ng the Melanesians, Qat, and among
the Ahts, Quawteaht, were heroic persons, who made men and most other
things. But it was desirable to keep their performances of this sort
separate from their other feats, their introduction of fire, for
example, and of various arts. In the same way it will be well, in
reviewing Greek legends, to keep Prometheus' share in the making of men
apart from the other stories of his exploits as a benefactor of the men
whom he made. In Hesiod, Prometheus is the son of the Titan Iapetus, and
perhaps his chief exploit is to play upon Zeus a trick of which we find
the parallel in various savage myths. It seems, however, from Ovid(1)
and other texts, that Hesiod somewhere spoke of Prometheus as having
made men out of clay, like Pund-jel in the Australian, Qat in the
Melanesian and Tiki in the Maori myths. The same story is preserved in
Servius's commentary on Virgil.(2) A different legend is preserved in
the Etymologicum Magnum (voc. Ikonion). According to this story, after
the deluge of Deucalion, "Zeus bade Prometheus and Athene make images
of men out of clay, and the winds blew into them the breath of life".
In confirmation of this legend, Pausanias was shown in Phocis certain
stones of the colour of clay, and "smelling very like human flesh"; and
these, according to the Phocians, were "the remains of the clay from
which the whole human race was fashioned by Prometheus".(3)

(1) Ovid. Metam. i. 82.

(2) Eclogue, vi. 42.

(3) Pausanias, x. 4, 3.

Aristophanes, too, in the Birds (686) talks of men as (Greek text
omitted), figures kneaded of clay. Thus there are sufficient traces in
Greek tradition of the savage myth that man was made of clay by some
superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian story.

We saw that among various rude races other theories of the origin of man
were current. Men were thought to have come out of a hole in the
ground or a bed of reeds, and sometimes the very scene of their first
appearance was still known and pointed out to the curious. This myth
was current among races who regarded themselves as the only people whose
origin needed explanation. Other stories represented man as the fruit of
a tree, or the child of a rock or stone, or as the descendant of one of
the lower animals. Examples of these opinions in Greek legend are now to
be given. In the first place, we have a fragment of Pindar, in which the
poet enumerates several of the centres from which