And moreover, Hesiod imagines that the Daemons
themselves, after certain revolutions of time, do at length
die. For, introducing a Nymph speaking, he marks the
time wherein they expire:
Nine ages of men in their flower doth live
The railing crow; four times the stags surmount
The life of crows; to ravens doth Nature give
A threefold age of stags, by true account;
One phoenix lives as long as ravens nine.
But you, fair Nymphs, as the daughters verily
Of mighty Jove and of Nature divine,
The phoenix's years tenfold do multiply.
Now those which do not well understand what the poet
means by this word
γενεά (
age) do cause this computation
of time to amount to a great number of years. For the
word means a year; so that the total sum makes but 9720
years, which is the space of the age of Daemons. And
there are several mathematicians who make it shorter than
this. Pindar himself does not make it longer when he
says, Destiny has given Nymphs an equal life with trees;
and therefore they are called Hamadryades, because they
spring up and die with oaks. He was going on, when
Demetrius interrupting him thus said: How is it possible,
Cleombrotus, that you should maintain that a year was
called by this poet the age of a man, seeing it is not the
space of his flower and youth, nor of his old age ? For there
are divers readings of this place, some reading
ἡβώντων, others
γηρώντων,—one signifying
flourishing, the other
aged. Now
those that understand hereby ‘ flourishing’ reckon thirty
years for the age of man's life, according to the opinion of
Heraclitus; this being the space of time in which a father
has begotten a son who then is apt and able to beget
another. And those that read ‘ aged’ allow to the age of
man a hundred and eight years, saying that fifty-four years
are just the half part of a man's life, which number consists
of unity, the first two plane numbers, two squares, and two
cubes (i. e. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4+ 9 + 8 + 27); which numbers Plato
[p. 16]
himself has appropriated to the procreation of the soul.
And it seems also that Hesiod by these words intimated the
consummation of the world by fire; at which time it is likely
the Nymphs, with the rivers, marshes, and woods where
they inhabit, shall be consumed,
Such as in woods, or grotto's shady cell,
Near sacred springs and verdant meadows dwell.
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