92 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF 



As to Deucalion, whether we consider him as a real or feigned 

 personage, however lightly we credit the naanner of his deluge, as de- 

 scribed in the Greek poems, and the multifarious details with M^hich it 

 became successively enriched, it is plain that it is only a tradition of 

 the great cataclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenians at the epoch 

 in which they also placed Deucalion, because he was considered as 

 the founder of their nation ; and liis history was confounded with that 

 of all the chieftains of the renewed nations *. 



consequently 1600 years before the first Olympiad, which would place it at 2376 years 

 before Christ ; and the deluge of Noah, according to the Hebrew text, is 2349, only 

 twenty-seven years difference. This testimony of Varro is substantiated by Censorinus 

 de Die Natali, cap. xxi. In fact, Censorinus wrote only 238 years after Christ ; and it 

 appears from Julius Afrieanus, ap. Euseb. prsep. cv, that Acusilaiis, the first author 

 who placed the deluge in the time of Ogyges, made this prince contemporary of Phoro- 

 nseus, which would have brought him very near to the first Olympiad. Julius Afri- 

 eanus only makes an interval of 1020 years between the two epochs ; and Censorinus 

 has a passage confirming this opinion. But some read, in the passage of Varro above 

 cited from Censorinus, JErogitium instead of Ogygium. But this would only be an 

 Erogitian cataclysm, of which who ever heard ! 



* Homer and Hesiod knew nothing of the deluge of Deucalion, nor that of 

 Ogyges. 



The first author (whose works are extant) who alludes to it, is Pindar (Od. Olymp. 

 ix). He mentions Deucalion as arri-^ang on Parnassus, and establishing himself in 

 the city of Pre togenia (first birth or production) and re-creating a population with 

 stones ; in a word, he recounts, only applying it to a single nation, the fable after- 

 wards generalized by Ovid, and applied to the Vvhole of mankind. 



The historians who followed Pindar (Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon) do 

 not mention any deluge, either in the time of Ogyges, or in that of Deucalion, although 

 they speak of this latter asjoae of the first kings of the Hellenians. 



Plato, in his ' Timaeus,' says but a few words about the deluge, as well as of Deu- 

 calion and Pyrrha, as a commencement of the account of the great catastrophe, which, 

 according to the priests of Sais, destroyed the Atalantis ; but in this brief mention, 

 he speaks of the deluge in the singular number, as if it was one only ; and even ex- 

 pressly says, a little farther on, that the Greeks knew but of one. He places the 

 name of Deucalion immediately after that of Phoroneeus, the first man, without even 

 adverting to Ogyges : thus, to the extent of his knovdedge, it was a general event, a 

 completely universal deluge, and the only one that occurred. He looked upon it as 

 identical with that of Ogj'ges. Aristotle (Meteor, i, 14.) seems to have been the 

 first who considered this deluge as only a partial inundation, which he placed near 

 Dodona and the river Acheloiis, but this was the Acheloiis and Dodona of Thessaly. 



Apollodorus (Bibl. i, § 7) gives to the deluge of Deucalion all its magnitude and 

 mythological character : it happened at the epoch of the interval between the age of 

 brass and the iron age. Deucalion is made the son of the Titan Prometheus, the 

 fabricator of man ; he re-creates the human race with stones ; and yet Atlas his 

 uncle, Phoroneiis, who lived before him, and many other antecedent personages, 

 leave large posterities. 



The nearer we come down to more recent authors, the more facts and details do we 

 meet with coinciding with the Mosaic account of the deluge. Thus Apollodorus gives 

 Deucalion a chest as his means of safety ; Plutarch mentions the pigeons by which he 

 endeavoured to ascertain the abatement of the waters ; and Lucian alludes to the 

 animals of every species which he had embarked with him, &'c. 



As to the coinfidences of traditions and hypotheses, by which it has recently been 

 sought to prove that the rupture of the Thracian Bosphorus was the cause of the de- 

 luge of Deucalion, and even of the opening of the Pillars of Hercules, by causing the 

 Euxine sea to discharge its waters into the Archipelago, which were, j rior to this 



