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Thus, not only should we not be surprised to find, even in ancient times, many doubts and contradictions respecting the epochs of Cecrops, Deucalion, Cadmus and Danaus; and not only would it be childish to attach the smallest importance to any opinion whatever, regarding the precise dates of Inachus[119] or Ogyges[120]; but, if any thing ought to surprise us, it is this,—that an infinitely more remote antiquity had not been assigned to those personages. It is impossible that there has not been in this case some effect of the influence of received traditions, from which the inventors of fables were not able to free themselves. One of the dates assigned to the deluge of Ogyges, even agrees so much with one of those which have been attributed to the deluge of Noah, that it is almost impossible it should not have been derived from some source, where this latter deluge had been the one intended to be spoken of[121].

As to Deucalion, whether this prince be regarded as a real or fictitious personage, however little we enter into the manner in which his deluge has been introduced into the poems of the Greeks, and the various details with which it becomes successively enriched, we perceive that it was nothing else than a tradition of the great cataclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenians in the period which they also assigned to Deucalion, because he was regarded as the founder of their nation, and because his history is confounded with that of all the chiefs of the renewed nations[122].