Note 122 — The History of Nations confirms the Newness of the Continents.

Neither Homer nor Hesiod knew any thing of the deluge of Deucalion, any more than that of Ogyges. The first author, whose works are extant, by whom mention is made of the former, is Pindar (Od. Olymp. ix.) He speaks of Deucalion as landing upon Parnassus, establishing himself in the city of Protogene (first growth or birth), and re-creating his people from stones; in a word, he relates, but confining it to a single nation only, the fable afterwards generalized by Ovid, and applied to the whole human race. The first historians who wrote after Pindar, namely, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, make no mention of any deluge, whether of the time of Ogyges, or that of Deucalion, although they speak of the latter as one of the first kings of the Hellenes.

Plato, in his Timæus, says only a few words of the deluge, as well as of Deucalion and Pyrrha, in order to commence the recital of the great catastrophe, which, according to the priests of Sais, destroyed the Atlantis; but, in these few words, he speaks of the deluge in the singular number, as if it had been the only one. He even expressly mentions farther on, that the Greeks knew only one. He places the name of Deucalion immediately after that of Phoroneus, the first of the human race, without making mention of Ogyges. Thus, with him, it is still a general event, a true universal deluge, and the only one which had happened. He regards it, therefore, as identical with that of Ogyges.

Aristotle (Meteor. i. 14.) seems to be the first who considered this deluge only as a local inundation, which he places near Dodona and the river Achelous, but near the Achelous and Dodona of Thessaly. Apollodorus (Bibl. i. § 7.) restores to the deluge of Deucalion all its grandeur and mythological character. According to him, it took place at the period when the age of brass was passing into the age of iron. Deucalion is the son of Titan Prometheus, the fabricator of man; he forms anew the human race of stones; and yet Atlas, his uncle, Phoroneus, who lived before him, and several other personages anterior to him, preserve a lengthened posterity.

In proportion as we advance toward authors who approach nearer our own times, we find circumstances of detail added, which more resemble those related by Moses. Thus Apollodorus gives Deucalion a great chest as a means of safety; Plutarch speaks of the pigeons by which he sought to find out whether the waters had retired; and Lucian, of the animals of every kind which he had taken with him, &c.

With regard to the blending of traditions and hypotheses, by which it has recently been tried to infer the conclusion, that the rupture of the Thracian Bosphorus was the cause of Deucalion’s deluge, and even of the opening of the pillars of Hercules, by making the waters of the Euxine Sea discharge themselves into the Archipelago, supposing them to have been much higher and more extended than they have been since that event, it is not necessary for us to treat of it in detail, since it has been determined by the observations of M. Olivier, that if the Black Sea had been as high as it is imagined to have been, it would have found several passages for its waters, by hills and plains less elevated than the present banks of the Bosphorus; and by those of the Count Andreossy, that had it one day fallen suddenly in the manner of a cascade by this new passage, the small quantity of water that could have flowed at once through so narrow an aperture, would not only be diffused over the immense extent of the Mediterranean, without occasioning a tide of a few fathoms, but that the mere natural inclination necessary for the flowing of the waters, would have reduced to nothing their excess of height above the shores of Attica.

See further on this subject the note that I have published at the head of the third volume of Ovid, of M. Lemaire’s collection.