Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/100

 C8 msTOiri OF GREECE. the supposition of previous races, the first altogether pure, the second worse than the first, and the third still worse than the second ; and to show further how the first race passed by gentle death -sleep into glorious immortality ; how the second race was sufficiently wicked to drive Zeus to bury them in the under-world, yet s'ill leaving them a certain measure of honor; while the third was so desperately violent as to perish by its own animosi- ties, without either name or honor of any kind. The conception of the golden race passing after death into good guardian daemons, which some suppose to have been derived from a comparison with oriental angels, presents itself to the poet partly as approx- imating this race to the gods, partly as a means of constituting a triple gradation of post-obituary existence, proportioned to the character of each race whilst alive. The denominations of gold and silver, given to the first two races, justify themselves, like those given by Simonides of Amorgos and by Phokylides to the dhTerent characters of women, derived from the dog, the bee, the mare, the ass, and other animals ; and the epithet of brazen is specially explained by reference to the material which the pugna- cious third race so plentifully employed for their arms and other implements. So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing vein : we find the revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an ethical lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present. 1 But fourth in the list comes " the divine race of Heroes : " and here a new vein of thought is opened by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past is broken up, in order to make way for these cherished beings of the national faith. For though the author of the " "Works and Days " was himself of a didactic cast of thought, 1 Aratus (Phoenomen. 107) gives only three successive races, the golden, silver, and brazen; Ovid superadds to these the iron race (Metamorph. i. 89-144) : neither of them notice the heroic race. The observations both of Buttmann (Mythos der altestcn Menschengesch- lechter, t. ii. p. 12 of the Mythologus) and of Volckcr (Mythologie des Japetischen Geschlechts, 6, pp. 250-279) on this series of distinct races, are ingenious, and may be read with profit. Both recognize the disparate character of the fourth link in the series, and each accounts for it in a differ- ent manner. My own view comes nearer to that of Volcker, with some con- siderable differences ; amongst which one is, that he rejects the verses respect- ing the daemons, which seem to me capital parts of the whole scheme.