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HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

in asserting the propriety, and maintaining the right of their favoured claimants,has rendered it next to impossible for us, at this distance of time, to settle thedispute with any certainty of being correct.

Although this contradiction in different authorities, and the remote distanceof time, have rendered it, as we have just observed, extremely difficult, if notimpossible, for moderns to fix the identity and pre-eminence of any individualperson better entitled to it than the rest of his competitors, there can remainlittle or no doubt, first, concerning the real cause why such 1 honours were confer-red ; and, secondly, why they were paid to such a variety of personages. Nep-tunes, or gods of the sea, were, not improbably, as numerous as the differentnations which worshipped them, each assuming to itself, as a deity, the personagewhose power and whose faculties appeared to entitle him best to their adoration.The circumstance of princes or chieftains, of the same description and character,making their way by the same means into countries remote from each other, maywell account for the multitude of them; and the same reason too may well ex-plain and reconcile the difference of opinion, both in respect to the true characterand name of the person, as well as the time in which he flourished. On onepoint we may fairly rest, that the Neptune, or the fabulous god of the sea, wor-shipped by the different pagan nations, was either the bold stranger who hadsubdued them by means they deemed preternatural, or their own powerful princewhom they deified in consequence of his having delivered them, by the samesupposed excellence or superior skill, from the ravage and depredations of somerestless invaders.

Though we do not, for reasons already assigned, think ourselves in any degreejustified in admitting Rameses to have been the most ancient of those personageson whom the appellation of Neptune and the honours attendant on his characterwere bestowed, yet we are clearly of opinion he was one of those conspicuouscharacters who were deified under that name, though a few centuries later than thefirst was. We need not instance a stronger proof than that it seems clearly estab-lished, he was the individual personage who assisted Laomedon in fortifying,with a wall, the city of Troy about the year of the world 2674 *. He is reported,

in

* Schaeffer remarks, that it is very evident both the Arabians and Phoenicians were expert navigatorslong before the time of the Trojan war, that they had founded a number of cities on the sea coast, andeven passed into the Atlantic Ocean through what is now called the Gut of Gibraltar. lie quotesStrabo, Book the first. “ ®pv\k eT rxl k, 0! (poivlxa* vxuhXix, 01 xal ra riv 'HfxxXcla'j s’r.Xc.v ErriXSfV,

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