48 



poet, misled, perhaps, by the ambiguity of the Phenician 

 names when translated into Greek. Thus there being a 

 Phenician tradition, tliat Uranus, one of their kings, had 

 married his sister Gea, and had several sons, one of whom 

 was named Kronos, Ilesiort (or rather his predecessors) 

 understanding these names in the sense they present in the 

 Greek language, and at the same time retaining the Phenician 

 sense, who considered them as prisons, says, v. 133, that the 

 heaven and the earth begot ten sons and daughters, the 

 youngest of whom was Ktvnos, whom the Latins call Saturn ; 

 and as this word by a slight variation of the pronunciation 

 might be called xpo"?, which signifies time ; hence the poets 

 called him Time, or the God of Time. So Orpheus in his 12th 

 hymn addresses him as the God who brings forth and gives 

 increase to all things. So Sophocles in his Electra calls Time 

 {xf'"!) a most gentle God. That Hesiod understood the heaven 

 and the earth iti the gross sense appears, by v. 153, and 159> 

 and indeed by all that precedes and follows. 



There were other antediluvian transactions, which Hesiod 

 mentions in his poem De Operibus et Diebus, which are not 

 mentioned by Sanchoniatho ; but seem derived from the 

 old Hellenic tradition, followed as we have seen by Ovid, in 

 which the original state of man in paradise seems alluded 

 to, and his degeneracy in the succeeding ages, which 

 occasioned the universal deluge. This tradition was much 

 amplified and embellished both by Hesiod and Ovid ; hence 

 originated the division of the space of time that intervened 



betwixt 



