416 The Rev. John Kenrick o?i the alleged 



from the absence of such allusions, that the story of Deuca- 

 lion and his flood was unknown to Homer. He might have 

 introduced them without incongruity, for example, in the ac- 

 count of Thessaly in the Catalogue; but there was no necessity 

 that he should do so. The silence of Hesiod is more im- 

 portant. In his Works and Days, the only one of the poems 

 ascribed to him of which the genuineness is unquestioned*, 

 he gives a history of the different races of mankind which 

 had preceded the race of iron, among whom it was his own 

 misfortune to livef. In such a deduction it appears impossi- 

 ble that he could have passed over such an event as the de- 

 struction of the human race by a flood, if it had been in his 

 age an article of popular belief. The only thing which even 

 appears like the destruction of a wicked generation is what is 

 said, 1. 136, of the silver age: 



Zev; Kpovl$r)$ expv\>e, ^oXoufxevOi, ovvzxx Tiaaj 

 Ovx eSt'Sowv /xaxapscffi 3so7j, oi "OXvpirov s%ov<rtv. 



Yet the poet goes on to describe their death in the same words 

 as that of all the other races, 



i7rsi xou toiito yevoc xurcc yalcc xaAtnJ'S : 

 and they become a race of sTnp^flo'vioj pzxapsj, though inferior 

 to their predecessors, who enjoyed the rank of Sa/ju-ovej. There 

 is here no trace of the fate of the contemporaries o/ Noah. 



There is a passage quoted by Strabo, lib. vii. p. 466., from 

 some lost work of Hesiod, in which the name of Deucalion 

 occurs. Speaking of the Leleges, he says, 



''Htoi yap Aoxpoi; AsXeywv rrfrpcuro Xacov 

 Tohc pa. 7T0TS Kgovliri; Zehc a^iru pjSsa eiSojj 

 Asxtous ex yulr)s ctXeouc Tioge devxciXtoovog. 



The last line is evidently corrupt, and Mr. Bryant, Myth. iii. 

 p. 389, pressed it into the service of his argument, by reading 

 xXtw -nope JevxaXicovi, " to Deucalion the man of the sea." 

 Villebrun conjectures dXeas voge devx.tx.klwi, which suits well 

 enough with the connexion ; for the poet appears to represent 

 them as a scattered tribe before, who were collected together 

 to serve under Deucalion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus speaks 

 of Deucalion as leading an army of Curetes and Leleges and 

 others who dwelt around Parnassus into Thessaly, and ex- 

 pelling the Pelasgi J; and Hesiod probably refers to the same 

 event. From the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, iv. 266, 

 it appears that both Hesiod and Hecatjeus represented the 

 descendants of Deucalion as reigning over Thessaly. Accord- 



* Pausanias,ix. 31. f "Enycc Kotl'Rft. 107—172. 



t Ant. Rom. i. 17. 



