Doubtless, Professor Müller, your astonishment has now subsided as to Hecatæus’s credulity in the existence of the Hyperboreans. Diodorus Siculus, who, though, as Granville Penn has affirmed, he “has transmitted to us many scattered and important truths,” yet does the same judicious commentator add, that it was in a condition “intermixed with much idle fiction, equivocation, and anachronism,”[519] was herein your guide! But the manes of the Hyperboreans now speak from the tomb, and vindicate their existence as well as their locality!
I come now to prove this by another mode.
Plato, in his Cratylus, represents Hermogenes as proposing several terms to Socrates for solution, when the following acknowledgment transpires:—
“I think,” says the philosopher, “that the Greeks, especially such of them as lived subject to the dominion of foreigners, adopted many foreign words; so that, if anyone should endeavour to resolve those words by reference to the Greek language, or to any other than that from which the word was received, he must needs be involved in error!”
The foreign extraction, then, of many of the Greek words being admitted, it devolves upon me to establish this extraction to be purely Irish.
To begin with Dodona—“In Eustathius and Steph. Byzantius,” says Vallancey, “we meet with three different conjectures in regard to the derivation of the name Dodona, which, they say, owes its origin either to a daughter of Jupiter and Europa, or one of the nymphs, the daughter of Oceanus; or, lastly, to a river in Epirus, called Dodon. But, as Mr. Potter observes, we find the Greek authors all differ, both as to the etymology of the name and the site of this oracle. In my humble opinion, Homer and Hesiod have not only agreed that it was not in Greece, but in Ireland, or some island, at least, as far westward.”
The passages to which the General refers in those ancient poets are—
“Σευ ανα Δωδωναιε Πελασγικε τηλοθι ναιων
Δωδωνης μεδεων δυσχειμερου.”[520]
That is,—
Pelasgian Jove, who far from Greece resid’st
In cold Dodona.