Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

[118] The genealogies of Apollodorus are generally known, and that portion of them upon which Clavier endeavoured to establish a sort of primitive history of Greece; but, when we become acquainted with the genealogies of the Arabs, those of the Tartars, and all those which our old chronicling monks invented for the different sovereigns of Europe, and even for individuals, we readily comprehend that Greek writers must have done for the early periods of their nation what has been done for all the other nations, at periods when criticism had not been used to throw light upon history.

[119] 1856 or 1823 years before Christ, or other dates still, but always about 350 years before the principal Phœnician or Egyptian colonies.

[120] The common date of Ogyges, according to Acusilaus, followed by Eusebius, is 1796 years before Christ, consequently several years after Inachus.

[121] Varro places the deluge of Ogyges, which he calls the first deluge, 400 years before Inachus, and consequently 1600 years before the first Olympiad. This would refer it to a period of 2376 years before Christ; and the deluge of Noah, according to the Hebrew text, is 2349, there being only 27 years of difference. This testimony of Varro is mentioned by Censorinus, De Die Natali, cap. xxi. In reality, Censorinus wrote only 238 years after Christ; and, it appears, from Julius Africanus, ap. Euseb. Præp. cv. that Acusilaus, the first author who placed a deluge in the reign of Ogyges, made this prince cotemporary with Phoronæus, which would have brought him very near the first Olympiad. Julius Africanus makes only an interval of 1020 years between the two epochs; and there is even a passage in Censorinus conformable to this opinion. Some also read erogitium in place of ogygium, in the passage of Varro, which we have quoted above from Censorinus. But what would this be but an Erogitian Cataclysm, of which nobody has ever heard?

[122] 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.