On the Theogony. 79 



common appellation of these children of Heaven and Earth,) Coeus, Koiof, 

 ^olicfe pro Ilotoc, Quality : Crius, Kpetoe, from the obsolete /cpew, the root 

 of KparoQ, Power : lapetus,* from TTiirreiv aro, the upper regions, because 

 light things fall upwards, (this is the most forced and unnatural of all these 

 etymologies). Thia, Qeia, from ^taffBat, to see, the faculty of sight, she is 

 afterwards represented as the mother, as Hyperion, the high mover, is the 

 father of the sun and moon. Rhea, 'Peia, from peiiy to flow j Rhea is said 

 to have been the wife of Kronus, or Saturn, Kpovoc, for xp^^"^' *■'"' repre- 

 sentative of time, because time perpetually flows ; Rhea is also sometimes 

 taken as a title of the Earth, because the rivers flow thence ; but we have 

 already seen that Hesiod makes the Earth, an older goddess, the mother of 

 Rhea. It seems necessary in our remarks on this poem to mention these 

 speculations of the ancient commentators, but surely to mention them is to 

 expose their utter uncertainty : the marine goddess, Tethys, is also here 

 mentioned. We now come to the most distinguished, though one of the 

 youngest, of the Titans, Kronus, or, as named by the Romans, Saturn, 

 whose farther legend we shall soon have occasion to notice. That this 

 deity is truly, as has been said above, a personification of time, seems 

 clearly established by the general consent of antiquity, and by the nature 

 of the obviously allegorical attributes assigned to him,t he is called the 



• lapetus, the father of Prometheus, who was said to have formed from earth and 

 water the human race, hence called, audax lapeti genus, is by many supposed to 

 have been taken from a corrupted tradition of Noah's son Japheth, the presumed 

 ancestor of the European population. Such a tradition may easily have exalted the 

 head of their own race to the station of the general head of the whole species. 



f That Time (if this explanation be correct) should be thus represented as one of 

 the youngest of the offspring of Heaven, is a remarkable instance of the gross incon- 

 sistency of this system ; for as Time must metaphysically have originated from the 

 very earliest moment when the operations of nature commenced, he ought undoubt- 

 edly to have been the firstborn of these emblems of those operations. Plato, in the 

 Timoeus, goes still further, and makes Saturn the grandson instead of the son of Heaven 

 and Earth ; his immediate parents being there represented as Ocean and Tethys. We 

 are not well satisfied with any of the etymologies of the Roman Saturn ; but thei-e 

 seems no doubt of his e.vact identity with the Greek Kpovog. Sir Wm. Jones men- 

 tions an Indian mythological personage, named Satya Vuater ; but there seems little 

 analogy between his story or attributes with those of Saturn, excepting that he gives 

 name to one of the Indian periods, the Satyagus, nearly corresponding with the 

 Saturnian age. It would be interesting to examine whether there be any mythological 

 legends relating to Shuncc, the god of the planet Saturn, and presiding over the 

 same sixth day of the week : the Saxon deity of that day, Seatcr, approximates, at 

 least in name. The l'>gyptians do not appear to have possessed an analogous deity, 

 althuugh .Vnubis is by Plutarch in some respects compared to him. The references 

 before given to Pliilo Hyblius, will shew how closely the PlKi'uician coincided with 

 the (Jrecian system in every thing relating to this deity, that is, as to his parentage 

 and his dethroning his father, Heaven. He repeatedly tells us that liis I'hitnician 

 name was Israel, wliich wc know means tlie powerful God in the Semitic languages, 

 and that he had an only son, leud (Ihid iu these dialects). Here the Grecian 



