Historical Dissertation on Abaris

continues from previous page: What remains, he who desires to see more about the Hyperboreans should go especially to Diodorus Siculus (d), Plutarch (e), Aelian (f), Clement of Alexandria (n), Pindar (g), Pausanias (h), Herodotus (k), Servius (λ), Rudbeckius (μ), and Jacob Perizonius (v). Pliny the Elder (ξ) reports that the Hyperboreans are not subject to diseases or to laborious old age. Strabo (o) contends that these things are fabulous. Ovid (π) narrates that there is a rumor that the Hyperboreans are changed into birds.

IX.

After I have discussed thus far quite prolixly the homeland of Abaris, I now believe I must, before all else, examine properly the age and time when Abaris was among the living. However, since all those things which we read consigned to writing by those who inquire into the records of time are very obscure and uncertain, it should not seem a wonder to us that so great a discussion is stirred up among learned men regarding the time of our philosopher. Yet I consider it worthy of the greatest admiration that it is not one or another Olympiad that provides the cause for debate for learned men, but that they disagree among themselves by a space of more than twenty Olympiads. For if faith is to be given to Harpocration (p), Hippostratus believed that Abaris came into Greece in the third Olympiad. Suidas (q) also agrees with this, who wrote back all these things, as he is most often accustomed to do, from Harpocration, not even changing a word. Although the most learned Ludolph Kuster, in his most recent, most splendid, and most accurate edition of this lexicographer, noted in this place of Suidas that he had found written in one Parisian Manuscript that this was done κατὰ τὴν νγ' Ὀλυμπιάδην during the 53rd Olympiad. Those who defend with great effort that Abaris was among the living in the 50th Olympiad recede furthest from the opinion of Hippostratus, and even further those who hand down that he lived in the 82nd Olympiad. Among whom Eusebius (r) seems to claim for himself the first place by a certain right when he says that Abaris was recognized as a diviner in the 82nd Olympiad. But learned men have long since observed everywhere that Eusebius does not always have great authority and most often errs in a wonderful manner. Indeed, I discover him contradicting himself in this very thing. For in this place he affirms that Abaris lived in the 82nd Olympiad, although a little before he had asserted that he came from Scythia into Greece in the second year of the 54th Olympiad. For I can hardly persuade myself to believe that Abaris lived in both the 54th and 82nd Olympiads and thus passed his life for over a hundred years. Joannes Funccius (u), not receding so far from Eusebius, refers his life to the third year of the 51st Olympiad. Those think they walk the safest path who refer Abaris to the times of Phalaris and Pythagoras, in whose number also is Porphyry (φ), Iamblichus (χ), and Henry Dodwell (ψ). But this is a new and no less controversy among learned men: at what time Phalaris and at what time Pythagoras lived. The most Reverend Bishop of Worcester, William Lloyd (α), affirms that Pythagoras was born in the last year of the 43rd Olympiad.