of a tree, from whose spreading branches two big fruits hang--one in
front of each of the figures who are stretching out their hands to
gather it. A serpent is rearing himself behind the woman. This
representative might serve as a direct illustration of the narrative in
Genesis, nor as M. Friedrich Delitzsch has observed, can it lend itself
to any other interpretation.

M. Renan has no hesitation in agreeing with ancient commentators in
finding a vestige of the same traditions among the Phenicians in the
fragments of the Book of Sanchoniathon, translated into Greek by Philo
of Byblos. In point of fact it is there told, in connection with the
first human pair, that Aion--which seems a rendering of Havah--"invented
feeding on the fruits of the tree." The learned academician even thinks
he discovers in this passage an echo of some type of Phenician figured
representation, retracing a scene such as that recorded in Genesis, and
visible on the Babylonian cylinder. Certain it is that, at the epoch of
the great influx of Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a
representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it
indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the
narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of
man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays
in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his
work as modeller--a pair--man and woman--in the nudity of primeval days,
standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means
to gather its fruit.[69] We meet with the same group in a bas-relief
built into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome,
only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as
a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the
two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and
reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the
representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so
favourite a subject with them, both in sculpture and painting.

On the sarcophagus of the Capitol the presence in proximity of
Prometheus of one of the Parcae drawing the horoscope of the man whom the
Titan is forming, leads us to suspect in these sculptured subjects the
influence of the doctrine of those Chaldean astrologists who had spread
themselves, during the later centuries before