1849.] Traditions of other Deluges. 81 scended from Deucalion by Hellen and by Dorus, cannot refuse also to believe, that Deucalion descended from Uranus by Japetus and Prometheus, and that Saturn was his great uncle, and Jupiter and the Centaur Chiron his uncles a la mode de Bretagne. The same authors relate all these. Is there an Arab Sheik who does not trace his descent from Noah by Ishmael, or an Irish gentleman his by Milesius? We ourselves, have we not long put faith in our Trojan origin, as Fredegaire asserts, and in that long catalogue of princes in direct line from Priam to Clovis, which the romances of the middle ages engrafted on that primal imagination? Apollodorus gives to Deucalion a son, named Hellen, chief of all the Greeks, and makes descend from him Dorus, chief of all the Dorians, and Eolus, chief of the Eolians, with as much authority as Albugazi (Hist. Gen. of the Tartars, ch. 2. and 3.), gives to Japhet, son of Noah, a son named Turk, and to Turk two great-grand-sons, Tartar and Mongol, whence descended the two great nations which now bear those names; or as Jean le Maire (Illus. of the Gauls, p. 43) derives from Galatas king of the Gauls, Allobrose, prince of Dauphiny, and his son Romus, who founded the city of Romans, and gave birth to the Romane language. Besides, although it were true that Deucalion had been in fact the head of the Grecians when that people first established themselves in the environs of Parnassus, popular opinion, regarding him as the author of the nation, would have placed in his time the catastrophe from which all nations date, by a simple confusion of epochs,-very natural when nothing is written, not even committed to verse and learned by heart,—and still no one be able at this day to draw any conclusion whatever concerning the reality of that event. There have been also in certain places, traditions relative to a deluge with which the name of Deucalion was not connected. Such was the inundation of Arcadia, related by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. Lib. I. c. 61), and to which he attributes the emigration of Dardanus to the island of Samothracia, and then to the Hellespont; such, again, was that of a great overflow of water of which Diodorus speaks (Lib. V. c. 47), which behoves to have taken place in Samothracia before the other deluges, and which some attribute to the rupture of the Bosphorus and Hellespont. Independently of this tradition of Samothracia on the rupture of the Straits, we find in antiquity various hypotheses. The Bosphorus is a channel of small width, whose banks are steep but for a short distance, and of inconsiderable height. Nevertheless, these declivities have sufficed certain of the ancients for the hypothe sis that this channel was really the product of a rupture. Strato1 of Lampsacus, according to Strabo (Geog. Lib. I. p. 49), even sought to explain by this supposed event, the shells and other marine remains which are seen in many places on the plains and plateaus of Asia Minor. Before this rupture, according to Strato, the Euxine Sea must have been much more extensive than at this day, and must have covered a part of Asia Minor. A similar rupture must have taken place at some epoch and from analogous causes, at the Pillars of Hercules, and the ocean have flowed in over the whole extent of the Mediterranean. The moderns, from the observations made by Pallas of the great plains of sand which extend from the north of the Black Sea to the Caspian and to Lake Ural, have even imagined that, at some time these three seas were united, and were separated only by a draining of their waters, occasioned by a rupture of the Bosphorus. Certain traces of volcanoes observed at the Cyanean islands and towards the entrance of the Black Sea, have seemed to them sufficient to furnish a physical explanation of such a rupture; they have even gone further and believed they could connect this draining with the deluge of Deucalion by historical proofs. Since it is said in Apollodorus that the deluge of Deucalion happened in the time of Nyctimus, king of Arcadia, Clavier (History of the first times of Greece, I. p. 44) supposes it was under that same king Nyctimus, that the inundation of Arcadia took place, which, according to Dionysius, constrained Dardanus to go to Samothracia; and, by a second supposition, he would persuade himself that it was this same inundation which obliged Deucalion to flee to Parnassus; consequently, according to him, Deucalion must have come originally from Arcadia.. But a combination stronger yet is that of M. Dureau de la Malle (Phys. Geog. Black Sea, etc., p. 241). Uniting the tradition of Samothracia touching the eruption of the Euxine, which Diodorus relates as far anterior to Dardanus, and even to all other deluges, with the tradition relative to the inundation of Arcadia and to the emigration of Dardanus, in which Dionysius of Halicarnassus from whom alone we obtain it, makes no mention of the Euxine; admitting next, that the second of these events is identical with the deluge of Deucalion, he makes of all this together with the rupture of the Bosphorus and that of the Pillars of Hercules which he also places at the same epoch, 1 Gr. Philos. 286 B. C. 1849.] Real Traditions resolved into a Universal Deluge. 83 one and the same catastrophe; to which, consequently, he can assign an historic date. Unfortunately this whole theory is as little founded in physics as in history. The phenomenon of marine relics on continents is universal, and cannot depend on a local cause. Not only around the Black Sea are fossil shells found, but everywhere. Moreover, it results from the testimony of two learned men who have visited the places, M. Olivier, in a report made to the Academy of Sciences, and General Andreossy (Voyage to the Outlet of the Black Sea, p. 48 et seq.), that the Black Sea, had it been much elevated above its own level, would have found many drains through hills and plains less elevated than the actual banks of the Bosphorus, without the necessity of opening for itself this long and narrow outlet. Besides, every one knows that a volcanic irruption is incapable of producing such an effect in a limestone country like the plateaus which traverse the Bosphorus. Finally, had the Black Sea, at some period suddenly fallen, in cascade, through this new passage, the small quantity of water capable of being drained by an opening so narrow, would have spread itself gradually over the immense surface of the Mediterranean, without causing on its shores a tide even of a few fathoms, much less a deluge which would have destroyed provinces, and forced men to seek a refuge on the heights of Parnassus. Gen. Andreossy, who has made these places a particular study, and whose talents as an engineer and hydraulician are well known, has himself proved from the elevation of the banks of the Strait,-that portion where they are steep,-that the simple inclination of the surface of the waters necessary for draining, would have reduced to nothing the excess of elevation they would have produced, when once they had reached the shores of Attica. But if the historical proofs they pretend to give of the identity of the deluges of Samothracia, of Arcadia, and of Deucalion, and above all of their date, and the physical explanations they have imagined for them, disappear before a serious criticism; there can remain little doubt that all which is real in these traditions, and even in those of the deluges of Ogyges, of Syria, of Phrygia, of Assyria, and of China, resolve themselves into the memory of one and the same event, viz., of that which is known in the Hebrew annals under the name of the UNIVERSAL DELUGE. ARTICLE V. THE GREEK DRAMA. By R. D. C. Robbins, Professor of Languages in Middlebury College, Vt. The Relation of the Poetry to the Government and Culture of the Greeks. THE spirit of an age or people is most accurately and surely represented in its poetry. The statesman who would prefer the moulding influence of the ballads to the laws of a nation, indicates that he has not been unobservant of the more hidden influences which govern society. But it is not less true that the diligent and thoughtful student of history can better be ignorant of the legal enactments and penal code of that nation and age, whose inner life he would understand, than of the warblings of its minstrels, or the spontaneous, gushing effusions of its men of song. Indeed, if we desire to have an intimate acquaintance with the spirit of the political institutions, the religion, or culture of any people separated from us by time or distance, we not only need but cannot do without their poetical productions. What should we know of the spirit of the old Norsemen but from the productions of their Scalds, their Eddas, and the first rude combinations of their runic alphabet, the gift of their god Odin? The poetry of Greece is perhaps more intimately connected with and descriptive of the state of society in which it arose, than that of any other nation. The history of the religion, civil institutions, and culture of long ages prior to authentic records of actual events, constituted this early poetry. It is true, that the earliest compositions of almost all nations are narrative songs, recited in their festivals, celebrating the exploits of their heroes, and the genealogies of their princes. It was so with our Saxon ancestors before they migrated from their German forests.1 But all nations have not a Homer or such a past as the Greeks to look back upon. "The divine myths of the Greeks," says Grote, "the matter of their religion constituted also the matter of their earliest history." Their past, long varied, stirring, earthwide, heaven-high, their genealogical records none the less certain Tacitus, Germ. c. 2, says: Germani celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est, Tuisconem, etc. 2 Hist. Vol. I. p. 71. 1849.] Reverence for Kingly Authority. 85 because let down from Olympian heights, had the two-fold charm of novelty and reality, marvellousness and certainty. In listening to the recitals of their minstrels, the cravings of the heart for higher revelations, and the desire for national honor and individual glory, was alike satisfied. No wonder, then, that they clung to them with a tenacity not easily destroyed, and built upon them with a confidence not readily shaken. It has been well said that "it was Homer who formed the character of the Greek nation." The Homeric poems were the fountain-heads of all the refinement of the ancients. The Homeric rhapsodists were in fact the priests, the lawgivers and historians of Greece for several ages. They were the especial favorites of the princes, the praises of whose ancestors "of divine descent," they sung, and whose authority was itself heaven-descended. The Homeric poems were evidently intended for the special gratification of princes, in whose banquets they were often sung. They exhibit "a government founded on divine right as opposed to the sovereignty of the people." The king was superior, in force of body and mind, as was well befitting his descent: In the midst Of heroes, eminent above them all, Stood Agamemnon, with an eye like Jove's He, to be sure, would sometimes condescend to counsel with his chiefs and elders, and communicate with the assembled people in the Agora, whose assent and submission was demanded by a sort of religious regard for the authority vested in the king. In the Iliad the nod of Agamemnon, king of men, is the end of all controversy. His word is truth,3 his authority is not to be resisted, his wrath no other than Achilles, the son of Thetis, goddess of the silver bow, dares to brave, or his vengeance incur. For woe to him who shall incense a king.4 It was Thersites alone, "loquacious, loud, and coarse," who |