degenerate English faces to the old yeoman stamp and finds those native virtues sold for money by grandchildren who learned every court vice at elections. Official history survives; merit does not.