In the year 810 before the founding of the City, Amphictyon reigned at Athens, the third from Cecrops. In his times a deluge of waters swept away the greater part of the peoples of Thessaly, a few being saved by taking refuge in the mountains, especially on Mount Parnassus, around which Deucalion then held the kingship.
1 Anno DCCCX ante urbem conditam Amphictyon Athenis tertius a Cecrope regnauit. cuius temporibus aquarum inluuies maiorem partem populorum Thessaliae absumpsit paucis per refugia montium liberatis, maxime in monte Parnaso, in cuius circuitu Deucalion tunc regno potiebatur,
He took in those who then fled to him on rafts, and sheltered and fed them on the twin peaks of Parnassus; and for this reason, they say, the human race was restored by him.
2 qui tunc ad se ratibus confugientes susceptos per gemina Parnasi iuga fouit aluitque; a quo propterea genus hominum reparatum ferunt.
At that time too, as Plato bears witness, very many pestilences and dreadful diseases raged in Ethiopia almost to the point of desolation.
3 tunc etiam in Aethiopia pestes plurimas dirosque morbos paene usque ad desolationem exaestuauisse Plato testis est.
And lest anyone should believe that the times of God’s anger and the times of the fury of war are separate, in that same period Father Liber subdued India, drenched it with blood, filled it with slaughter and polluted it with lusts — a people, at any rate, which had never been subject to any man and was content only with its native quiet.1
4 et ne forte diuisa tempora esse credantur irae Dei furorisque bellici, ea tempestate subactam Indiam Liber pater sanguine madefecit, caedibus oppleuit, libidinibus polluit, gentem utique nulli umquam hominum obnoxiam, uernacula tantum quiete contentam.
1Liber is Bacchus (Dionysus), whose conquest of India was a legend popularised after Alexander’s campaigns.