Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/492

 428 Four-footed Man :

but, in another, it is perhaps unimportant for our present enquiry. For those who adopted the theory of a Golden Age agreed with the Epicurean view, that there was a time when men were quite uncivilised^ Our problem is simply to discover what was the lowest possible degree of savagery conceived by any Greek, of whatever school. Among the poets, Aeschylus had already described the life of primitive man as that of a cave-dweller, destitute of all civilisation. Euripides {Stipp., 201 et seq.) puts an interesting description of primitive man into the mouth of Theseus, who praises " whatever god it was who ordered our life from a confused and bestial state," by giving intelligence, speech, and civilisation. Critias (fr. i) characterised man's life as aTaKToii, OtjpiwSrjg ; he held that the object of law was simply punishment, and a clever man invented gods to supplement deficiencies of law. Still later in the list of tragic poets, Moschion (fr. 6) also describes the beast-like life of cave-dwellers. The prose-writers give the same sort of evidence as the poets mentioned above. The views of Plato and Aristotle on primitive man would require many pages for an adequate discussion ; but it may here be enough to point out that neither philosopher conceives a lower stage for primitive humanity than that of the savage, (Plato, Prot., 322 B et seq., Rep., 369 B et seq., Laws, 676 A et seq, ; Aristotle, Pol., ii. 8). Plato, like the Epicureans after him, laid stress on man's struggles with wild beasts ; man is thus clearly marked off from Otjpia in the earliest times. The Cynical " Return to Nature " led to many excesses and absurdities ; but, though the Cynics justified even canni- balism and incest on the ground that these crimes are " natural " to man as cognate to other animals, they never suggested that man's erect posture was not " natural " and primitive.

Though the /(fe of primitive man is beast-like, his form

^For accounts influenced by Stoicism, see Aratus, Phaeti., 97 et seq.; Manilius, i. 58 et seq. ; Seneca, Ep. 90.