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Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain
might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how
prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some sceptic take
exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the
antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do
not believe that the size of men's bodies was larger then than now,
though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the
same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a
landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as
he fought, and ran, and hurled, and cast it,- "Scarce twelve
strong men of later mould That weight could on their necks uphold."
thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men.
And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the
world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body
is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres,
either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some
accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have
rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at
Utica a man's molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down
into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made
out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For
though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the
giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any
other have there been altogether wanting instances of gigantic stature,
though they may be few. The younger Pliny, a most learned man,
maintains that the older the world becomes, the smaller will be the
bodies of men. And he mentions that Homer in his poems often lamented
the same decline; and this he does not laugh at as a poetical figment,
but in his character of a recorder of natural wonders accepts it as
historically true. But, as I said, the bones which are from time to
time discovered prove the size of the bodies of the ancients, and will
do so to future ages, for they are slow to decay. But the length of
an antediluvian's life cannot now be proved by any such monumental
evidence. But we are not on this account to withhold our faith from
the sacred history, whose statements of past fact we are the more
inexcusable in discrediting, as we see the accuracy of its prediction
of what was future. And even that same Pliny tells us that there is
still a nation in which men live 200 years. If, then, in places
unknown to us, men are believed to have a length of days which is quite
beyond our own experience, why should we not believe the same of times
distant from our own? Or are we to believe that in other places there
is what is not here, while we do not believe that in other times there
has been anything but what is now?
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