“They say, moreover, that the moon in this island seems as if it were near to the earth, and represents, on the face of it, excrescences like spots on the earth; and that Apollo once in nineteen years comes into the island; in which space of time the stars perform their courses and return to the same point; and therefore the Greeks call the revolution of nineteen years the Great Year. At this time of his appearance they say that he plays upon the harp, and sings and dances all the night, from the vernal equinox[447] to the rising of the Pleiades,[448] solacing himself with the praises of his own successful adventures. The sovereignty of this city and the care of the temple, they say, belong to the Boreades, the posterity of Boreas, who hold the principality by descent in the direct line from that ancestor.”
When copying this narrative from the writings of Hecatæus, it is evident that Diodorus did not believe one single syllable it contained. He looked upon it as a romance; and so far was he from identifying it with any actual locality, that he threw over the whole an air of burlesque. We are, therefore, not at all obliged for the services he has rendered—yet shall we make his labours subservient to the elucidation of truth. Little did he dream that Ireland, which he, by and by, expressly mentions by the name of Irin, and which he calumniates as cannibal, was one and the same with that isle of which he read such encomiums in the writings of former antiquaries; and, most unquestionably, it did require no small portion of research to reconcile the contradiction which the outline involves, and which is now further enhanced by his scepticism.
Unable to solve this difficulty, Mr. Dalton—wishing to retain, by all means, the Hyperborean isle, which, indeed, he could not well discard, yet not bring it in collision with the Iranian libel—does not hesitate to throw at once overboard into the depth of the Atlantic the island of Irin (alias Ireland), and affirm that it never was the place which the historian had specified. “It is not quite certain,” says he, “what place Diodorus means by Iris;[449] from the turn of the expression it would rather appear to be a part of Britain,—perhaps the Erne, for which Mr. James M‘Pherson contends in another place,—while the island which Diodorus does mention in the remarkable pages cited above, and which so completely agrees with Ireland, is never called Iris by him, nor does the name occur again in all his work, nor is it by any other author applied to Ireland.”[450]
Mind, now, reader, how easily I reconcile the conflicting fact of Diodorus’s incredulity with his positive defamation.
At the period when he flourished as an accredited historian, the occupancy of Ireland had passed into new hands. The Scythians were the persons then possessed of the soil; and they being a warlike tribe, averse to letters, to religion, and to refinement,[451]—but overwhelming in numbers,—obliterated every vestige of that primeval renown in which the island had once gloried, and which afforded theme and material to the learned of all countries for eulogy and praise.
Hecatæus was one of those who depicted in glowing colours the primitive splendour and the ethereal happiness of Ireland’s first inhabitants. He belonged to an age which was well called antiquarian, even in the day in which Diodorus wrote, viz. B.C. 44; and when, therefore, this latter, looking over the pages of his venerable predecessor, saw them so replete with incidents,—at variance with our condition in his own degenerate day,—he did not only not dream of considering Ireland as the place described, but looked upon the whole story as the fiction of a dotard.
Let us, however, despite of Diodorus, establish the veracity of the antiquarian Hecatæus. Then behold the situation of this island, just opposite to France,—in size as large as Sicily,—at once corresponding to the locality and size of Ireland, and subversive of the claims of those who would fain make England, Anglesea, or one of the Hebrides, the island specified.
Considering further the prolificacy of its soil, and with that compare what the old poet has affirmed,—and what we know to be true,—of our own country, viz.:—
“Illic bis niveum tondetur vellus in anno
Bisque die referunt ubera tenta greges.”
Then bring its propinquity to the “arctic pole,” and the high northern latitude which Strabo[452] and other ancients have assigned to Ireland, into juxtaposition with “Hyperborean,” the name given to its inhabitants from the very circumstance of their lying so far to the north, and the identity of the isle with that in which each true Irishman exults is infallibly complete when I quote from Marcianus Heracleotes—who wrote in the third century, and who, as he himself avows, only drew up a compendium from the voluminous works of Artemidorus, who flourished in the hundred and sixty-ninth Olympiad, or 104 years before Christ—the following description of this sacred island, viz. “Iuvernia, a British isle, is bounded on the north (ad Boream) by the ocean called the Hyperborean; but on the east by the ocean which is called the Hibernian; on the south by the Virginian ocean. It has sixteen nations and eleven illustrious cities, fifteen remarkable rivers, five remarkable promontories, and six remarkable islands.”