35 



in lils travels he was accompanied by musicians, among whom 

 were nine virgins.* This fable was rather an embellishment, 

 than a part of the Greek religion ; they were invoked by 

 poets, but never adored ; the}- seem also to have converted 

 some parts of the Egyptian history, doubtless, communicated 

 to them by the Phenicians, into fictions. Thus, it being 

 mentioned in the' Egyptian history, that the Nile, having 

 burst its mounds, had overflown that part of Egypt, of 

 which Prometheus was governor, and that these mounds 

 were repaired by Hercules, who thus freed Prometheus from 

 the pain, grief and anxiety which that accident had 

 caused him ;-j- the Greeks converted the whole into a 

 fiction, and reported that an eagle preyed on Prometheus's 

 liver ; the river being called an eagle, from the sudden 

 violence of its irruption, and that it was killed by Hercules. 

 They laid the scene on Mount Caucasus, as it was much 

 frequented by eagles ; but the fable of Charon, which is 

 commonly thought to have been grounded on a fact men- 

 tioned by Diodorus, namely, that the Egyptians transported 

 the bodies of their dead beyond the Lake Moeris, and that 

 Charon was the ferry-man, I believe to be an original Greek 

 fable, and that no such practice ever existed in Egypt, 

 otherwise Herodotus would have mentioned it ; it was too 

 important not to have been noticed by him. Diodorus, who 

 visited Egypt 400 years after Herodotus, must have heard it 

 from the Egyptian priests, who, during the reign of the 



P 2 Ptolemies 



* Dlodor. Lib, 1. p. 22. f IbiJ. 



