﻿39& A SUPPLEMENT TO THE ESSAY 



" breathed from her immortal mouth, and thus deli- 

 11 vered to the half-divine mariners of the warrior 

 " Jason.' 3 From this introduction to the noblest and 

 most animated of the Argonantic poems, it appears 

 that fiften complete generations had intervened between 

 the voyage of Jason and the emigration of Battus-; 

 so that, considering th^ee generations as equal to an 

 hundred* or a?i hundred and twenty years, wnich New- 

 ton admits to be the Grecian mode of con, putt rg 

 them, we must also place that voyage a: least jive or six 

 hundred years before the time fixed by Newton him- 

 self, according to his own computation, for the build- 

 ing of Cyrene ; that- is, eleven or twelve hundred and 

 thirty-three years be£>re (Christ : an age very near on 

 a medium to that of Parasara. If the poet means af- 

 terwards to say, as I undei stand him, that Arcesilas, 

 his contemporary, was the eighth in descent from Bat- 

 tats, we shall nearly draw the same conclusion, without 

 having recourse to the unnatural reckoning of thirty- 

 three or forty years to a generation ; for Pindar was 

 forty years old when the Persians, having crossed the 

 Hellespont, were nobly resisted at Thermopylae, and 

 gloriously defeated at Salamis. He was bom, there- 

 fore, about the sixty-fifth Olympiad, or five hundred 

 and twenty years before our era ; so that, by allowing 

 more naturally fix or seven hundred years to twenty- 

 three generations, we may at a medium place the 

 voyage of Jus on about one thousand one hundred and 

 seventy years before our Saviour, or about forty-five 

 years before the beginning of the Nezvtonian chro- 

 nology. 



The description of the old colures by Eudoxus, if 

 we implicitly rely on his testimony and on that of Hip- 

 par elms, who was, indisputably, a great astronomer 

 for the age in which he lived, affords, I allow, suffici- 

 ent evidence of some rude observation about 937 

 years before the Christian epoch ; and, if the car- 

 dinal points had receded from those colures 3 6° 29' 



