Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/460

428 BOOK on his head and hands/ while Mcnoitios undergoes a punishment corresponding to that of Sisyphos or Ixion, and with his father lapetos is consigned to the abyss of Tartaros. In short, if we put aside the assertion that in some way or other Prometheus was a giver of the boon of fire to men, the story is told with a singular variety of inconsistent details. Nothing can be more clear and emphatic than the narrative in which ^schylos asserts the utter and hopeless savagery of mankind before Prometheus came to their aid. They had no settled homes, no notion of marriage or of the duties which bind the members of a family together ; they burrowed in the ground like the digger Indians, and contented themselves with food not much better than that of the insect-eating Bushmen, because they knew nothing about fire, and how far it might raise them above the beasts of the field. This WTetched state was their original condition, not one to which they had fallen from a higher and a better one, and it was from mere compassion to their utter helplessness that Prometheus stole fire from the house of Zeus, and hiding it in a ferule, imparted it to men, teaching them at the same time how to cook their food and build houses. With this notion the narrative of the Hesiodic Theogony is in complete antagonism. In this legend the existence of man upon earth began with a golden age, during which the earth yielded her fruits of her own accord, and in which plagues and sicknesses were unknown. They were subject indeed to the doom of death ; but they died as though they were merely going to sleep, and became the righteous demons who, wandering like the Erinyes everywhere through the air, watch the ways and works of men, to uphold the righteous and overturn the wicked. The second is the silver age, the men of which incurred the wrath of Zeus, and were hidden by him beneath the earth for impiously withholding the honours due to the immortal gods. Still when they die they are reckoned among the blessed, and are not without honours themselves.^ The brazen age which followed

' Hesiod, Theog. 516. of Olympos: but it was easy to assign ^ The portions thus allotted to the to the departed souls of the silver age a de])arted of the golden and silver races lower, or even a positively malignant, tended to foster and develope that idea character. They are not called Dai- of a moral conflict between good and mones by the Hesiodic poet, but they evil which first took distinct shape on have a recognised position and dignity Iranian soil. The evil sjMrits are there in the realm of the air. There was no the malignant powers of darkness who reason, therefore, why they should not represent both in name and in attributes be represented by others as evil demons; the gloomy antagonist of the sun-god and this step which, as Grote remarks, Indra. The Hesiodic myth coincides was taken by Empedokles and Xeno- completely with this sentiment, while it krates, led to that systematic distinction extends it. Here the sjjirits of the men of which the Christian teachers availcil belonging to the golden age are the themselves for the overthrow or rather gooil demons, these demons being gene- the Iransforniation of the system itself. rically ditferent from the blessed gods It only remained for them to insist on