which are found everywhere among the most backward and barbarous races. It is not as if only the myths of Greece retained this rudeness, or as if the Greeks supposed themselves to have been always civilised. The whole of Greek life yields relics of savagery when the surface is excavated ever so slightly. Moreover, that the Greeks, as soon as they came to reflect on these matters at all, believed themselves to have emerged from a condition of savagery is undeniable. The poets are entirely at one on this subject with Moschion, a writer of the school of Euripides. "The time hath been, yea, it hath been," he says, "when men lived like the beasts, dwelling in mountain caves, and clefts unvisited of the sun. . . . Then they broke not the soil with ploughs nor by aid of iron, but the weaker man was slain to make the supper of the stronger," and so on.[1] This view of the savage origin of mankind was also held by Aristotle:[2] "It is probable that the first men, whether they were produced by the earth (earth-born) or survived from some deluge, were on a level of ignorance and darkness."[3] This opinion, consciously held and stated by philosophers and poets, reveals itself also in the universal popular Greek traditions that men were originally ignorant of fire, agriculture, metallurgy, and all the other arts and conveniences of life, till they were instructed by ideal culture-heroes, like Prometheus, members of a race divine or half-divine. A still more curious Athenian tradition (preserved by Varro) maintained, not only
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