126 



MARTIN L. ROUriE, ESQ., B.L., ON 



eastern and western coasts of the --^Egean Sea, but the innumer- 

 able islands which lie between them ; while every time that 

 Greece is noticed in the Old Testament it is called Javan,* 



But this Bible statement of the parentage of Javan, or the 

 Greek nation, strangely tallies with the Greeks' own account of 

 their origin. Ouranos and Gaia (Heaven and Earth), said they, 

 had six sons and six daughters ; and of this family only one 

 — lapetos by name — had a human progenyf : marrying 

 Klymene,! a daughter of Okeanos (the Ocean), he had by 

 her Prometheiis and three other sons ; Prometheus begot 

 Deukalion (who was the Grecian Noah, saved with his wife 

 alone through a world-wide flood) ; and Deukalion begot 

 Hellen, the reputed father of the Hellenes or Greeks. Nay 

 more — if we proceed a step further, we And that Hellen himself 

 had a grandson named Ion ; and in Homer's poetry the rank and 

 file of the Greeks are commonly called 'laoz^e?, or Jaones§ 

 (between the a and the short o of which, as in like cases, 

 philologers read the lost digamma, making it 'lafoz^e?, or 

 Javones) ; while ^schylus in his play of " The Persians " twice 

 makes Xerxes' mother call the European Greeks by this 

 name. 1 1 



The agreement in detail of the names of Javan's sons given 

 in our chapters with those of the Grecian tribes scattered 

 around the -^gean Sea and the Levant I hope to show in my 

 next paper ; but for the present this much is proved : the 

 Greeks by their traditions, equally with the Bible record, 

 claimed Japheth or JapetH as their first human ancestor : they 



* The two clearest references under that name to its history being 

 found in Dan. xi, 2, where Xerxes' invasion of it is foretold, and in 

 Dan. viii, 5-8, 20-22, where a prophecy is made of the conquest of the 

 Persian empire by a king of Greece, and the subsequent fourfold division 

 of his own dominions. 



t As for the other children of Ouranos and Gaia, Oceanus and Tethys 

 intermarr}'ing became the parents of all the nymphs of river and sea ; 

 and similarly Hyperion and Theia became the parents of Helios, Selene, 

 and Eos (the Sun, Moon and Dawn), Coeus and Phoebe of the goddesses 

 Leto and Asteria, and Cronus and Ehea of Zeus, Poseidon, and other 

 gods ; Themis (by Zeus) bore the Hours and the Fates, while Mnemosyne 

 (by Zeus) gave l)irth to the Muses ; and, lastly, Crius (by Eurybia) 

 begot Astraeus, who in turn begot the Winds and the Stars. 



I Reverting in tlie body of my text to the Greek k in proper names in 

 place of the often misleading Latin c, I have kept the y for its original 

 purpose, which was to represent the sound of the Greek v, the same as 

 that of tlie French u. 



^ See Gladstone, Homer (Macmillan), pp. 102, 103. 



j| 11. 178, 563. T Cp. page 125, note t. 



