﻿ON INDIAN CHRONOLOGY. 395 



Eudoxus to Chiron, the supposed assistant and instruc- 

 tor ot rhe Argonauts, 1 shall say very little j because 

 the whole Argonautic story (which neither was, ac- 

 cording to Herodotus, nor, indeed, could have been 

 originally Grecian) appears, even when stripped of its 

 poetical and fabulous ornaments, extremely disput- 

 able ; and whether it was founded on a league of the 

 Helladian princes and states for the purpose of check- 

 ing, on a favourable opportunity, the overgrown power 

 of Egypt, or with a view to secure the commerce of 

 the Euxine and appropriate the wealth of Colchis ; or, as 

 I am disposed to believe, on an emigration from Africa 

 and Asia of that adventurous race, who had first been 

 established in Chaldea -, whatever, in short, gave rise 

 to the fable, v/hich the old poets have so richly em- 

 bellished, and the old historians have so inconsiderately 

 adopted, it seems to me very clear, even on the prin- 

 ciples of Newton, and on the same authorities to which 

 he refers, that the voyage of the Argonauts must have 

 preceded the year in which his calculations led him to 

 place it. Battus built Cyrene, says our great philoso- 

 pher, on the scite of Ira sa, the city of Antaeus, in the 

 year 633 before Christ; yet he soon afterwards calls 

 Euripylus, with whom the Argonauts had a conference, 

 king of Cyrene ; and in both passages he cites Pindar , 

 whom I acknowledge to have been the moft learned, 

 as 'veil as the sublimed of poets. Now, if I under- 

 stand Pindar (which I will not assert, and I neither 

 possess nor remember at present the Scholia, which I 

 formerly perused) the fourth Pythian Ode begins with 

 a short panegyric on Arcesitas of Cyrene', iC where," 

 says the bard, " the priestess, who sat near the golden 

 u eagles of Jove, prophesied of old, when Apollo was 

 " not absent from his mansion, that Bat/us, the cole- 

 " nizer of fruitful I^ybia, having just left the sacred 

 " isle (Thera) should build a city excelling in cars, 

 " on the splendid breast of earth, and, with the se- 

 " venteenth generation, should refer to himself the 

 " Therean prediction of Medea which that princess of 

 '* the CoJchiam, that impetuous daughter of AZttes, 



