172 



It were difficult-, however, if not impossible, to conceive 

 how an entire language, and, particularly, one so perfect as 

 the Greek, could subsist, among a people so rude and un- 

 settled as the early Greeks, and who had so little peaceful 

 intercourse with each other, if not committed to writing, 

 and preserved in books, composed long before their lapsing 

 into a state so unfavourable to literature. And, accord- 

 ingly, we do find, that such books existed in the earliest 

 ages. Diodorus, Lib. V. p. 376, tells us, that several lite- 

 rary monuments existed in Greece, which were lost by a 

 great inundation, probably, that of Ogyges, by which At- 

 tica was laid waste; and from which he fled, with preci- 

 pitation, into Boeotia.* But many may have been saved; 

 and, certainly, some existed, in the age of Cccrops: for 

 Tacitus, Lib. XL Annal. c. xiv. says, that many attributed 

 the invention of letters to him; which could not be, if 

 books did not exist in his time.f It appears, also, from 

 Diodoru&'s account, that these literary monuments existed, 

 at the time of the inundation, in Attica only; and not in 

 those parts inhabited by the Pelasgi: for he tells us, that 

 the Egyptians, claiming to themselves the invention of the 

 astronomical science, the Greeks had nothing to reply. 

 Now, as the inundation reached no other part of Greece 

 but Attica, they could have replied, if any astronomical 

 books had existed in the parts inhabited by the Pelasgi. 



We 



* Mount Helicon was a very proper place of refuge, 

 t If we credit Cedrenus, p. 81, Deucalion wrote a history of the flood; 

 namely, that which happened in his time. 



