The Lost Treasures of Sethos, Enlightened Prince of Egypt (1731)

Mark SoMoS

THE LOST TREASURES OF SETHOS, ENLIGHTENED PRINCE OF EGYPT

(1731)

ESTRATTOda

ATHENIAN LEGACIESEUROPEAN DEBATES

ON CITIZENSHIP

Edited byPaschalis M. KitroMilides

Leo S. Olschki Editore Firenze

IL PENSIERO POLITICOBiblioteca

34


ON CITIZENSHIPEdited by

Paschalis M. KitroMilides

Leo S. Olschki2014

IL PENSIERO POLITICOBiblioteca

34


ON CITIZENSHIPEdited by

Paschalis M. KitroMilides

Leo S. Olschki2014

Tutti i diritti riservati

CaSa EditriCE LEo S. oLSChki

Viuzzo del Pozzetto, 8 50126 Firenze www.olschki.it

Volume pubblicato con il contributo di

ISBN 978 88 222 6358 2

Tutti i diritti riservati

CASA EDITRICE LEO S. OLSCHKI

Viuzzo del Pozzetto, 8

50126 Firenze

www.olschki.it

Volume pubblicato con il contributo di

ISBN 978 88 222 6147 2

— 5 —

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pag. 7

PaSChaLiS M. kitroMiLidES, Redeeming European Political Thought » 9

aSPECtS of CitizEnShiP in thE CLaSSiCaL City

andrEaS kaLyvaS, Solonian Citizenship: Democracy, Conflict, Parti-cipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 19

GEorGE th. MavroGordatoS, Citizenship and Military Obligation in Classical Athens: The Anomaly of the Metics . . . . . . . . . . . . » 37

ioanniS kyriakantonakiS, Citizenship and Initiation: Common Realms and Concepts in Classical Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 49

GEoff kEnnEdy, Senatus Populusque Romanus against the Demos:Roman Republicanism versus Athenian Democracy . . . . . . . . . . » 69

CitizEnShiP in GrEEk PoLitiCaL PhiLoSoPhy

PEriCLES S. vaLLianoS, Politics as Mediation: Law and the Private Sphere in the Late Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 95

anthony MakrydEMEtrES, Leadership and Citizenship in Plato’s Politicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 119

diMitrioS MourtziLaS, The Notion of Citizenship in Aristotle’s Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 127

ChariLaoS PLatanakiS, Aristotle on Political Participation . . . . . . . » 135

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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idEaS of CitizEnShiP in rEnaiSSanCE and EarLy ModErn PoLitiCaL thouGht

adriana zanGara, La démocratie athénienne vue depuis Florence:Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannotti et la question de l’ostracisme Pag. 159

MarCo Giani, Athenian Ostracism in Venetian Disguise: an HistoricalDiatribe in Late Renaissance Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 179

XaviEr GiL, City, Communication and Concord in Renaissance Spain and Spanish America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 195

toMaSz GroMELSki, Citizenship in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania » 223

Johan oLSthoorn, Forfeiting Citizenship: Hobbes on Rebels, Trai-tors and Enemies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 237

huMan naturE and CitizEnShiP in an aGE of EnLiGhtEnMEnt and rEvoLution

PEtEr SChrödEr, “Une distinction frivole” – Enlightenment Discus-sions of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 255

Mark SoMoS, The Lost Treasures of Sethos, Enlightened Prince of Egypt (1731) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 271

JaMES LivESEy, From Athens to Paris: The Legislative Assembly andDemocracy in the Summer of 1792 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 315

CLaSSiCaL EvoCationS and thE ChaLLEnGE of ModErnity

CharLES h. CLavEy, An Athens in Weimar: The Political Theory of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 333

niaLL Bond, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Community-Society Dichotomy andits Relevance for Discussions of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 359

ContEMPorary ChaLLEnGES

GiuSEPPE BaLLaCCi, Actualizing Democratic Citizenship: Arendt and Classical Rhetoric on Judgment and Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 381

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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davidE CadEddu, The Active Citizenship of Twentieth-Century In-tellectuals: Reading Benda’s La trahison des clercs . . . . . . . . . . Pag. 413

konStantinoS PaPaGEorGiou, Cosmopolitan Citizenship in a Com-plex World. Arguments for an Impure View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 425

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 450

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . » 451

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Mark SoMoS

THE LOST TREASURES OF SETHOS, ENLIGHTENED PRINCE OF EGYPT

(1731)

Séthos (1731) deserves more attention. Its contributions to Egyptomania, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Freemasonic symbolism, and the battle of ancients and moderns, are some of the reasons. Séthos also claims to be the third in a new, distinctive type of philosophical novels, after Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699) and Ramsay’s Cyrus (1727). These novels, often revolving around a traveling prince, set up a series of literary thought experiments to systematically test and explore competing commercial and political arrangements, both foreign and domestic. They also propose a model for the education of a new sort of man, suited for the commercial age and its effect on popular and global pol-itics. Fénelonian novels are veritable treasure troves of thought experiments and social criticism. They remain under-used by historians of eighteenth-cen-tury political and economic thought.

IntroductIon*

1. Summary

The contribution of Fénelon’s Télémaque (1693-4, 1699) to early capi-talism is recognised in recent literature. Beside its obvious political signifi-cance, the Cambridge School foregrounded its role in an interconnected set

* Thanks to Joseph Disponzio, who called my attention to this book in 2000 as a source on French garden design; to James Schmidt, who read and commented on the first version of this pa-per in 2001; and to Doohwan Ahn, Ioannis Evrigenis, Marius Hentea, Marketa Klicova, Christoph Schmitt-Maaß, Michael Sonenscher and Richard Whatmore, who commented on later drafts. A version was presented at the “Commerce and Perpetual Peace” workshop in 2008 at King’s College, Cambridge. I am grateful to the organisers, István Hont and Isaac Nakhimovsky.

MARK SOMOS

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of debates, ranging from Ancients v. Moderns, a new morality suitable to a commercial age, and Quetism-inspired criticisms of absolutist limits on tol-eration, to international military and trading arrangements aimed at self-reli-ance, controlled development, and moral harmony. The impact of Féneloni-an thought experiments upon commercial morality and politics has recently been traced in Italy and Germany.

Beside commercial and political texts, Télémaque also inspired a self-con-scious genre of experimental novels, whose authors explicitly claim to follow Fénelon. This claim is a hallmark of this well-defined genre, and eliminates the hermeneutical obfuscation and ambiguity that mars Fénelon’s reception. One purpose of Fénelonian novels, like Ramsay’s Cyrus (1727), Terrasson’s Séthos (1731), and Justi’s Psammitichus (1759-60), was to educate princes di-rectly (including Louis de Bourbon, dauphin de Viennois, duc de Bourgogne; Bonnie Prince Charles; and the Dauphin Louis, b. 1729). Another was to educate the public through direct reading and through emulating a prince, rightly instructed. Both aims subserved the higher objective of transforming morals to suit the new age.

These philosophical novels describe imaginary countries in the frame-work of a systematic thought experiment in social, political, and commercial reform. They share several features, from playful ruses to disguise their or-igin, through specific cross-references to one another, to commentaries on current affairs. The clearest formulation of the group, its objectives and sig-nificance, is Terrasson’s Séthos. It was a runaway bestseller, quickly translated into English, German, Italian and Russian. It inspired Mozart’s Magic Flute, introduced Egyptian symbolism into freemasonry, charmed Voltaire, and re-formed Enlightenment garden design. This paper presents it from the per-spective of the history of political and economic thought, rather than literary history, as a synecdochal case study of Fénelonian novels.

2. Author and text

Jean Terrasson (1670, Lyon – 1750, Paris) is an underrated Enlighten-ment figure. He was a rationalist, literary critic, epistemologist, theologian, professor of Greek and Latin philosophy at the Collège de France, and mem-ber of the Académie Française after 1732. His first known work is the Traité de l’infini créé, written in 1700.1 The 1715 Dissertation critique sur l’”Iliade”

1 Traité de l’infini créé, avec l’Explication de la possibilité de la trans-substantiation. Traité de la confession, & de la communion (Amsterdam, 1769). Occasionally ascribed to Fontenelle or

THE LOST TREASURES OF SETHOS, ENLIGHTENED PRINCE OF EGYPT (1731)

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d’Homère is a two-volume work of more than 1,100 pages in which Terrasson comes down strongly on the side of the Moderns.2 He proposed that literary and art criticism be rebuilt on a foundation of reason, and thereby replicate the progress of the natural sciences.3 Next came his Trois lettres sur le nouveau système des finances in 1720, prompted by Law’s financial reforms.4 Séthos, histoire, ou Vie tirée des monumens anecdotes de l’ancienne Égypte, traduite d’un manuscrit grec, first published in 1731, was re-issued in Amsterdam and translated into German and English the next year, into Italian in 1734, into German again in 1777-8, and Russian in 1787-8.5 It underwent numerous

Malebranche, Terrasson’s authorship is more or less established today. Traité de l’infini créé, ed. A. Del Prete (Paris, 2007). N. SMIth, ‘Traité de l’Infini Créé’, The Philosophical Review, 14:4 (1905), pp. 456-471. A. del Prete, ‘Entre Descartes et Malebranche: le “Traité de l’infini créé”’, in eds. A. McKenna and A. Mothu, La philosophie clandestine à l’âge classique (Paris-Oxford: Univer-sitas-Voltaire Foundation, 1997), pp. 307-319. Ibid, ‘Per la datazione del Traité de la infini créé: ricerche sulla biblioteca di Pierre-Daniel Huet’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, LVIII:4 (2003), pp. 713-717; ‘Le Traité de l’infini créé et Malebranche: la subversion du sens’, Tangence 81 (2006), pp. 119-141. On the Traité as a controversial theological consideration of extraterrestrial life and plu-rality of worlds see M.J. crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 134-137. S.J. dIck, ‘The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate and its Relation to the Scientific Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41:1 (1980), pp. 3-27.

2 Dissertation critique sur l’“Iliade” d’Homère: où, à l’occasion de ce poëme, on cherche les règles d’une poëtique fondée sur la raison: & sur les exemples des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1715). In 1716 he augmented it with ‘Addition a la Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homere, pour servir de réponse a la préface de M. Dacier sur le Nouveau manuel d’Epictete’.

3 This call was repeated in his posthumously published La philosophie applicable à tous les objets de l’esprit et de la raison: ouvrage en réflexions détachées (Paris, 1754). Overviews of the de-bate and Terrasson’s role in s.v. “Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century”, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, and s.v. “Ancients and Moderns”, J.T. ShIPley, Dictionary of World Literature: Criticisms, Forms, Technique (Read Books, 2007), pp. 33-34. D.L. Patey, ‘Ancients and Moderns’, in G.A. kennedy et al (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 32-71, esp. 54-5. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (London, 1920), ch. 5. J.M. levIne, ‘Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Mod-erns’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52:1 (1991), pp. 55-79, esp. 70-71.

4 The letters were originally published from February to May 1720. R. StourM, Bibliographie historique des finances de la France au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1895), p. 74. T.E. kaISer, ‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-Century France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit’, The Journal of Modern History, 63:1 (1991), pp. 1-28. On Law, see A.E. MurPhy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford, 1997).

5 The Life of Sethos, taken from the private memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians. Translated from a Greek manucsript [sic] into French. And now faithfully done into English from the Paris edition; By Mr. Lediard. In two volumes (London: Printed for J. Walthoe, over-against the Royal-Exchange in Cornhill, 1732). Abriss der wahren Helden-Tugend, oder, Lebens-Geschichte des Sethos, Königes in Egypten: aus geheimen Urkunden des alten Egypten-Landes gezogen und nach der frantzösischen Übersetzung eines griechischen Originals verteutschet von C.G.W [Christoph Gottlieb Wendt] (Hamburg: Gedruckt und verlegt von seel. Thomas von Wierings Erben; Ist auch in Leipzig: bey Philip Hertel, 1732-7). Setosi, Storia ovvero Vita, Tratta de Monumenti non pubblicati dell’ Antico Egitto, tr. Selvaggio Canturani (Venice: per Sebastiano Coleti, 1734). Geschichte des egyptischen Königs Sethos … Aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Matthias Claudius (Breslau, bey Gott-lieb Lowe, 1777-8). Geroiskaia dobrodietel’, ili Zhizn’ Sifa, TSaria Egipetskago, iz tainstvennykh

MARK SOMOS

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editions, and the interests and motives that united and divided its translators deserve a separate study. The 1732 English translation was prepared by naval historian and surveyor Thomas Lediard, and the cotemporaneous German translation by Christoph Gottieb Wendt, librettist and translator of Desfon-taines’s Le nouveau Gulliver, a pretended translation of a sequel by Swift.6 The Italian translator of the 1734 edition was Selvaggio Canturani, who also translated several works by Bossuet, Cardinal Fleury’s The Manners of the Ancient Israelites, Nicolas Lemery’s Traité de l’antimoine, D. Agostino Cal-met’s (an opponent of Galileo) Storica Antico Nuovo Testamento, and the Jesuit Jean Crasset’s History of the Japanese Church. These works are more or less reactionary Catholic engagements with modern physics and anthropolo-gy. The second German translation was prepared by the renowned poet Mat-thias Claudius, followed by a Russian version by Denis Fonvizin, playwright and Count Nikita Panin’s secretary. I examined the 1731 first French edition, the 1767 slightly expanded French edition, the first English translation from 1732, and the 1734 Italian. Citations are from the 1732 English version, with re-translations where indicated.

The extent to which Séthos refers to real-life figures and events remains an open question. It is possible to speculatively propose some identifica-tions. The immediate political context may be the Dauphin Louis’s birth in 1729. At the beginning of 1711 the French monarchy seemed secure. However, in April 1711 Louis le Grand Dauphin, for whom Télémaque was written, died unexpectedly. In 1712 Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, Louis XIV’s daughter and mother to Louis, duc de Bretagne and Louis, duc d’Anjou, died of smallpox. Her husband and the latest Dauphin, the duc de Bretagne, died of the same disease within a month. Her only remaining son was also infected, but was saved by his governess, who forbade bloodletting. The duc de Berry, youngest son of le Grand Dauphin, died without issue in a hunting accident in 1714.

Louis XIV lost four male descendants in three years. In 1714 only the frail, four-year-old Louis, duc d’Anjou, stood between the preservation of the freshly concluded peace and the renewal of the War of the Spanish Suc-cession. Louis XIV’s death in September 1715 was followed by an eventful Regency, which ended with the accession of Louis XV in 1723. Two years later Louis married Maria Leszczynska, Princess of Poland, with whom he

svidietel‘stv drevniago Egipta vziataia. Perevel Denis Fon-Vizin (Moscow: V Tipografii Kompanii Tipograficheskoi, 1787-8).

6 P-F.G. deSfontaIneS, Le nouveau Gulliver, ou voyage de Jean Gulliver, fils du Capitaine Gul-liver (Paris: Veuve Clouzier, 1730).


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had eleven children. Their only son to reach adulthood was Louis, born in September 1729. His birth was seen across Europe as the first stabilisation of the monarchy since 1711, and was welcomed with tremendous joy as a prom-ise of European peace. The shadow of a major war of succession with Spain was finally lifted. Certain features of Séthos, discussed below, suggest that in keeping with Fénelon’s and Ramsay’s practical combination of philosophical novels with actual guidance to educating potential heirs to a throne, Terras-son may have intended the book as moral instruction for Louis.

Another book by Terrasson, La philosophie applicable à tous les objets de l’esprit et de la raison, was published posthumously.7 Beside these original works, Terrasson was known as a translator of Diodorus Siculus, a source often used in Séthos. Volumes of the translation were published during Ter-rasson’s lifetime from 1737 to 1744. Terrasson is sometimes credited with L’Académie des Dames, but I have not been able to confirm whether he wrote the book himself, or translated it from a Latin satire by Johannes Meursius (1579-1639), itself pretending to be by Luisa Sigea de Velasco (1522-1560).8 Nicholas Chorier’s authorship is more probable.9

Terrasson’s brother, Antoine, was a lawyer who wrote about the vielle and the history of Roman law.10 Antoine wrote a great deal about the figure of the law-giver, and one imagines that the two brothers exchanged ideas about the topic. According to some biographical handbooks, there were two more brothers, Gaspard (1680-1752) and André (1669-1723), also born in Lyon, and both Oratorian preachers. Gaspard delivered the funeral oration of the Dauphin in 1711. In the early 1730s he became a Jansenist, and was impris-oned in 1735 for nine years.11

Like Terrasson’s, the importance of Séthos passes generally unnoticed in the secondary literature. Most of what exists concerns Schikaneder’s libretto

7 La philosophie applicable à tous les objets de l’esprit et de la raison: ouvrage en réflexions détachées (Paris, 1754).

8 L’Académie des Dames ou les Sept Entretiens galants d’Aloisia, traduits de Meursius (Paris, 1750).9 J.G. turner, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and

England 1534-1685 (Oxford, 2003), p. 167, passim.10 Dissertation historique sur la vielle; ou l’on examine l’origine & les progres de cet instrument.

Avec une digression sur l’histoire de la musique ancienne & moderne. Dediée à Mademoiselle de * * * par M. * * * (Paris, 1741). Histoire de la jurisprudence romaine, contenant son origine et ses progrès depuis la fondation de Rome jusqu’a present, etc. (Paris, 1750).

11 Most biographical references mention only Jean and Antoine. One exception is J.Fr. and L.G. MIchaud, Biographie universelle, ancien et moderne; ou, Histoire (Paris, 1811), which mentions all four as brothers, as well as a Matthieu, their cousin and a successful advocate in the Parlement of Paris. Antoine’s works on legal history are often referenced in the Encyclopédie.

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for Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791), for which Séthos was the major source.12 It was also vital for the development of Freemasonry, though it is debat-ed whether it introduced, or first reported, the use of Egyptian symbolism there.13 In either case, the key role of initiation and the cosmopolitan circle of initiates in Séthos make the connection substantial. Chailley traces some of the Austrian and German Masonic uses of Séthos.14 Otherwise, there are only occasional references to and, at best, two-line summaries of the plot.15 It featured briefly in the Black Athena controversy, and sometimes appears as a curio.16 I hope to show that the book has a great deal more to offer.

Among other intriguing features, it illustrates a twist in Greece’s nev-er-flagging relevance. Séthos is one of several Enlightenment attempts to re-examine politics with a relatively clean slate, without what was occasion-ally felt to be a stiflingly rich set of connotations accumulated around an-cient Greece, Israel and Rome. Even though Terrasson therefore reduced all Greek accomplishments to their supposed Egyptian origins, his contempo-raries associated the institutions and values he presented in the book most closely with Greece. The choices laid out in Séthos between commerce and war, and democracy and oligarchy, were best known to contemporary read-ers from conventional contrasts between Sparta and Athens; while the ex-clusive legitimising potential of popular sovereignty, the range of particular methods for public participation, and the competing balances between the duties and rights of national and cosmopolitan citizenship that Terrasson developed and discussed in an Egyptian framework, are recognisably and strikingly Greek. Unsurprisingly, and as shown in more detail below, even this determined eighteenth-century attempt to rethink domestic and global politics returned irresistibly to the language, institutions, and debates of an-cient Greece.

12 J. StaroBInSkI, ‘The Promise of Idomeneo’, The Hudson Review, 2002, pp. 15-30, esp. 20.13 A. GrIeve, ‘Egyptien ou gothique: le souterrain initiatique de Jean-Jacques Lequeu’, Eu-

rope, 62:659 (1984), pp. 97-103. P. retat, ‘Initiation maçonnique et initiation traditionnelle, modèle antique et projet civilisateur’, Lendemains 12:46 (1987), pp. 49-56.

14 J. chaIlley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera. The Magic Flute Unveiled: Esoteric Symbolism in Mozart’s Masonic Opera – An Interpretation of the Libretto and the Music (Rochester, Vermont, 1992). Also see R. SPaethlInG, ‘Folklore and Enlightenment in the Libretto of Mozart’s Magic Flute’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9:1 (1975), pp. 45-68.

15 E.g. P. hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIème siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris, 1946).16 E.g. one of the ‘top 10 worst books’: C.P. freund, ‘Great awful books’, Slate (1996). M.

Bernal, Black Athena (3 vols., 1987-2006, Rutgers). M. lefkowItz, Not out of Africa: How “Afrocen-trism” became an Excuse to teach Myth as History (BasicBooks, 1996), pp. 111-112.


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fénelonIan novelS

1. Genre and themes

Ramsay and Terrasson both claimed that their philosophical novels be-long to a new genre, started by Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (1699). Télémaque, written in 1693-4, is celebrated for several reasons, including the introduction of the Quietistic distinction between right and wrong kinds of love into political debates, and an elegant style that became widely imitated. It was written for Louis XIV’s son as part of Fénelon’s programme for the Dauphin’s upbringing, and was first printed without Fénelon’s authorisa-tion.17 He was banished from court, which in itself warrants a close reading of this otherwise innocent-looking tale about Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, and his adventurous travels in search of his father. The prince comes to moral perfection and fitness to rule by encountering cultures other than his own. The book relies on contrasts to identify what is universal in the prince’s cul-ture, what is unique, and what is wrong.

Ramsay and Terrasson offered detailed analyses of the distinguishing fea-tures of this new Bildungsroman.18 Here I will only summarise Terrasson’s ac-count of the new genre’s distinguishing features.19 It reflected the dominant political ideals of the day, but unlike conventional princely ‘mirrors’ it pre-ferred fiction over history, and used a more sophisticated moral psychology. It opened up the hitherto unique princely education to merit and, in moderated forms, to the wide public. Rules of self-control, prudence, secrecy, statecraft, deception were introduced through fables, but with greater psychological subtlety than before. These novels, Terrasson explained in the Preface, aim to educate the young prince not by the undemanding device of setting unam-biguously virtuous exemplars to follow, nor by motivating them with bland

17 Ramsay explains how Télémaque followed Fénelon’s principles for the Dauphin’s moral in-struction. ‘In Order to form his Mind, he was made to study, not by Rules, but according as Curios-ity, which they took Pains to excite in him, led him to it. By this Means Amusements were converted into Study, and the most serious Studies became an Amusement. A Conversation begun by Design, without his perceiving it, gave Occasion to the reading of a History, to the examining of a Map, and to such Reasonings and Discourses as, at his Age, he might be capable of comprehending. The Exercises set him were always solid Instructions. By some Story, or some Dialogue, which treated of the most considerable Transactions of ancient or modern Times, they made him acquainted with the Characters of the great Men of all Ages, and at the same Time, inspir’d him with the Love of the purest Virtue. The Dialogues of the Dead, and the Adventures of Telemachus, were written with this in View.’ A.M. raMSay, The Life of François de Salignac De la Motte Fenelon, Archbishop and Duke of Cambray (London, 1723), pp. 23-24.

18 Sethos, Preface. raMSay, Life. Taste. Cyrus. 19 Sethos, pp. I-xv.

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promises of glory in return for goodness. The new genre deploys well-target-ed strategies for drawing the young and impressionable into a fantasy world in which the characters they are invited to identify with face complex moral conditions, such as choices between two evils, between equally plausible ac-tive and passive responses, and the moral burden of a well-intended plan of deception – didactic white lies, for instance – going horribly wrong.

In Séthos’s Preface, itself a showcase of literary ruses and moral calculus, Terrasson explicitly claims that Séthos is the third work in the new genre, after Télémaque and Ramsay’s Les voyages de Cyrus (Paris, 1727). This genre took an original position on the use of history and fiction in moral instruction, strongly preferring fiction. A knowledge of history is essential for everyone, but it is infe-rior for didactic purposes. In real history good men often lose. The good quali-ties that need to be imparted can rarely all be found in one hero, or even in the moral balance or practical benefits that could motivate anyone to follow suit. Most moralising works described historical events and figures to show the out-come of a kind of behaviour, and therefore a kind of moral character, in a given situation. The classical histories of Livy, Tacitus, Sallust and others, sources of the stock exemplars, were read on the assumption that they were useful guides to successful action in the present. This implied that history has a pattern, or at least there were reproducible causal links between events in different places and times.20 This is not to deny that irrational pride, as an aid to emulation and empathy, was unwelcome in a hero; but it must remain an instrument for attain-ing virtuous ends, following a rational scheme. Even the Machivallian prince in search of glory and greatness had to be conscious of his motives.

The Renaissance and early modern use of exemplars relied heavily on the reproducibility of such links, and the attendant utility of internalising a spe-cific moral character. But history is mostly about conquest, which is no longer an appropriate object of emulation in the age of commerce and politeness. Since history can furnish exemplars of ‘false heroism’, a radical re-formation of princely education is needed. Beside the false-true heroism distinction in the Preface (related to true against selfish love, which translates into civilisa-tion vs. conquest as the prince’s objective), Terrasson draws attention to an-other form of bias built into historical accounts that makes them less suitable for moral instruction than well-designed fiction.

Even historians generally abridge the relation of peacable circumstances, which the great agitations of the state, and the tumultuous actions of war sometimes end

20 T. haMPton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Cornell, 1990). J. roSenthal, ‘Attitudes of Some Modern Rationalists to History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4:4 (1943), pp. 429-456.


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in. The longest spaces of time pass’d without any troubles, are the shortest in their works. The attention of readers is hardly to be kept up, but by the divisions or rev-olutions of empires ; or at least by conquests, which rendring a prince or a people renown’d, suppose the devastation of many others. And thus, we may always say, Happy that nation, or fortunate that age, the history of which is not diverting!21

Terrasson describes a love-hate relationship with rhetoric, distrusting it and being enchanted by it at the same time. Attitudes to rhetoric comprise too large a subject to discuss here, but it is worth noting some relevant as-pects. One side argued that simplicity proves or confirms a text’s veracity, or even its divine inspiration.22 If disagreements arise and the text needs in-terpretation, then it is corrupt, and/or disharmonious with divine truth and human understanding.23 The other side applauded the beauty of phrases, even if they eroded simplicity. Both sides had an Ancient and a Modern sub-division, focused on whether the Classics were simple or difficult, and right models or not. Terrasson’s eminence among the advocates of modern and rationalised literature will prove important for the discussion of secrecy below. Other issues that are elegantly and economically highlighted in the Preface include princely education, civilised politeness, initiation into mys-teries that rival religion, cultural relativism, and mesmerising tricks with text and authorship.

Terrasson ascribes to the new genre a kind of reason of state that relies on more sophisticated insights than earlier speculum writers. Rulers’ humanity is identical with commoners’. The methods developed to form, motivate and controll the common man, who is not always or wholly rational, shall also be used in the education of princely to supplement or even replace their reason, and develop both the right skills and the motivation required for a successful reign. Moreover, every citizen of the reformed European states must have the same basic education in politeness and science.24 The prince’s character is

21 Sethos, II.ix.348.22 This was Fénelon’s belief, according to raMSay, Life, pp. 107-110. Ramsay himself was a

close associate and secretary of Mme Guyon. 23 A standard defense against accusations of corrupt unclarity was to suggest that it is the crit-

ic’s soul that had become so corrupt that he cannot access the simple truth. Fénelon’s Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la vie intérieur (1697) is a case in point. It is an interpretation of the Articles d’Issy, the report of the commission convened to examine Mme Guyon’s orthodoxy. The commis-sion asked Bossuet to write an exposition of the Articles, entitled Instructions sur les états d’oraison. One of Fénelon’s points in the Maximes was to contrast the need for further elaborations with the simplicity and intuitiveness of Mme Guyon’s beliefs. It was the direct reason why Louis XIV sacked Fénelon as royal tutor, and the Maximes was condemned by the Inquisition in 1699.

24 B. Guy, ‘Toward an Appreciation of the abbé de cour’, Yale French Studies 40 (1968), pp. 77-90.

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built on the foundation of a commoner’s moral and factual knowledge. This aspect of Fénelonian novels enriches our understanding of eighteenth-cen-tury constitutional debates, which were similarly affected by the prolifera-tion of printed pamphlets, democratic experiments in societies and salons, and free speech and mixed membership in Freemasonic lodges.25 Moreover, these novels share an enlightened optimism for the possibility of organising the world in self-evident ways, starting from Kunstkammers and museums, maintained by princes but accessible to all, and ending with academies and a cosmopolitan republic of letters.26

While both speculum and Fénelonian novels instruct their readers in rea-son of state, they display marked differences. The new genre assumes that ultimately the interest of princes and the people are the same. The insepa-rability of these interests is a fundamental premise. The means appropriate to the populace and to the prince do, however, differ from time to time. The psychological intricacy of Fénelonian novels becomes even more striking when we realise that, in contrast with specula, they are prepared to entrust the greatest good, that of the people, to the partly irrational character of the prince, whose training in virtue (in the form of Masonic initiation in Séthos) is supposed to enable him to rule better than an encyclopaedic knowledge of political cause and effect would. Fénelonian novels often show great fa-miliarity with the latest epistemological theories, but stop short of assuming, expecting or advocating full princely rationality, as other works do.27

The literary approach to political arrangements does not mean that this genre is less ‘realistic’ than Giles of Rome (1243-1316), Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368-1426), Machiavelli (1469-1527) and other speculum writers, or other forms of political instruction that use historical examples. Fénelonian novels allow a greater role for contingency and accident. Rulers who are good, vir-tuous and also experienced, realistic and shrewd, may still fail, fall, or find themselves in impossible situations. Neither will Stoicism, Christian morality or an impeccable training to rule necessarily save their reign or their life. This is not to say that there are no mechanisms of self- and public government that a young prince ought to learn, or that the new genre gave up on the idea of

25 R. darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789 (Norton, 1995). M.C. JacoB, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ox-ford, 1991).

26 I.B. cohen, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 37:2 (1976), pp. 257-288. R.F. Jones, ‘Science and Criticism in the Neo-Classical Age of English Literature,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 1:4 (1940), pp. 381-412.

27 terraSSon, Philosophie. Dissertation. For a superb overview, see N.O. keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1980).


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reproducible historical causation; but these mechanisms are no longer pre-sented as infallible or universally applicable.

In Fénelonian novels, the prince travels. Through him, the reader is in-troduced to different forms of government, some evil, some good, some ef-fective, others less so. Real political, moral, and economic circumstances mas-querade as fictional, and are examined without fear of the repercussions that would follow open criticism. Beside veiled critical references to real condi-tions, the author constructs imaginary states to test particular political, moral, and economic variables, often in logical sequence. One could catalogue the forms of government that these new-style heroes encounter on their travels, and compare them with influential classifications of forms of government, from Aristotle to Montesquieu. Short of this exhaustive study, the ideal-typi-cal scheme of Fénelonian novels can be described as follows.

A Prince travels to Small Island 1, where superstition maintained by ty-rannical priests keeps the state at its most primitive. Overthrowing the priests allows for the introduction of barter. On Small Island 2, stuck on the same economic level but without the bane of superstition, metals can be immedi-ately introduced, because there is less risk of them being turned into weapons for a zealous civil war. Without superstition, the level of moral development is high enough to sustain the social and political transformation that inevi-tably follows the economic and technological change caused by metallurgy. This leads to improved modes of production, a division of labour, and the introduction of coins.

Introducing metals to Small Island 1 precipitately would lead to upheav-al, not progress: stages of development follow each other in orderly fashion. Transitions (in this case, shaking off superstition) take time. Stability de-mands that social, constitutional, and economic stages are synchronised, and specific disharmonies – between feudal politics and global trade, for instance – produce correspondingly specific problems. A prince visits, learns about and reforms several states along the way, in a more or less systematic thought experiment. Around the high end of the developmental scale, the domestic and international efficiency of large-sized monarchies vs. republican alliances are analysed, under the same fictional setting; and so on. States are compara-tively explored under various conditions, ranging from minorities, dynasties, religion, stage of economic and cultural development, to climate and mores unique to the state in question. Right and wrong types of interaction between them are also examined, from military alliances to commercial competition.

Thus Telemachus, Cyrus and Sethos prepared for their reign in exile. What allowed them to grow into great rulers was starting out with excellent characteristics as private individuals. The ability to rule is not a radically dif-

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ferent, but an additional skill for those with a virtuous personality. The rev-olutionary inference is that anyone can become a good ruler, given the right training. Noble birth or blood-royal are mentioned in these books only to exhort the prince to discharge his duties, or to mock the arrogance of certain rulers he meets. It gives no special rights or abilities to the princes themselves, and there is great emphasis on the compatibility between royal and common-er virtue. One of the things that enable the prince to excel in his public role is his private experience of various nations; of contingencies, unquantifiables; and his acquisition of a comparative perspective (taken to an extreme in the lost patriotism of Wilhelm Meister). Moral instruction is revamped to suit, on the one hand, a prince in an age of progressive popular participation, giving him updated arcana imperii and an obligation to guide and instruct; and on the other, to create a commercially and politically informed populace. Com-merce and peace are the main concerns:

The spoil of nations does now no longer appear an object of emulation; at least among civilized people. Panegyricks upon conquests and devastations are no more patterns in the education of princes; and good poets have done with extolling them for making arms alone their pastime. I find no reason to repent of what I formerly said speaking of Telemachus: That if the happiness of mankind could be said to arise from a poem, it would be from that.28

Beside new forms of morality, Fénelonian novels experiment with soci-oeconomic models to ensure the domestic stability of countries that are at varying stages of development, together with international harmony and dy-namic economic progress.29 Continental and global plans for perpetual peace and complex commercial harmony are proposed, and their sustainability is secured through institutional designs that range from a global brotherhood of secretly initiated éminences grises to the gradual filtering-down of princely skills and virtues, which will eventually characterise all good citizens of the new commercial age.30

Terrasson announces Séthos as the third after Télémaque and Les voyages de Cyrus, but also their perfection.

28 Sethos, Preface, v.29 I. hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Per-

spective (Cambridge, MA, 2005). M. SonenScher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007), especially ch. 2.

30 I. hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,’ in M. GoldIe – R. wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 379-418.


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They are both properly a system of education: and tho’ Cyrus was more ad-vanced in years than Telemachus ; both heroes are only treasured up instructions for practice, or made trial of what they were to put in use; the former in the management of a little kingdom, and the latter in the government of a vast empire. My author, on the contrary, displays a compleat life, or the actual application of those principles and sentiments, which his hero had imbibed in the course of a most excellent education. So that in this history, which is divided into ten books, the hero, from the fourth, is in a condition to instruct others ; and in the whole sequel acts alone upon his own motives. Mov’d by a true heroism, he employs the time of a tedious exile in the quest of unknown people, whom he frees from the bondage of the most barbarous super-stitions, and becomes their law-giver. In his return, he, by his valour, relieves a mighty republick from an enemy, that was at its very gates ; but demands no other reward for his labour, than the preservation of the people he had vanquished, whose king or tyrant had been the aggressor. Being at last returned into his native country, he becomes a benefactor to those he had reason to look upon as his enemies and rivals ; rejoicing in those junctures, which engaged his honour to sacrifice his own interest to theirs, and made the happiness he obtained for them his duty. SETHOS is not alone virtuous by a natural disposition or from habit. The motives of his conduct are drawn from durable and enlightened principles, which he displays in different encounters.31

2. Codes, cousins and caricatures

The genre continued, and Terrasson left his mark. Obvious examples are Justi’s Psammitichus (1759-60), and Schikaneder’s abovementioned Magic Flute libretto.32 Terrasson’s geneaology excluded the phenomenally success-ful 1705 Idoménée of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, though its debt to Fénelon is under debate.33 Also intriguing is Terrasson’s reference to Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry’s monumental Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-53) in the Preface, although it predates Télémaque. While not Fénelonian in Terras-son’s sense, Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795-6) are closely related works. That utopias, including Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771), as well as eighteenth-century treat-ments of heroes and lawgivers, had great importance for constitutional and

31 Sethos, vII-vIII.32 J.H.G JuStI, Die Wirkungen und Folgen sowohl der wahren, als der falschen Staatskunst in

der Geschichte des Psammitichus, Königes von Egypten, und der damaligen Zeiten (2 vols., Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1759-60).

33 T. zIolkowSkI, Scandal on Stage: European Theater as Moral Trial (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1-2. Differences are explained in M. SoulatGeS, ‘Idoménée, de Fénelon a Crébillon père: Du statut ambigu donné a l’expérience tragique’, Dix-huitième siècle 28 (1996), pp. 385-396.

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social reform has been widely recognised, unlike the genre and importance of Fénelonian novels, with commerce and politics at their centre.

Beguilingly, the specific genre defined by Ramsay and Terrasson may be the direct inspiration for inverted caricatures like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735), Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752), Candide (1759), and the scores of imaginary travels in which the protagonist gets into fantastic, arduous scrapes and emphatically learns nothing; unless the unhelpful lesson that perfecta-bility and the universality of ‘natural’ sentiment are severely limited, and equivalent alternatives exist to every value that his own culture holds dear. Another template for this ironic twist is the description of a public to itself through the adventures of an exotic, uncorrupted foreigner, like Usbek and the Persians in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). This poor fellow’s diffi-culties in getting used to the quirky and unnatural in a given public (usually French) is what brings out the contingent and changeable aspects of this pub-lic. Although the terms of comparison are inverted, the method for distilling through comparing and contrasting what is essentially human, and what is culturally contingent, remains the same. Telemachus, Cyrus and Sethos learn and adjust. They become wiser than any of the nations they encounter, and end up ready to take their place as rulers of their people, or of an even wider public. Gulliver and Candide learn nothing. The differences are so great that the only conclusion, the only thing common to all publics, is too banal and commonsensical to benefit them on their return home. They learn to see the pretensions of their culture, but not what to do about it.

Plot SuMMary

Events in Séthos are diverting indeed. The plot abounds in action and sub-plots. A summary outline of the story is necessary to understand the ar-guments. For the sake of clarity amid the false, mistaken and feigned-mistak-en identities, I call the protagonist ‘Sethos/Cheres’ in the periods when he travels under the assumed name of Cheres, a commoner.

Memphis is the second strongest of the twelve Egyptian Nomes or prov-inces. Osoroth is its good but indolent king, who leaves government to his virtuous and wise wife, Nephte. Sethos is their only son. They have three rings, with broken-up segments of the family image of Osiris, Isis and Ho-rus. Amedes is Nephte’s talented and wise minister. Daluca, a lady at court, insinuates herself into the King’s company. Nephte falls ill and continues to decline, despite everyone’s prayers and Egypt’s medical excellence. Her last ambition is to provide for Sethos. She secretly gives him her ring, and goes to


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Latona for an oracle. She dies, and is buried with an extraordinary ceremony. Osoroth marries Daluca, who corrupts the court’s manners, gives birth to two sons, and plots to exclude Sethos from succession. Then follows a long description of the temples and galleries that made Egypt the mother of all science, morality and religion, all to which Greece is indebted. Thebes and This, the first and third most powerful kingdoms, ally to attack Memphis. To prepare him for war, Amedes sends Sethos to capture a giant serpent that ravages the countryside. Sethos’s success incites Daluca’s jealousy. To save him, Amedes pretends to remove Sethos from Egypt, but takes him instead to be secretly initiated.

The complex and lengthy education and initiation process is briefly inter-rupted by the episode of the two Carthaginian princes, Saphon and Giscon, sons of King Zoros. Saphon, the first-born, comes to the temple to confess that he killed Giscon. The background unravels: Zoros favoured Giscon and suspended Saphon’s right of primogeniture. He told his sons to perform he-roic deeds to compete for succession. Saphon fought to extend the borders. Giscon civilised the Capsans, a neighbouring savage tribe, who became so powerful that Saphon could present them to Zoros and the Senate as ene-mies. While fighting them, he also killed Giscon. In a dramatic twist, Giscon now enters the temple, revealing that Saphon killed a Capsan wearing Gis-con’s armour. Giscon is initiated and the brothers, reconciled and reunited, return to Carthage. Sethos’s training continues.

Egyptian education and sciences are described in detail. Sethos returns to Memphis, making Osoroth proud and happy, and Daluca jealous. She ap-points Thoris, a young corrupted courtier, as general. Osoroth deems him a poor choice, to be replaced by Sethos after the first campaign. Daluca and Thoris conspire to kill Sethos during the siege of Coptos. Sethos visits Thebes as an initiate, although at war with them as a prince. To unite the warring parties he dreams up a project: to discover together the origin of the Nile, explore Africa, and benefit all mankind. He returns from Thebes and ac-quires great fame with ingenious defensive ploys during the siege. Thoris prepares two contingents for simultaneous sorties. He deliberately confuses the passwords with which they could recognise each other, and convince the defenders to let them back in.

Mephres, the Theban king, captures Thoris, but most of the detachment escapes through the heroic stand of an old general. The other sortie walks into a trap, but fights valiantly. Thebans at the gate pretend that they are routed Memphians, are let in, but soon discovered. During the fight to close the gates Sethos, his devious Arabic slave Azares, and Amedes are stranded outside. Amedes is captured and taken to the king of This. He engineers a

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truce with Memphis, leaving only Thebes at war. Sethos is injured and left for dead. Azares takes Sethos’s ring with him into Arab captivity. Osoroth makes peace with Mephres, and offers half his kingdom in exchange for Sethos, who is picked up by Ethiopians, bought by Phoenicians, and shipped to Ceylon on a relief expedition in aid of its Phoenician colony. He changes his name to Cheres to prevent the partitioning of his homeland, and to travel and gain merit as a commoner.

The three warring kings of Ceylon make peace and ally against the Phoe-nician colony. Astartus, admiral of the Phoenician fleet, wants to fight, but the council of war hesitates. Sethos/Cheres makes a rousing speech: if the colony is destroyed, you administer exemplary punishment; if they survive, you must rescue them. His tactical skills prove instrumental in defeating the Ceylonese (a.k.a. Taprobanese) fleet. Astartus is secretly visited by two officers from the colony, who tell him that Pheletes, head of the colony and nominally Astar-tus’s superior, betrayed Taprobanese trust and, jumping the gun, captured a city dishonourably, without asking permission from the Phoenician court at Tyre. Now the natives joined forces against him. They propose a plena-ry meeting between Pheletes, Astartus and themselves, and accept Sethos/Cheres as arbitrator. Rather than face justice, Pheletes throws himself into the sea. Sethos/Cheres brokers a new peace, and proposes a joint commercial project of discovery and colonisation, involving the Egyptian priests he met on the ship to Ceylon.

Sethos/Cheres and companions make discoveries in navigation, geogra-phy and anthropology. They build colony after colony, subjugating the native tribes. Some are more ready to accept Sethos/Cheres than others, depending on how advanced they are, as judged by the objective principles of natural justice, and the interests of the whole of mankind. Spreading commerce re-quires clearing the coasts of pirates and tyrants. The adventurers round the Cape of Good Hope and establish a whole province, New Phoenicia. They overthrow the indigenous kingdom of Sogno, brutalised by its priests, only to reform and civilise it and restore its original king after a proper princely education. Sethos/Cheres is informed that Azares is pretending to be Sethos, using his claim to the throne to prepare the conquest of Egypt for the Arabs. Sethos/Cheres reaches Guiney, where the reform-minded young king cannot cope with the priests, who seem to control fabulous beasts and natural phe-nomena. Sethos/Cheres with wise laws gradually changes the locals’ mores and manners, defeats the priests, and exposes the supernatural phenomena as trickery and deceit. The young king, his courtiers and the people are re-ed-ucated according to their function in society. Sethos/Cheres finds out that King Anteus attacked Carthage. Since King Zoros and his sons Giscon and


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Saphon are alive, he surmises he is not needed, and leaves for the Hesperides. This is an idyllic, small country of simplicity and honesty, careful to remain neutral. From its king, Sethos/Cheres and friends learn about Giscon’s fall.

Upon returning from Memphis, the brothers proposed that Saphon shall lead the offensive, while Giscon stays to defend Carthage. Out of favourit-ism, Zoros instead sends Giscon to Siga to besiege Anteus and his beauti-ful daughter, Zarita. Giscon suspends the siege, opens negotiations without authorisation from Carthage, and falls in love with Zarita. The perfidious Anteus offers him as dowry Mauritius Massaesylian, one of two provinces disputed with Carthage. The angry Carthaginian Senate relieves Giscon of command: his leniency enabled Anteus to regroup and damage Saphon’s army. Zoros assures Giscon of his love and support. Giscon hopes to put things right, stays in besieged Siga, marries Zarita, but Anteus betrays him and leaves to reinforce his other army. Saphon is killed. Giscon and Zarita leave for Carthage to face the Senate’s judgment: death, suspended until he saves Carthage, and has a son; or indefinitely, if Zoros dies before that.

The Hesperidian king now describes their manners and customs to Sethos/Cheres. Sethos/Cheres approaches the Carthaginian refugees. They turn out to be Zoros, Zarita and Amedes. Amedes tells Sethos/Cheres how he negotiated peace between Memphis and This, and that Zarita is very vir-tuous, and was tricked by Giscon and Anteus into this politically disastrous marriage. She is wholly devoted to Giscon, and remains a dutiful daughter to Zoros. Sethos/Cheres pronounces Zarita a heroine. Amedes warns him that the love of women, however virtuous, corrupts heroism.

Sethos/Cheres and company leave to save Carthage. They kidnap Ty-geus, Anteus’s only son, from his capital, Tingi. Sethos/Cheres gives him a princely education. After the lightning-fast siege of Siga Anteus escapes, but suffers defeat from Giscon’s Capsan army. Pammus, an unknown Egyptian, joins Sethos/Cheres. He explains that his beloved wants him to become like Sethos/Cheres, and distinguishes himself in battle with Anteus and later in negotiations with Carthage. Sethos/Cheres kills Anteus and defends the Tin-gitans from Carthaginian revenge. After tricky negotiations with the Senate, they agree to return even Siga to Tygeus. Pammus disappears, the refugees re-turn, everyone is happy. Sethos/Cheres can finally leave to defend Egypt from Azares, his former slave, who has been using the stolen ring to pose as Sethos.

Azares attacks Tanis, an Egyptian kingdom under Spanius. Spanius has a beautiful daughter, Mnevia, whom he only wants to marry to someone who has no claim to a throne, in order to preserve Tanis’s independence. Osoroth and Daluca have two virtuous sons, Beon and Pemphos. Osoroth’s hesitation about offering the throne to the re-emerged, fake Sethos, becomes the casus

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belli for the Arabs against Memphis. Sethos/Cheres and Azares are both outstanding strategists. Azares flees the first encounter, but Sethos/Cheres only inflicts insignificant damage. Sethos/Cheres disbands his army. Spanius wants Sethos/Cheres as his son-in-law, and persuades the kings of Thebes and This to declare him the Conservator of Egypt, a title they would not offer to blood-royal. This enables Spanius to offer Mnevia to Sethos/Cheres. They are in love already. Sethos/Cheres goes to Memphis to reveal himself and seek permission to marry. Just before he leaves, Spanius tells him that he does not want a royal son-in-law.

Azares returns at the head of a new Arab army. Osoroth asks Sethos/Cheres to protect Memphis against the fake Sethos. Sethos/Cheres takes Nephte’s ring from the guardianship of Memphis priests. Beon’s wife is Nephte’s niece, and pregnant. Sethos/Cheres takes Beon along for the cam-paign, as an education. He knows by now that Pemphos is really Pammus, who is madly in love with Mnevia. Mnevia goes to Heliopolis for an oracle about Sethos/Cheres and her future. The priests tell her that he is the real Sethos, and they will never get married. Sethos captures Azares, who con-fesses everything, returns the ring, and becomes Sethos’s slave again. Osoroth resigns the throne in Sethos’s favour. He purges the court and the officer corps. Daluca takes poison but dies quite leisurely. Sethos wants to remain the impartial Conservator and resigns for Beon’s sake. Daluca learns that she killed herself in vain. During the crowning ceremony, the High Priest talks at length about ancient Egyptian kings as exemplars for Beon. Sethos breaks off his engagement with Mnevia, and convinces her to heroinically marry Pammus. Sethos settles down in Memphis as Conservator, and lives as the impartial, virtuous judge and arbitrator of the whole of Africa.

SéthoS In eIGhteenth-century Moral and conStItutIonal reforM dIScourSeS

Writing allows us to continue conversations over centuries. Changing reality, changing language and the consequent need for continuous reinter-pretation prompts us to overcome inconveniences of distance, language, and death. Breaking down debates into time periods and topics helps to re-con-struct the community of contemporaneous discussants. Such communities necessarily overlap with others. Identifying separate threads of discourse is just a step towards perceiving the complex fabric of interweaving topics in a way that approximates how members of such communities perceived it. The description of discourses below is over-generalised and incomplete. Still, it cannot be wide off the mark, because the concerns I describe were demon-


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strably shared by many thinkers in the period, and with the examined parts of Séthos, Terrasson took a position in clear and specific debates. My dis-course-labeling may be dubious, but I doubt that there is a better way. Would a list of cross-references to other texts, or tracing possible borrowings and textual influences, prove the connections and describe the language-games better than historical and intellectual contextualisation with arbitrarily delin-eated, but text-based and substantial discourses?

1. Ancients v. Moderns

Ancient Egypt, the setting for Séthos, is significant in several ways. As mentioned above, Terrasson’s Dissertation critique and Philosophie applicable ranked him on the side of the Moderns, alongside Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757). This is a crucial En-lightenment debate concerning the respective merits of ancient and modern philosophy, politics, literature, morality, religion and science.34 Pro-Ancients like William Temple (1628-99) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711) believed that literary, moral and political models should be resurrected to solve contemporary problems, from staging dramas to channeling patriotism. ‘Moderns’ thought this impossible, and strove to define ways in which their age surpassed previous ages, given the progress of knowledge and morals.35

Terrasson is customarily described as a defender of Moderns against An-cients. Within this simplified bipartisanism, this is true. However, in Séthos Terrasson only chastises the Greeks and Romans, and attributes the superior glory to ancient Egypt as often as to the Moderns. Ancient Egypt is the source of all science, all arts, the art of war, civilisation and politeness.36 These the Greeks adopted and passed on to the Romans in an already corrupted form. In Séthos, Greek mythology is demystified systematically, especially the Or-phic mysteries, as spoilt versions of their Egyptian original.37 Terrasson re-

34 With roots in ancient and medieval discourses, including the quarrel between Liberal Arts on the one hand, and Theology and Philosophy on the other. E.g. H. d’andelI, Bataille des septs arts, ca. 1259. Martianus Capella’s Satyricon (5th cent. AD) is similarly enlivened by the rivalry be-tween the personified arts. Early modern debates surrounding prisca sapientia are also relevant.

35 H. rIGault, Histoire de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Paris: Hachette, 1856), 436-55 and throughout. P.H. Meyer, ‘Recent German Studies of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in France,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18:3 (1985), pp. 383-390.

36 Egypt the fountain of all arts: Sethos, I.II.92. War: I.v.340 ff., and the siege of Coptos. Civil-isation: I.ii.62.

37 Sethos, I.III.172 ff., I.Iv.224, 250-8, 279-80, passim.

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peatedly declares that Orpheus himself was present at Sethos’s initiation, but carefully renders this inconsequential: despite Sethos’s extensive travels and communications, there was no further contact between them. The only in-stance in Séthos where Terrasson acknowledges Greek talent is when he de-scribes how Thales and Pythagoras, the last Greeks to spend years in Egypt and to become initiates, made great use of even the little they learnt in Egypt after their return to Greece.38

2. The hero: mastering oneself

Télémaque is an annoying book because the hero is ready to sacrifice him-self at the drop of a hat. He seldom compromises his naïve notion of virtue, and prefers to die or commit suicide rather than solve a moral dilemma. He becomes somewhat more prudent by the end. In Séthos the hero learns, and the reader accompanies him on his journey.

Yet one easily recognisable legacy of Télémaque in Séthos is the distinc-tion between good and bad kinds of love. Fénelon developed the theological concepts he adapted from Madame Guyon into a widely accessible and po-litically relevant form. The distinction is now famous in Rousseau’s formula-tion, who also had enough faith in the didactic powers of Télémaque to make it that rarity, a reading in Émile (1762). One can read Séthos as a half-way house between the two works. Royal self-regard is a good thing in Séthos, as long as it is accompanied by the monarch’s self-effacing instinct – which he can learn from initiates better than at court – and by an unwavering focus on the common good, the care and expansion of which is the only proper source of pride and satisfaction allowed him. The fate of the people and the ruler are inextricably bound; but as the people often want what is bad for them, a prince’s virtuous love for his subjects must sometimes appear as oppression and deceit.39

While true love for the people and, in Patrick Riley’s phrase, disinterested statesmanship,40 entitles Sethos to occasionally oppress, it also demands great sacrifices. The most sentimental theme in Séthos is the love between Sethos/Cheres and Mnevia. They cannot marry, although they are both wise and virtuous and love each other correctly, unlike the other royal couples, Zarita

38 Sethos, I.II.83. Terrasson also pitched modern science against the Greeks, e.g. I.v.328, I.vI.389.

39 Sethos, I.I.48-9.40 P. rIley, Introduction to Fénelon, Telemachus (Cambridge, 1994).


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and Giscon, or Daluca and Osoroth. Amedes describes true love to Sethos/Cheres:

Heroick love, by which I mean, that passion of a generous heart, that refin’d flame, which does not hinder men from being great, but rather encourages them to be so, is, without dispute, far above that vulgar love, that mean satisfaction, or unruly fury of the senses, which levels the great man to the condition of the most contempt-ible, and these to that of beasts.41

Renouncing Mnevia’s love, Sethos/Cheres tells her, is the most heroic thing he has ever done, since it best meets true heroism’s definition. At this stage Mnevia is not yet a fully-fledged heroine. To figure out what to do, she consults the oracle at Heliopolis. She asks three questions: who is Cheres; does he love her; and will he marry her? There are three corresponding ora-cles or scenes. Mnevia is drugged to make her susceptible to their theatrical effect. The actor-priests talk in verse, and tell her that Cheres is Sethos dis-guised. The second scene is an extraordinary theatrical expression of Terras-son’s notion of heroism.42

The design of this second scene, was to represent a combat in the mind of Sethos between love and heroick virtue, by two persons; one of which represented the man, and the other the hero.43

The two Sethi have a tremendous row. The Man wants to be happy, the Hero argues against love: ‘You perish in the port, unless you know / To over-come, in love, your greatest foe. / You’re not your own ; his passion, his repose, / His sceptre, Sethos all to virtue owes.’ The Man replies that he can become a virtuous king and marry Mnevia at the same time. He also comes up with an argument that shows that Terrasson was either aware of the risk of over-drawing the character of Sethos/Cheres, or hints that the reader’s uneasiness with Sethos/Cheres’s deceptions and cruelties is a deliberate fillip to critical thought. ‘Those acts refin’d, which in your eyes seem great, / The censure of excess, may, one day, meet.’ Man and Hero start fighting, which

41 Sethos, II.vIII.247. Compare l. de Sacy, Traité de la gloire (The Hague, 1715). Pertinent references to Nicole and others in C. olIvIer, ‘Port-Royal et la gloire,’ Histoire, économie et société 20:2 (2001), pp. 163-175.

42 This is one of several scenes in Sethos that suggest that Terrasson hoped it would be turned into an opera. Scenes like this conform closely to Terrasson’s criteria for a good libretto. See the 1720 translation of his A discourse concerning opera… (London). J. undank, ‘Review of A.M. La-borde, L’Esthétique Circéenne, Etude Critique, suivi d’un choix de textes relatifs à l’esthétique cir-céenne (1686-1800)’, MLN 86:4 (1971), pp. 578-583.

43 Sethos, II.x.436-7.

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is when Mnevia suddenly rises and rushes forward. Too late – the Hero kills the Man. Mnevia is upset and curses him for what he has done. It is not you I love, she says, or if it is, then, relentless hero, rather kill me than leave me trapped in this impossible love. It is good literature, not just soppy ro-manticism, when Terrasson shows Mnevia’s incomplete heroism through the psychological insight that she does not know at this stage whether she loves the hero or the man. After all, before eventually marrying the more human Pemphos, she sends him off to join Sethos/Cheres to learn to be like him. Mnevia must recognise, fully understand, and accept the unbridgeable gap between the heroic and the common.

Princes are public figures. Their raison d’être is the public good. Everything about them is geared toward the concomitant tasks. Their defining duty is the ruler’s self-control, i.e. not exceeding their power and not doing anything for their own glory that does not benefit others. As Sethos/Cheres instructs Saphon, ‘This duty is as extensive as the publick good; but then the publick good gives bounds to it, which he will never go beyond’.44 Yet Terrasson often emphasises that the best way to start becoming a good prince is to become a good private citizen. Amedes gives Sethos/Cheres a public education because of this principle.45 Sethos wants to gain fame as Cheres for the same reason. Unlike in conventional specula, Fénelonian princes’ private personality dis-solves in the public. A substantial part of this personality is shaped by the interactions between their private character and the public they internalise; and between the various publics they encounter in both private (e.g. while young and/or incognito) and public capacities.46 This intimate knowledge of several peoples is intended to both sensitise princes to the common people, and teach them to manipulate a variety of groups effectively. As Amedes ex-plains at the end of Sethos/Cheres’s preparation for his initiation,

I was sensible of my incapacity to educate a prince like you, and therefore I immediately borrow’d the assistance of all the schools of Memphis, to teach you the sciences under masters more able than myself ; and I have endeavour’d to add to the

44 Sethos, I.Iv.221.45 Sethos, I.II.108, 112-3, I.III.193-4.46 See the beginning of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1762 The Life of Richard Nash, Esq.: ‘History owes

its excellence more to the writer’s manner than the materials of which it is composed. The intrigues of courts, or the devastation of armies, are regarded by the remote spectator with as little attention as the squabbles of a village, or the fate of a malefactor, that fall under his own observation. The great and the little, as they have the same senses, and the same affections, generally present the same picture to the hand of the draughtsman; and whether the hero or the clown be the subject of the memoir, it is only man that appears with all his native minuteness about him; for nothing very great was ever yet formed from the little materials of humanity.’ With thanks to Marius Hentea.


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vigilance with which a governour ought to attend a private education, that emulation which is rarely seen in a pupil, unless in a publick one.47

What distinguishes a prince from a commoner is that the former not only knows, but also transcends these private cares, shaped and shared by the public, by entirely subsuming his private interests to the needs of others. The prince’s glory is his people’s happiness. A good prince denies himself, his fam-ily, his love, his thirst for revenge, his passions and similar motivations that are common. This is why Sethos/Cheres, after learning the sciences and the things that his people know and want, must undergo the initiation. Madame Guyon’s Quietist system and its influence on Fénelon’s thought are described in similar terms by Ramsay: God moves us by our love of self through a series of actions and trials, before we arrive at true love, which is passive.48 Sethos becomes an impartial judge and enlightened arbitrator for a whole continent, with no country or dynasty of his own. This position is probably as close as one can get to the political embodiment of Fénelon’s religious ideal. Initia-tion, raised on the foundation of common virtues, makes him a great general, lawgiver and negotiator. Yet it raises him so far above common humanity that he becomes unfit for marriage and the throne, which both require uncritical attachment to a set of particular, limited interests.

The initiate is a new man, a man of principles, always virtuous, holding his life of no account - a Stoic hero, in full control of his life. Glory is attained, but not craved. His motivation comes from his sense of duty - hence ‘many of our initiates had rather do private services to their prince or country in obscurity, than be distinguish’d by the most shining dignities’.49 They are Jesuit-like, with a Stoic patriotism and regard for the benefit of their country or, if possible, the whole of mankind. They serve as a sort of voluntary pal-impsest, representing the interests of both their people and all mankind, but not only in an enlightened, absolutist fashion, but also according to a version of the medieval theory of kings as heads and peoples as bodies, updated by early modern French moral theories. ‘So consequently, this man, not being to be bias’d by any desire, or any fear of his own, is taken up with all the desires, and all the fears of those whom he is to make happy, as their master, or to serve, as their fellow-citizen.’

The self-mastery of the hero, the initiate and the prince conveys on the people a morally sound form of sovereignty, sustainable in the newly changed

47 Sethos, I.III.194.48 raMSay, Life, pp. 71-2.49 Sethos, I.III.190-1.

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world. The self-government of such a hero, who identifies with the people completely, conveys the kind of self-government upon a state that Terrasson thought befitted the new phase of French history, in which the facts of com-merce and broader political participation called for new forms of politics and morality. The various ways in which Terrasson chose to tie Sethos/Cheres and the people together (e.g. initiate, having always public interest in mind, the foundation of a public education, ultimate judgment from the public, etc.), and the ways in which he chose not to (e.g. no country, but a continent to watch over, no dynasty, constant arcana imperii and deceit, etc.) may both be responses to, and continuations of, the political experiments under the Régence (1715-23), including the introduction of Polysynody, the systéme de Law, and a renegotiated settlement with the Parlement of Paris. Fleury is also referred to in the Preface. It is possible and tempting to construct keys to the figures, events and policy recommendations in Séthos. I am reluctant to do so without further research. At the moment several such cyphers are possible, and Terrasson may not have had one in mind. Or the correct key may be an eclectic mix of real-life references, perhaps so eclectic that even if recon-structed, the code would tell us nothing about Terrasson’s political opinions.

The initiates resemble the Stoics. They want the same subjection of pas-sions, to rid themselves of distractions and become worthy to rule. Stoicism and the new princely patriotism go together well. After renouncing private ambitions, only the public remains. The Stoic’s widening circle of friends, country, and mankind, often appear in Séthos, first in the priestly oracle given to Nephte about her son: ‘Born for the good of mankind, he will become a benefactor to nations; preserver of Egypt; and a conqueror of himself’.50 These values are professed by all initiates. Initiates are proper judges of the whole of mankind. Although they love their fatherland, they can be its im-partial judges when required. Initiates shun popularity, and they prefer death to compromising their principles. Virtue is more precious to them than life. Terrasson’s combination of the Stoic virtues of self-mastery, patriotism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and good monarchy as the king’s regard for the welfare of his subjects on the other, is all the more remarkable, since what he arrives at is a kind of general will that can only be expressed and executed by ‘moral aristocrats’, who overcome the temptations of high birth and recognise their duty to transcend their private interests.51

50 Sethos, I.I.25.51 Compare BolInGBroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (1738, reworked in 1749) and Letters on

the Study of History, including the argument that anyone can become a good king, but the nobly-born are more likely to, because they are born into an environment conducive to princely upbringing.


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At this point it seems that Terrasson’s project to reconcile the new, com-mercial and enlightened morality with the democratic ethos (whereby popu-lar sovereignty is central, and any reader can become a hero and initiate) has severe limitations. The new morality, in which the prince must be raised, may be available to all, but should not be pursued by all. Perhaps even princes, like Giscon, Beon, Pammus and Tygeus, should reconsider a wholesale imi-tation of this hero, who ends up unmarried and dethroned. Indeed, it seems that the hero figure that Terrasson shaped is quite inhuman. He has no frail-ties, or rather his frailties are not human. Values set by men do not concern him, only the good of mankind according to the values he sets himself. He sacrifices everything: perhaps it is not reading too much into the text to see a resemblance to Christ.

3. Good government: mastering others

On first reading Séthos, the most striking feature is the ubiquity of secrecy and deception. One can gain the impression that Sethos/Cheres is an inveter-ate and pathological liar, incapable of doing anything without dissemblance. Most of these deceptions are shown to be instrumental, and we soon learn that things turn out well when Sethos/Cheres lies. It is not always obvious, however, that lies are necessary; often he simply distrusts other people’s abil-ities. He is, however, a hero. Earlier I mentioned briefly the radical disjunc-tion between members of the public and those who live for the public and have no private identity other than their voluntary subservience and requisite skills. Heroes are on a higher rung even than kings, since they are not tied to the interests of one country. They are cosmopolitan and act in the interest of all mankind.52 This complete dissolution of the private in the widest public imaginable means that their actions must often be, to some extent and in the short run, contrary to what others, including compatriots, myopically believe to be their self-interest. As the High Priest puts it at Nephte’s funeral, they bear ‘the murmurings of a populace, blind, and perhaps stirr’d up by the secret calumnies of those who, tho’ they knew better, might not find their private advantage in the publick felicity’, and ‘[p]utting frequently her own glory to stake for the interest of an ungrateful people’.53 Sethos/Cheres’s most

52 Compare natural aristocracy in Aristotle. Their natural superiority differs from Fénelonian heroes’, who start out with the natural abilities of commoners, and rise above them through calling and perseverance.

53 Sethos, I.I.47.

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extreme use of his heroic right, gained through self-sacrifice, is when he bans Beon from seeing his wife, lest the bad news about Sethos/Cheres’s accession to the throne affect her pregnancy. It later turns out that he only wanted to make his resignation in Beon’s favour a pleasant surprise. Beforehand, he posts guards to the temple to prevent Beon from seeing his pregnant wife. This is carrying Aufklärung too far.

Another telling scene is when Sethos/Cheres is asked, as the youngest Egyptian candidate for initiation, to give Saphon his opinion regarding the Carthaginian princes’ quarrel. Giscon is still presumed dead when Sethos/Cheres admonishes Saphon for having a false idea about heroes, and for fol-lowing bad exemplars who conquer mindlessly. Valour needs to be guided by virtue, which is patriotism:

This virtue, in a subject or citizen, is the love of his prince and his country, guided by his obedience alone. In a prince, or the head of a republick, it is the love of his people, heighten’d by the justice he observes with regard even to his neighbours and his enemies. In the hero, to conclude, it is the love of mankind in general, or human-ity guided by a zeal founded upon a lively hope of the protection of the gods.54

The priests conclude that with this mature judgment, Sethos/Cheres passed his initiation examination. The contrast he drew between right and wrong patriotism is easily applicable to Louis XIV.

Deceptions are unavoidable, and stem from the hero’s superior wisdom, uncommon obligations, and rights. This may be why Sethos/Cheres not only uses deception, but makes it his favourite policy instrument and form of com-munication. The deceptions he engineers in collaboration with others advance, on one level, the interests of the circle to which the deceivers belong. Never-theless, Sethos/Cheres and the Carthaginian Senate, later Sethos/Cheres and his Phoenician fleet, conspire to deceive for their own immediate benefit, or at best for one circle wider. He plots and schemes with kings and princes for a country’s future benefit, and with the Memphis priests and initiates to enrich the whole of Africa, while his one-man schemes, often hidden inside the cun-ning plots he makes with others, serve mankind or justice writ large.

A hero cannot govern a single country well. He can save a nation, and give it laws to run itself, but he cannot protect interests at length that are limited in any way. It is only when the specific interests of a nation, group or person co-incide with mankind’s interests that Sethos/Cheres is allowed to step in. What suits one nation may not suit another, due to different levels of development

54 Sethos, I.Iv.219.


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and circumstances. There is, however, a common denominator, a powerful tribunal and seat of justice that represents the whole of mankind. Although it is only Sethos/Cheres and other initiates like Giscon who feel its presence, they measure all their actions against the standards of its justice. This enables them to set an example to all nations, and everyone they encounter.

Similarly, a wise ruler uses the emulative instinct of his people as an instru-ment of indirect government. Sethos/Cheres tells the young king of Guiney how to completely overhaul his people’s morals.

[K]ings are hardly the masters of a false point of honour, which may unfortu-nately have gain’d the ascendant over the minds of their subjects; that therefore the business would be, to lead this point of honour into another channel, or to give its former object an appearance of shame.55

The initiaties’ inner court of justice also means that its internalised standards occasionally prompt initiates to violate the ostensible interests of individuals and nations who initially suspect them (especially Sethos/Cheres) of self-inter-est and malice. The only proper right of conquest, as the High Priest tells Sa-phon, comes from the interest of the conquered: ‘To conquer nations, who are destitute of master and laws, in order to make them more happy and more po-lite than they were before, is allowable’.56 Sethos/Cheres follows this principle in all his conquests. The first is Menuthias, where he enslaves the whole nation because

he could bring them no otherwise but by servitude to that communication of good offices, to which he believ’d all the people of the earth were oblig’d one towards the other. […] That his most fervent wishes were, to civilize the savages themselves, who might be found susceptible of any manners, by the intercourse he would procure them with polite nations. In a word, that all he aspir’d to in his undertaking was, to make men advantageous one to the other.57

His exact literary counter-part is Pheletes, driven to suicide during the peace conference by the others’ rational pacifism: ‘A military undertaking needs no other justification but its success’.58 The initial resistance of the con-quered nations, of which there is surprisingly little in Séthos, is a price compa-rable to what good rulers pay who take measures that offend the sensibilities

55 Sethos, II.vII.79.56 Sethos, I.Iv.224.57 Sethos, I.vI.441-2.58 Sethos, I.vI.413-4.

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of their subjects in the short run, and who are willing to lose popularity and compromise their people’s affection in order to increase their happiness. Ini-tiates and heroes are always ready to pay this price in their dealings with man-kind. There exist, however, irredeemable people like Anteus, and nations like the cannibals, who cannot be governed or civilised even through deception, conquest, or slavery.

Note however that Sethos ends up as the arbitrator for Africa, not the whole of mankind. He civilises African nations, and hopes to further the inter-ests of man by exploring Africa. Terrasson does not explain this, but it seems that Sethos’s benign influence on mankind works through this continent alone. A hero and initiate may be too cosmopolitan, just and broad-minded to protect the interests of one single country, but Terrasson is careful not to advocate uni-versal monarchy. Senates and councils abound in his account of government, and even the wisest initiates and the priests continue to depend on the collec-tive wisdom and power of their group. The Carthaginian Senate, for instance, can condemn Giscon to death and suspend his execution until he provides an heir. Should his father die before that, the Senate can crown Giscon and continue to suspend, rather than withdraw, the death sentence over the king.

4. Power and the people

Yet the most important check on monarchy is not geography or senates, but popular sovereignty. It would be equally wrong to ignore or overstate Terrasson’s radicalism. His view of the supremacy of popular sovereignty and the political mechanisms he describes for full direct participation are remark-able for the 1730s. Allowing anyone to become an initiate, building initiates’ training not separately from but on top of public education, the constant reference to public interest as the ultimate standard of justice, and the duty to implement educational reforms that help everyone reach perfection, are among such mechanisms. Yet sometimes good government requires speed and secrecy. Terrasson’s radicalism for these mechanisms lies in his hugely influential description of a secret circle of cosmopolitan initiates, who assist and check monarchs. Some of Terrasson’s views, such as the people deciding whether deceased monarchs go to heaven or hell, are fascinating, unique, and should be seen as experimental contributions to the political and constitu-tional debate about the future of France, Europe, and the international order. These are some features of the novel described in this section.


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4.1. The scope of popular sovereignty: affirmation and expansion

Terrasson calls Sethos Cheres while he travels incognito. Cheres is Sethos’s public, commoner persona. It becomes more glorious and influential than the prince of the blood. Terrasson’s use of the protagonist’s double identity, with secret and public names, is a literary instrument that highlights the centrality of popular power in the book. Sethos/Cheres could have returned to Egypt sooner, but he wanted to earn his right to rule by winning fame for the name of a commoner. This is the fame that he chooses in the end, when it proves to be irreconcilable with the throne. As Sethos, he first became an initiate by popular authorisation. His final rank and calling as Conservator is also a pub-lic office. Terrasson’s emphasis on public authorisation is a vital part of his constitutional experiment. Confrontation with the pretender, the recovery of his ancestral rings, and the legitimate succession to the throne provide a dra-matically satisfying resolution to Sethos’s secret identity. In terms of literary design, a conventional dénouement would be to let Sethos ascend the throne, and rule in wisdom and peace forever after. Instead, Sethos retains only the titles obtained as an initiate and as Cheres, and renounces inherited privilege.

I mentioned how princely education begins like the public’s and that any commoner can become a king, although the noble-born have a com-parative advantage. Still, commoners rise to high posts in the book. Nephte makes Amedes her chief ‘cabinet counsellor, without any title of note’ be-cause he proved himself outstandingly able, but neither passed through the ranks gradually nor is high-born. With this trick, giving him power but no title, Nephte avoids ‘subverting order’.59 Similarly, Spanius invents a title for Sethos/Cheres, whom he believes to be a commoner, and after the other kings confirm it, he is ready to give him his daughter. As a group, the people are placed above other political agents, and as individuals the playing field is levelled. Anyone can become an initiate, and a good prince is first and foremost a good commoner. The high visibility of, and sustained emphasis on, these popular elements are maintained through an array of literary forms and solutions, ranging from long dialogues on correct instruction to symbolic enactments of popular sovereignty.60

One extraordinary such scene is Nephte’s burial. She is mummified, put on a golden coach and escorted by the whole of Memphis to the main Egyp-tian temple at Latona. This temple has two parts, a public one above ground

59 Sethos, I.I.10-1.60 A. la voPa, ‘Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Jour-

nal of Modern History 64 (1992), pp. 79-116.

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and a subterranean labyrinth, where only priests, initiates and the dead may enter. Homer, with what Terrasson considers typical Greek obfuscation of an Egyptian mystery, calls the entrance to the lower half the gates of hell. This is where Nephte receives the oracle, where the people pray for her, and where Sethos receives his initiation. It houses a monumental statue of Osiris, Isis and Horus standing together. Terrasson hints at, but carefully avoids any explicit comparison with the Trinity.61 Then comes the extraordinary scene.

When the corpse was brought to the bank of a lake call’d Charon, over which the passage lay to the gate of the infernal deities, it was there stopp’d by an incorruptible tribunal, compos’d of sixteen priests of the labyrinth, with their chief, and two judges chosen out of each of the twelve ancient nomes. The high-priest, who conducted the deceas’d king, having there made an harangue, the president of the tribunal gave leave to all the assistants to lay such charges against the deceas’d, as they could prove. They then proceeded to judgment, by which the corpse was either sentenc’d to be deliver’d to their ferryman, whom they call’d Charon, or to be depriv’d of sepulture. This sentence pass’d by scrutiny, that is, by certain tickets, which the judges threw into that terrible urn, the very idea of which was powerful enough to keep the ancient kings within the bounds of justice.62

A tribunal of forty-one (sixteen priests; twenty-four elected representa-tives: two from each of the twelve kingdoms that make up the Egyptian federation; and a priestly chairman) hold a ballot to decide the afterlife of the monarchs. Harrington similarly politicised and ‘popularised’ Jewish cleromancy in The Art of Lawgiving (1659). Here the Hebrew Republic is under the direct government of God, who unites the people’s welfare in His person; therefore the black and white stones used in divination constitute a ballot. Séthos’s union of this- and other-worldly politics is similar in essence, although here the people are both ruler and God, and the decision concerns not government but the after-life of kings.63

The initiates who represent the people form a kind of moral elite, and class-consciousness features prominently in this Egyptian death ritual. The ballot is open, and the regional representatives are directly elected. Next, Terrasson describes the procession, which includes municipal brotherhoods and guilds, all the Egyptian priests (even if their Nomes are at war), and

61 ovId, Metamorphoses, IX.688-692. Augustine attributes to Varro the euhemerist interpreta-tion that this figure, standing next to Osiris/Serapis and Isis, is giving a clue that these figures were not gods, but deified humans. City of God, XVIII.5.

62 Sethos, I.I.33-4.63 Sethos, I.I.34-5.


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baggage-wagons. The tribunal makes its judgment in public. The Memphian High Priest steps off Nephte’s coach, and formally pleads a technical, foren-sic defence of the actions of the dead queen. He never refers to Nephte by name, only by the office of ‘reine’ or ‘Roi’.

At the approach of this awful tribunal, compos’d of judges, who were rever’d as the gods themselves, the high-priest, who was to be the queen’s advocate, and all those who were concern’d for her memory, were seiz’d with unexpected terrors: For if those things which are really good, are sometimes accounted bad by the injustice of men, it is more to be apprehended, that those causes which to us appear good, may be really bad in the judgment of the gods.64

When the tribunal comes to judgment, its members officially become gods, even though they were publicly and individually elected in their own kingdoms. The elected judges of the kingdom whose monarch is being bur-ied, in this case Memphis, preside over the tribunal. The sixteen priests of the labyrinth sit somewhat lower, and the twenty-two other initiates elected by the remaining Nomes sit directly below. ‘The urn was plac’d in the front of the tribunal, on the brink of the uppermost step.’ The Memphian High Priest begins the defence by stating that Nephte had true piety, inward and outward, and always had her people’s happiness at heart. The country’s good fortune and peace were the gods’ reward for her virtue. She upheld the rule of law, and submitted her judgment to others’. She knew also how to delegate:

I dare therefore affirm before you her judges, and before those of her subjects, who now hear me, that if, among such a number of inhabitants as this city of Mem-phis, and the other five thousand cities of this dynasty are known to contain, it may appear, that, contrary to her intention, any one has been oppress’d, the queen is not only excusable in regard of the impossibility of providing for all, but is praise-worthy, in that, knowing the bounds of human understanding, she has kept to the center of publick business, and has fix’d her whole attention upon the first causes and motions of things. […] and tho’ private persons may sometimes suffer, they have no right to blame their princes, when the body of the state is sound, and the principles of gov-ernment salutary.65

Nevertheless, Nephte relies on the judges’ clemency. After a brief dis-cussion, the tribunal gives an opportunity for the assembled people to bring charges against the dead monarch. This time there is none, which makes voting unnecessary, since the directly elected, divine tribunal is but an in-

64 Sethos, I.I.42.65 Sethos, I.I.48-9.

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strument of the people’s will. Nephte enters the mansions of the blessed by universal consent.66

What do we make of this scene? Terrasson claims to continue the genre begun by Fénelon’s book for the Dauphin, and he makes the king’s afterlife depend on the judgment of the people (expressed directly or through priestly and initiated representatives), who use an open ballot. As literary iterations of constitutional reform go, this is remarkable. The Enlightenment move to-wards ‘democracy’ or ‘republic’ in this case has an other-worldly, vox dei stage that highlights the centrality of popular sovereignty, without proposing that the people are given direct political control in this world. Terrasson re-peatedly warns against priests’ interference with a living monarch. When (s)he becomes accountable to the gods, they only echo the vox populi.

Nor are the people asked merely to announce whether they were hap-py with the king. They are called to speak up, and given individual isegoria in deciding the ruler’s eternal fate. Both priests and kings are ultimately in-struments of the people’s will. Authority in the next world belongs to the people and acts as a powerful check on both monarchy and clergy. Despite the long, detailed and elaborate treatment of religion, mythology, initiation and rituals, Terrasson does not suggest any metaphysical truth other than the inalienable sanctity of vox populi. To these French estates, Terrasson adds the initiates. They embody the ideals every man should aspire to; yet few are cut out to join. They remain an elite, and operate in both this- and other-worldly spheres to defend the public’s interests.

THE priests in Egypt were the only judges in point of civil right: But if them-selves had any matter of dispute with private persons, and by so much the more if with the king, it was decided by the assembly of initiates: So that the priests and ini-tiates might have kept the knowledge of the law wholly within themselves. However, as they thought it reasonable that every one who was cast should judge of the equity of their judgments; and besides, it was requisite for private persons to know the laws they were to live up to; the priests taught this science publickly in a hall of the palace: and that was the only school into which strangers were admitted. The Egyptians had right to boast that Solon and Lycurgus borrow’d from them the best of those laws which they establish’d, one of them in Athens, and the other in Sparta.67

Irrespective of the popular character of the judgment that decides wheth-er the monarch goes to hell or heaven, neither priests nor popular representa-

66 Nephte resembles Mme Maintenon, while Daluca is like the marquise de Montespan. Or perhaps Osoroth is Louis XV?

67 Sethos, I.II.87.


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tives, including the tribunal, have as much say in practical politics as the king and the initiates. One difference between the way kings and initiates embody popular sovereignty is that while kings represent the interests of one people, initiates are charged with the welfare of all mankind. Another difference is that monarchy is hereditary, while initiates are chosen by other initiates, se-cretly trained and tested, and finally publicly acclaimed.

The ‘Isiack Pomp’ or the ‘Triumph of the Initiate’, Sethos’s presentation to the public after his successful initiation, is related on I.iv.281-292. Six her-alds announce that a new initiate will appear. They do not disclose his name, only that he is an Egyptian.

This was always agreeable news to the kings, who believ’d they thereby gain’d a faithful servant upon all occasions. But it was yet a greater joy to the people, who look’d upon the Egyptian initiates as wise mediators between the king and them, and as powerful protectors about his person.68

The initiate is closer to the people, inasmuch as they have more need of his protection and mediation than the king. In the book, initiates defend the people against enemies, both foreign and domestic, far more often than they defend kings. It is hard to imagine an initiate in Séthos who defends a king against the people. Beside these differences, an initiate’s allegiances are defined by the aforementioned concentric circles, reminiscent of Stoic schemes.

The last part of the procession, or the triumph of the initiate, had a military appearance, even with regard to those who were not warriors ; because it was sup-pos’d, that they defended their country in their way : and besides, the initiates were indifferently of every profession for the service of the king and of the publick. At the head of the second interval, appear’d, under the sound of fifes and kettle-drums, three standards flying. The first bore the symbol of the kingdom of Memphis, which was the Ox Apis ; the second that of Egypt, which was a sphynx; and third that of the whole world, which was a serpent, biting his tail, in the form of a circle. This was to signify the order according to which the initiate devoted himself to the service of mankind.69

Fellow initiates are arranged by their initiation date, therefore ‘it often happen’d that generals and even princes, who were younger in the initiation, gave place to mere citizens’.70 The initiate appears in glorious clothes, with a

68 Sethos, I.Iv.282.69 Sethos, I.Iv.287.70 Sethos, I.Iv.288.

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sword on his side and a palm branch of peace in his hand. His head is covered with a white veil that he can see through, but hides him from the onlookers.

Behind him follow’d a triumphal chariot, drawn by four horses in front. Four virtues held a triumphal crown over the empty seat; and images of the vices enslav’d, border’d all the circumference of the footboard. This chariot was, excepting some symbols, like to that in which generals made their entries into the chief cities of Egypt, at their return from any signal victory. But the initiate never went into his ; to shew that he did not aspire even to those exterior honours which his great actions might merit.71

This spectacle sends an unmistakeable message. Beyond his defensive pow-ers against external and domestic dangers, we also witness the initiate’s victory over himself, his vices enslaved like so many public enemies. The veiled Sethos receives a greater than usual acclaim, because people are apprehensive about Daluca’s administration. Until he reveals himself, he is celebrated only in his impersonal role as popular liberator, not the well-beloved prince and heir to the throne. The public character completely overtakes the private, so that the public show of force in the acclamation has no individual object.

It was for this reason, though the joy had been less at other times, that the initiate always went veil’d; that he might apply no part of these transports of publick affection to himself, and that he might, on the contrary, suppose they were only due to the high esteem he had for a body, whose examples he was hereby taught to follow, and whose glory he was encouraged to maintain.72

The wild popular acclaim reconfirms the public authorisation of Sethos’s office and the institution of initiates, not him personally. Osoroth is overjoyed by the procession. Sethos, still veiled, ascends the temporary scaffold in front of the royal palace’s balcony.

Here he kneel’d down on a cushion, and made a profound reverence to the king. Then rising, he drew his sword, as offering it for his service. At this action, which the young prince perform’d with a wonderful grandeur and noble air, Osoroth, almost with tears in his eyes, stoop’d, and stretch’d out his arms as to embrace this initiate. He then turn’d to the right and to the left, to inspire every one with that tender ad-miration with which he himself was pierc’d. The people, encourag’d by this example, vented thousands of joyful acclamations address’d to the king. They wish’d him to be their master, and to continue so during a long course of life. At the same time they fix’d their eyes upon the queen in a manner, which tho’ no otherwise insulting, than in their secret intentions, she however perfectly comprehended.73

71 Sethos, I.Iv.289.72 Sethos, I.Iv.289.73 Sethos, I.Iv.290-1.


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The initiate is the living link between the king and his people. Sethos walks back to the temple with sword and palm crossed, while Osoroth, still unaware of the initiate’s identity, berates Daluca for not telling him earlier that Sethos left with Amedes, so that he could have arranged for Sethos to be present and stirred to emulation by the sight of such a magnificent initiate. Sethos sits on a throne in the temple, two officers pull the curtains, and it is only now (and to the people first) that his identity is revealed.

Sethos, as we saw, ends up as the ‘Conservator’ of Egypt and the arbi-trator of Africa. He resigns his throne and breaks off his engagement with Mnevia, the love of his life. He promises never to marry another woman, in order to protect his position as the impartial Conservator of Egypt, Sethos Sofis. The Egyptian kings conferred this title on him in the belief that he was a commoner. Even Spanius’s original plan for procuring this title for him was predicated on the assumption that Sethos/Cheres had no connection to any of the royal houses.74 The superiority of public interest over heredity is shown once again. The kings of Thebes and This miscalculate in thinking that this title is insufficient for Spanius to allow a commoner to wed his daughter; and in his final reasoning to Mnevia, Sethos/Cheres argues that ‘The dignity so spontaneously conferr’d, and which has no parallel, must be more pre-cious to me, than a birthright, in which I have so many equals’.75

Popular sovereignty is the most salient feature of Séthos’s constitutional criticisms and reform alternatives. Even the initiates’ higher morality derives from regard for the common good. Sethos/Cheres is conscious of his birth. He refers to it often for self-motivation, or to get the better of a high-ranking debating partner; but public interest always overrides his dynastic interests. By contrast, we are shown princes who place heredity above the public, and are proven spectacularly wrong. One example is Mephres, the king of Thebes who, after capturing Thoris, vows to take vengeance for the unseemly death of Sethos/Cheres which he blames on Thoris’s treachery, choosing to ignore Queen Daluca’s role in the conspiracy. Mephres reprimands Thoris for pre-suming to command an army against the army that he, a king, commands. He even considers this to be a calculated slight from King Osoroth, who ought to have known better than to allow an up-start to face a royal. But, Mephres continues, there is no point in talking about this in public: even discussing such matters belongs to blood-royals only.76

74 Sethos, II.x.384.75 Sethos, II.x.474.76 Sethos, I.v.369-71.

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4.2. The scope of popular sovereignty: checked and delimited

The flipside of the frequent, multifarious and potent expressions of pop-ular power is the clear limit Terrasson sets to its practice. The people have no direct role in everyday government. Similarly, the palpable moral psychology for the masses is described only apophatically in Séthos. The multitude is shown to be occasionally superstitious, easy to manipulate, but almost always in possession of aggregate common sense and decency. Yet Terrasson gives no treatment of their psychology that would be comparable to the extended discussion of the prince’s and individual commoner’s. His views on the psy-chology of the multitude can at best be inferred.

On the few occasions when Sethos/Cheres directly involves the citizens in choosing their government, instead of at least guiding them to follow what he regards as their best interest, he imposes constraints on broad popular de-liberation.77 For instance, after overthrowing the barbarous clerics of Sogno, the indictment of the evil minister occurs by spontaneous public accusations, voiced only by the prominent citizens – those who used to sustain the corrupt minister through bribes. Similarly, Sethos/Cheres asks only them for their opinion about the king’s character, and whether or not to reinstate him. The people like their king, and hope that without the priests’ malign influence he will be a stronger and gentler ruler. Yet Sethos/Cheres uses their opinion only to form judgment about the citizens themselves, namely that they are morally mature and by nature good.78 In assessing the king, he accepts as evidence only the optimates’ judgment. Still, public opinion is not without significance. Sethos/Cheres

was glad to have this formal testimony from the people, that the king might have the greater affection for his subjects, to whom he would partly be oblig’d for his resto-ration, and that the subjects might be the more strictly devoted to the king in some measure of their own election.

It is unclear what he would have done if the citizens wanted a new king, or a parliament, instead of or in addition to their reinstated ruler. Although all power comes from the people, the popular participation of the Sognoese, who are at a relatively low stage of development, is limited to non-binding consultation at best.

77 M. ozouf, ‘Public opinion at the end of the old regime’, Journal of Modern History, 60 suppl. (1988), pp. 3-21. K.M. Baker, ‘Public Opinion as Political Invention’, in Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 167-199.

78 Sethos, II.vII.40-7.


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The execution of the minister and the king’s reinstatement take place on a tall stage, engineered to maximise public visibility. The same device and purpose appear at Sethos’s initiation, Azares’s confession, and Sethos’s rein-statement at the end of the book. However, unlike at the burial of Nephte in Memphis, only the lords, ladies and priests of Sogno can ask questions or provide evidence in the course of this monarch’s trial. Nephte’s trial was posthumous, and did not endanger stability by exposing a living monarch to public assessment. Sethos’s initiation was completed through public acclama-tion, but unlike at Nephte’s funeral, no one was asked or allowed to testify individually. In this world, popular power works only in indirect ways.

After defeating Anteus, Sethos/Cheres negotiates with the Carthaginian Senate for the life of the captured soldiers and Tygeus. The Senate eventually agrees to his demands, because they realise that his arguments are correct and therefore if they resisted him, they would risk the people’s censure.79 It is not exactly rationality, but common wisdom that the Senate recognises in the public.80 Terrasson expresses no faith in councils, either. Sethos/Cheres repeatedly overturns the considered judgment of various councils of war, by convincing them otherwise with a few words, or by simply acting against the consensus and then showing the council why its decision had been wrong. The Carthaginian Senate also often fails to make rational or virtuous deci-sions. In the end, responsibility for political practice lies with the hero alone.81

5. Secrets and lies

This leitmotif was briefly mentioned in section 3 above, as arcana imperii. Here they are considered not as parts of the hero’s education, but as tools of war and government.

Secrets, lies and deceptions abound in Sethos/Cheres’s wars and cam-paigns. The battles with Azares offer good examples. Both men are trained in military deception, and their war quickly becomes a contest of lies. At one stage Azares pretends to negotiate, while planning to withdraw his troops during the night, so as to create the illusion that he renounced his ambi-

79 Sethos, II.Ix.334.80 J. haBerMaS, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category

of Bourgeois Society (MIT Press, 1989). Relevantly developed in R. chartIer, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Duke University Press, 1991), ch. 2. M.C. JacoB, ‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28:1 (1994), pp. 95-113.

81 R. koSelleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (MIT Press, 1988).

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tion for the throne of Memphis. Sethos/Cheres, seeing through the first pre-tence, pretends he did not, to try to make Azares careless in organising his withdrawal. Terrasson approves these as valid and wise military strategies. Another kind of deception, however, cannot be tolerated. Sethos/Cheres fi-nally decides to kill Anteus not because of his deceptions and lies in war but because his direct, explicit promise of truce or peace cannot be trusted. I cannot explain Terrasson’s criteria for distinguishing between legitimate mil-itary and political deception and cases in which pacta sunt servanda holds unconditionally, but he makes these distinctions consistently and confidently throughout the book. There are clearer distinctions between the forms of acceptable political deceits, ranging from arcana imperii through white lies to complex conspiracies.

Secrecy first appears when the High Priest declares that Nephte ‘never suffered a secret, or a falsity, to proceed out of her mouth; and that dissimula-tion, which is so inseparable from sovereignty, in her never extended beyond silence’.82 Dissimulation goes much farther for her son. At the end of Book II, Amedes explains initiation to Sethos. The young prince wants to leave im-mediately, but Amedes enjoins him to keep it a secret. This is actually his first trial. The preparation and ceremonies of initiation are shrouded in opaque and elaborate deception. For instance, Sethos is warned that he must follow all instructions to the letter, as he will be immediately disqualified for the slightest breach.

It was not that they ever design’d to put their threats in execution, but they did it to put the candidates to a trial under this situation of mind, in order to give them an opportunity of exerting their courage; for they wink’d at any small failures in those whom they judg’d worthy of the initiation in other respects.83

At the end of the ceremony Sethos takes an oath of secrecy and consents to his summary execution, should he ever break it. Secrets are worth having for their own sake. They add moral fibre, and attract more secrets:

It is certain, that the bare observation of their religious secrets gave the initiates, as well as the priests, a fund of wisdom and discretion, for which they were rever-enc’d, and which procur’d them, as well from princes as private persons, an entire confidence of secrets in every kind. They however recommended, not only to initi-ates, but to young priests and officers of the second order, not to affect that reserv’d air, which serves only to excite in others a useless curiosity, and which, in some meas-

82 Sethos, I.I.46.83 Sethos, I.Iv.184.


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ure, discovers the secrets they are solicitious to keep. Thus they accustom’d them-selves to a certain affability, which did not give room to the greater part of mankind to suspect they knew more than they said.84

Their rites are kept in the strictest secrecy. If somebody breaks it, he dies, and the rites are changed.

This is the reason why we know so little of the antient ceremonies. What I am acquainted with myself came to my knowledge only by means of some uncommon documents very difficult to be decypher’d’.85

Betraying a secret is an Egyptian initiate’s greatest crime. Its punishment is vivisection and feeding one’s heart to birds of prey. This is the original of the corrupted Greek myth of Prometheus.86

Sethos/Cheres’s repertoire also includes white lies. The young king of Guiney wants to emulate him, and follow him to Egypt to be initiated. Sethos/Cheres thinks that Guiney needs the king more than the king needs initiation. Hiding behind his public, assumed persona he ‘told him, conceal-ing the truth, and yet not telling him a falsehood, that there was no such name as Cheres in the list of the Egyptian initiates’.87 He used the same ploy of offering incomplete and re-arranged facts to deceive Zoros and Zarita, the Carthaginian refugees in the Hesperides, although they did not believe him and waited for Amedes to clear the ensuing uneasy atmosphere.

Even the king of the blessed Hesperides is not averse to the occasional ruse. He tells Sethos/Cheres to go find the Carthaginian refugees and pretend he got lost, so that the Hesperidians would not discover that the refugees were allowed to settle. Sethos/Cheres agrees, then tells his two companions, officers of the Phoenician fleet, to return on board, conceal their plan to save Carthage, and pick him up in a few days after, he lies, he talked to the Atlan-tides to obtain the precise information needed for the campaign. Other than retaining sole control over the situation, there is no rationale for this elabo-rate deception of his own close allies. Later events do not justify it, either.

Giscon, one of the initiated princes, is set up as contrast with Sethos/Cheres in Terrasson’s careful scheme. He is equally ready and willing to use complex deceit, but he is less fortunate or apt. In an effort to save Zarita and himself from Anteus’s web of lies, Giscon chooses to layer new lies on top

84 Sethos, I.Iv.248-9.85 Sethos, I.III.176.86 Sethos, I.Iv.258.87 Sethos, II.vII.117.

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of Anteus’s scheme, instead of telling Zarita that he discovered her father’s deception. Here is Amedes’s assessment:

But at that time his business was to disguise the irregularity of his conduct, which he plainly perceiv’d was but a fatal mixture of weakness and temerity. Falshood, which unhappily becomes a necessity to those who do evil, was always a great trouble to him ; he avoided it likewise as much as possible : but he did not disprove those untruths which the king made use of in the presence of his daughter, generally with such cunning as hardly left the appearance of a falsity in the expressions, but which infallibly deceiv’d the minds of those they were levell’d at.88

Describing Giscon’s incorrect approach to deception, Amedes gently reproaches Sethos/Cheres for his courage getting the better of his wisdom during the siege of Coptos, and for interrupting him twice in impatience. He no longer advises him to reign in his passions, as he constantly did during Sethos’s education.

This may be an appropriate entry point for another line of inquiry about how Fénelonian novels transform the use of exemplars. Princes travel, and the reader empathises and lives through events, discharging passions and ac-quiring valuable knowledge with real-life moral applications. Historical and conventional literary (and religious) exemplars were good or bad, and failed or succeeded accordingly. All one had to do was imitate them.89 The Fénelo-nian genre developed a distinctive moral psychology, attested by the authors’ extensive discussions of education, motivation and politics both within and outside their experimental novels. Their heroes, Telemachus, Cyrus, Sethos and Psammitichus, are not as straightforward exemplars as they first appear. Although Sethos/Cheres aims at virtue, and makes precious few mistakes that are admitted or spelled out in the book, there are certain signs and passages that beg the reader to problematise him as a model suitable for emulation. The aforementioned inhumanity of an accomplished hero is one such sign.

Occasionally, secrecy can be so over-blown as to become positively comic. By the time Osoroth asks Sethos/Cheres (whom he believes he is meeting for the first time) to defend Memphis against Anteus (whom he believes to be Sethos), Sethos/Cheres already knows that the person who pretended to be Pammus is in fact his unsuspecting younger brother, Pemphos: but since Pemphos ‘had thought proper to conceal from his mother the acquaintance they already had with one another, he resolv’d to pursue this privacy to the

88 Sethos, II.vIII.227.89 SoMoS, ‘Enter Secularisation: Heinsius’s De tragoediae constitutione’, History of European

Ideas, 36:1 (2010), pp. 19-38.


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end’.90 Which is why they salute each other in front of the general’s tent as if they had never met before, and only start talking as friends in the tent. Pemphos, still unaware of Sethos/Cheres’s true identity and that his own false identity was discovered, tells Sethos/Cheres about his love for Mnevia, who originally sent him off to emulate Sethos/Cheres – the man who is now scheming to somehow renounce Mnevia in Pemphos’s favour.

6. Commerce and sociability

The eighteenth century produced a torrent of sophisticated literature on commerce and sociability.91 My aim here is to merely relate Séthos to some of the issues that feature in the primary and secondary sources. Commerce, according to Sethos/Cheres, enriches all nations by optimising the redistribu-tion of their resources, and locking them into peaceful interdependence. It is also a more reliable means than religion or culture for keeping the channels of emulation open. Sethos/Cheres acts several times on the maxim that a nation should be civilised and topple tyranny in order to benefit from ‘commerce, that amiable band of society, which joins the most distant nations’.92 Com-mercial engagement civilises a nation and protects it from tyranny, which can only survive in an isolated country. These are stock themes; in Séthos, howev-er, commerce is an emphatically popular and even democratic activity.

After discussing Egyptian chemistry and the futility of trying to turn base metal into gold, Terrasson continues in his own name or in the name of the fictitious ancient author:

Besides, wise men don’t doubt but this true philosopher’s stone, of which Mercury of Hermes was the inventor, was the commerce which this first king of Thebes estab-lish’d in Egypt. And in reality, it is not the quantity of matter, either gold or silver, be it taken from the mines, or the laboratories of chymists, that renders a nation opulent. The mines of Norway, Germany, Spain and Africa, don’t make the inhabitants of those coun-tries one jot the richer. The continual circulation of a moderate quantity of this matter, and a perpetual commerce, with the productions of a soil, and the fruits of industry, have rais’d nations to extreme plenty, who have no mines either of gold or silver.93

90 Sethos, II.x.410.91 hont, Jealousy. SonenScher, Before. Fénelon’s own view of commerce is interesting. Its praise

in Télémaque is cautious and qualified, but in the unpublished Tables de Chaulnes, written in 1711, Fénelon declares free trade as the solution to several log jams in the European balance of power.

92 Sethos, II.vii.2. Also see Sogno’s reform: Sethos, II.vi.35-6.93 Sethos, I.II.70-1.

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Commerce is the ‘true philosopher’s stone’. Superfluous wealth should be used for external magnificence, which stimulates industry and creates jobs. A rich monarch should spend, wisely and in moderation, on public projects.94

Terrasson has sophisticated theories about commerce.95 His belief in the commercial character of universal morality is attested in several passages. The reform of Sogno, discussed from a moral perspective above, is a good example.

In the mean time these new guests had dispers’d themselves through all Sogno, and fill’d these poor people with a joy as yet unknown to them. They gave them no-tions of trade which they never had before; they bought of them a great number of things they had no need of, only to let them into the nature of the barter.96

Here is no nostalgia for savage innocence. Sethos/Cheres conquers hunt-er-gatherers, makes them build settlements, and instructs them to start cul-tivating the land. Using emulation and envy, he instils a sense of ownership by officially giving their own land to them. He establishes a priestly court of justice to transfer uncultivated land to their neighbours, or back into com-munal ownership:

giving them a mutual right to one another’s lands which they left untill’d. But to prevent any quarrels that might arise from these sorts of intermissions, they could not enter upon them but by a decree of the priests, whom he had constituted judges of all their differences. The necessity of subsistence, added to this emulation; and the rigorous laws made to prevent begging, soon wrought upon these new inhabitants to bring the whole country to a great height of fertility. Of all advantages to a kingdom, the greatest is, to have all the necessaries of life within it self, and to be able even to furnish foreigners with them ; but, on the contrary, to borrow none of them but conveniencies or ornaments.97

Autarky and commerce are compatible for Terrasson. Emulation and competition, in other words natural pride and greed, make savages first cul-tivate their lands, even if they initially become worse off than they were as hunters. Sethos/Cheres then establishes trade in New Phoenicia by making his fleet accept the shells that the savages use for money. He first ‘invests’ by offering savages over-favourable bargains, all sorts of civilised goods for their less precious products and raw materials. When they are hooked, he starts

94 Sethos, I.III.152.95 See his Trois lettres, op.cit.96 Sethos, II.vII.34.97 Sethos, II.vII.61.


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using Phoenician coins. As the kingdom is established and they open gold and silver mines, they start trading in shells from all over Africa for gold and silver coins. In less than two years, all of coastal Africa adopts coins, as is ‘common to all the nations of the world who seek any intercourse one with the other’.

It is a false policy of great traders to seek to impoverish their neighbours; for they thereby lose the vend of their own merchandizes, which they then are not in a capacity to buy. Trade consists only in a circulation of different matters, caus’d, as it were, by equal powers.98

Such statements were not without contemporary relevance or risk. The Club d’Entresol, attended among others by Saint-Pierre, Hénault, Mon-tesquieu, d’Argenson, Walpole, Bolingbroke and Ramsay (who wrote the Travels of Cyrus during the Club’s existence), was shut down in 1731, the year Séthos was published, because of its criticism of Fleury and especially because of it opposition to mercantilism and Physiocracy.99 In most savage nations he conquers, Sethos/Cheres explicitly bans hunting. Hunting is inefficient. It makes people exert themselves tremendously but only for very short periods of time, and they become ‘very laborious and slothful at the same time.’100

Despite his stadial scheme of civilisation and modes of production, and his avowed programme of enlightenment, Terrasson applauds when Sethos/Cheres leaves a particular nation in a savage condition, instituting only bar-ter but no coins among them. He does this to ensure that the wider world would always have enough fur and other items that only savages can procure, untouched by money and unaffected by a spiral of demands or the commer-cial theatrum mundi.101 Since economics and morality go hand in hand, and Sethos/Cheres wilfully keeps these nations primitive and base in the interest of global commercial balance, the universality of his moral mission seems to be compromised. Though clearly contradicting several principles expressed throughout Séthos, Terrasson slides over the issue without comment.

98 Sethos, II.vII.65.99 A. adaM, in Le Mouvement philosophique dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris,

1967), pp. 146-150, connects the division of labour and systematic programme of discovery of the Club d’Entresol with Fontenelle’s and Terrasson’s preoccupation d’études positives et de maximes normatives and utilitarianism. I.O. wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton, 1938).

100 Cf. J.-J. rouSSeau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754).101 Sethos, II.vII.57-8.

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concluSIon

This paper introduced the text, and showed some of the ways in which it is important. Predictably, I will try to deceive honourably like Sethos, and conclude with something else than what I proposed in the Abstract, while fulfilling the promise made in the Introduction.

Do not only read Séthos. If I convinced you about this text’s importance to eighteenth-century and current discourses, you will see why its re-issue or even academic edition with a full apparatus of notes is both a promising commercial venture and a service to mankind.

FINITO DI STAMPARE

PER CONTO DI LEO S. OLSCHKI EDITORE

PRESSO ABC TIPOGRAFIA • SESTO FIORENTINO (FI)

NEL MESE DI SETTEMBRE 2014

Documents

The Lost Treasures of Sethos, Enlightened Prince of Egypt (1731)