[11] “Hesiod thinks that with the lapse of certain periods of years the end comes even to the demigods; for, speaking in the person of the Naiad, he indirectly suggests the length of time with these words:[36]
Nine generations long is the life of the crow and his cawing,
Nine generations of vigorous men.[37] Lives of four crows together
Equal the life of a stag, and three stags the old age of a raven;
Nine of the lives of the raven the life of the Phoenix doth equal;
Ten of the Phoenix we Nymphs, fair daughters of Zeus of the aegis.
Those that do not interpret “generation” well make an immense total of this time; but it really means a year, so that the sum of the life of these divinities is nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty years, less than most mathematicians think, and more than Pindar[38] has stated when he says that the Nymphs live “Allotted a term as long as the years of a tree,” and for this reason he calls them Hamadryads.”
While he was still speaking Demetrius, interrupting him, said, “How is it, Cleombrotus, that you can say that the year has been called a generation? For neither of a man “in his vigour” nor “in his eld,” as some read the passage, is the span of human life such as this. Those who read “in their vigour” make a generation thirty years, in accord with Heracleitus,[39] a time sufficient for a father to have a son who is a father also; but again those who write “in their eld” and not “in their vigour” assign an hundred and eight years to a generation; for they say that fifty-four marks the limit of the middle years of human life, a number which is made up of the first number, the first two plane surfaces, two squares and two cubes,[40] numbers which Plato also took in his Generation of the Soul.[41] The whole matter as stated by Hesiod seems to contain a veiled reference to the “Conflagration,” when the disappearance of all liquids will most likely be accompanied by the extinction of the Nymphs,
Who in the midst of fair woodlands,
Sources of rivers, and grass-covered meadows have their abiding.[42]
”