King of Crete:  and therefore Asterius Reigned in Crete in the Golden Age; and the Silver Age began when Chiron was a child:  if Chiron was born about the 35th year of David’s Reign, he will be born in the Reign of Asterius, when Jupiter was a child in the Cretan cave, and be about 88 years old in the time of the Argonautic expedition, when he invented the Asterisms; and this is within the reach of nature.  The Golden Age therefore falls in with the Reign of Asterius, and the Silver Age with that of Minos; and to make these Ages much longer than ordinary generations, is to make Chiron live much longer than according to the course of nature.  This fable of the four Ages seems to have been made by the Curetes in the fourth Age, in memory of the first four Ages of their coming into Europe, as into a new world; and in honour of their country-woman Europa, and her husband Asterius the Saturn of the Latines, and of her son Minos the Cretan Jupiter and grandson Deucalion, who Reigned ’till the Argonautic expedition, and is sometimes reckoned among the Argonauts, and of their great grandson Idomeneus who warred at Troy. Hesiod tells us that he himself lived in the fifth Age, the Age next after the taking of Troy, and therefore he flourished within thirty or thirty five years after it:  and Homer was of about the same Age; for he [192] lived sometime with Mentor in Ithaca, and there learnt of him many things concerning Ulysses, with whom Mentor had been personally acquainted:  now Herodotus, the oldest Historian of the Greeks now extant, [193] tells us that Hesiod and Homer were not above four hundred years older than himself, and therefore they flourished within 110 or 120 years after the death of Solomon; and according to my reckoning the taking of Troy was but one Generation earlier.

Mythologists tell us, that Niobe the daughter of Phoroneus was the first woman with whom Jupiter lay, and that of her he begat Argus, who succeeded Phoroneus in the Kingdom of Argos, and gave his name to that city; and therefore Argus was born in the beginning of the Silver Age:  unless you had rather say that by Jupiter they might here mean Asterius; for the Phoenicians gave the name of Jupiter to every King, from the time of their first coming into Greece with Cadmus and Europa, until the invasion of Greece by Sesostris, and the birth of Hercules, and particularly to the fathers of Minos, Pelops, Lacedaemon, AEacus, and Perseus.

The four first Ages succeeded the flood of Deucalion; and some tell us that Deucalion was the son of Prometheus, the son of Japetus, and brother of Atlas:  but this was another Deucalion; for Japetus the father of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas, was an Egyptian, the brother of Osiris, and flourished two generations after the flood of Deucalion.