Gulliver's Travels (Swift)/Part 3/Chapter 8
from the Collection “Gulliver's Travels. Part 3”
The division of this summary into sections is editorial.
On Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver continued his conversations with the dead, whom the island’s governor could summon.
Ancient authors confront their interpreters
Gulliver devoted a day to famous ancient thinkers, asking to see Homer and Aristotle with their commentators. So many commentators appeared that hundreds had to wait outside the room.
Neither author knew any of the commentators. One ghost told Gulliver that the interpreters avoided the authors in the afterlife because they were ashamed of having misrepresented them. Homer found that two of his commentators lacked the imagination to understand poetry; Aristotle impatiently asked whether the others were as foolish as the two presented to him.
At Gulliver’s request, the governor summoned Descartes and Gassendi to explain their theories of nature to Aristotle. Aristotle admitted that his own ideas had often rested on guesswork. He found that the later thinkers’ systems had also been discredited, and predicted that fashionable explanations of nature would keep changing.
He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters.
Gulliver spent five days speaking with other ancient scholars and saw many early Roman emperors. The emperor Elagabalus’s cooks lacked the ingredients to demonstrate their skill, while a Spartan servant’s broth proved so unpleasant that Gulliver could not manage a second spoonful.
Noble pedigrees and modern reputations unravel
The two gentlemen who had brought Gulliver to the island needed to leave within three days. He used that time to question prominent people who had died in the preceding two or three centuries. An admirer of old families, he asked to see kings with eight or nine generations of their ancestors.
Instead of an uninterrupted line of royalty, he found musicians, courtiers and churchmen among them. Other noble family lines had likewise been interrupted by servants, entertainers, soldiers and thieves. Gulliver believed he could trace inherited features, illnesses and faults to these ancestors.
His inquiries into public life were still more disturbing. After questioning celebrated figures from European courts, Gulliver concluded that compliant writers had routinely credited cowards and fools with courage and wisdom, while innocent people were condemned through corrupt judges and political factions. He summed up his reaction:
I was chiefly disgusted with modern history.
He also found writers of supposed secret histories inventing private conversations and motives. The dead described how people with access to powerful figures influenced councils and governments. A general admitted winning through cowardice and poor decisions; an admiral had defeated an enemy he had meant to betray his fleet to. Three kings said they had appointed people of merit only by mistake and argued that government depended on corruption.
Gulliver then questioned recently deceased holders of titles and great estates. Their accounts attributed their advancement to fraud, betrayal, sexual exploitation, poisoning and the destruction of innocent people through corrupt justice. The discoveries weakened his professed reverence for high rank.
An overlooked captain and a corrupt inheritance
Gulliver next asked to meet people who had performed great services for rulers and states. Most were absent from the records; a few were remembered as criminals or traitors. They appeared poorly dressed and downcast, and said they had died in poverty, disgrace or by execution.
One former ship’s captain stood beside his only son, who had been killed at about eighteen in the sea battle of Actium.
The captain said he had broken through the enemy line, sunk three major ships and captured a fourth, causing Antony’s flight and the ensuing victory. After the war he sought a larger ship at Augustus’s court, but it went to an inexperienced young man with connections to an imperial mistress. He then lost his own command to a favourite of the vice-admiral and retired to a poor farm.
Gulliver asked to hear from Agrippa, the admiral at Actium. Agrippa confirmed the story and said the captain had understated his own contribution. Gulliver reflected that commanders often took both praise and spoils that belonged to others.
Because the summoned dead looked as they had in life, Gulliver also compared them with the living. He attributed what he saw as a decline in English health and appearance to disease. Finally, he summoned English yeomen of an earlier generation, whom he admired for their plain living, honesty, courage and love of liberty. Comparing them with their descendants, he lamented that votes were now sold for money and that electoral politics had acquired the corruption of the court.