FOOTNOTES
[4] It has been a favourite theory of learned men, that Virgil had access to Sibylline prophecies, which foretold the birth of a Saviour. How came the Sibyls, any more than the Pythonesses of Delphos, to be ranked on a sudden with the really inspired prophets? or is it credible that they should have had either the curiosity, or the power, to inspect the Jewish Scriptures? The “Sibylline Verses” were confessedly interpolated, if not fabricated, by the pious fraud of Monks. The imitations from Isaiah seem no less chimerical. Every description of a golden age among the poets may be wrested into a similar parallel. Nor is it to be conceived that Virgil would have produced so dry a copy of so luxuriant an original. This argument does not affect the extraordinary coincidence of the time of the appearance of this eclogue, with the epoch of the Messiah’s birth; which is exceedingly curious.
[5] See the epigram; which, for want of an owner, is ascribed by Tzetzes to Pindar:
Hail Hesiod! wisest man! who twice the bloom
Of youth hast prov’d, and twice approach’d the tomb.
[6] The Greeks were extremely fanciful about dolphins. Several stories of persons preserved from drowning by dolphins, and romantic tales of their fondness for children, and their love of music, are related by Plutarch in his “Banquet of Diocles.”
[7] See “Specimens of ancient Sculpture,” by the society of Dilettanti.
SECTION II.
ON THE ÆRA OF HESIOD.
The question of the æra when Hesiod flourished, and whether he were the elder or the junior of Homer, or his contemporary, has given rise to such endless disputes, that Pausanias declines giving any opinion on the subject. Some of the moderns have attempted to ascertain the point from internal evidence: 1st, by the character of style: 2dly, by philological criticism: 3dly, by astronomical calculation.