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:
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 PindarAllotted 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 in their vigour
make a generation thirty years, in accord with Heracleitus,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,Conflagration,
when the disappearance of all liquids will most likely be accompanied by the extinction of the Nymphs,