vour to explain the nature and origin of the world and all
phenomena.

The correctness of this explanation, resting as it does on the belief
that the Greeks were at one time in the savage status, might be
demonstrated from the fact that not only myths, but Greek life in
general, and especially Greek ritual, teemed with surviving examples of
institutions and of manners 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 that marriage was originally unknown,
but that, as among Australians and some Red Indians, the family name,
descended through the mother, and kinship was reckoned on the female
side before the time of Cecrops.(4)

(1) Moschion; cf. Preller, Ausgewahlte Aufsatze, p. 206.

(2) Politics, ii. 8-21; Plato, Laws, 667-680.

(3) Compare Horace, Satires, i. 3, 99; Lucretius, v. 923.

(4) Suidas, s.v. "Prometheus"; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 9.

While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, admitted, or
rather asserted, that savagery lay