Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/461

Rh CHAP. exhibits a race of men who ate no corn and had hearts of adamant, and whose hands sprung from their vast shoulders. These were the workers in brass (for men had not yet needed or come to know the use of iron), and their weapons were used to their own destruction. Like the men sprung from the dragon's teeth in the Theban and Ar- gonautic myths, they fought with and slaughtered each other, and went down without a name to the gloomy underworld of Hades. But it must not be forgotten that the Hesiodic poet knows of no transitional periods. The old age does not fade away insensibly into the new. It is completely swept off, and the new takes its place as virtually a new creation. Thus the earth becomes the possession of a series of degenerating inhabitants, the race of the poet's own day being the worst of all. These are the men of the iron age, who know no peace by day and by night, and for whom, although some good may yet be mingled with the evil, the poet anticipates nothing but an increasing misery which at the last will become unbearable. Good faith and kindly dealing will in the end vanish from the face of the earth, until Aidos and Nemesis (reverence and righteousness) will wrap their shining garments around their radiant forms, and soar away into the heights never pierced by the eye of man.

Such is the purely ethical legend by which the Hesiodic poet ac- The counts for the present condition of mankind — a state not only opposed acr|™'° to the legends of Hermes, Prometheus, and Phoroneus, but also to all the associations which had taken the strongest hold on the popular mind. The stories recited by bards or rhapsodists told them of a time when men walked the earth who were the children of immortal mothers, whose joys and sorrows were alike beyond those of men now living, who had done great deeds and committed great crimes, but who nevertheless held open converse with the flashing-eyed goddess of the dawn, and for whom the fire-god forged irresistible weapons and impenetrable amiour. In the conviction of the Hesiodic as of our Homeric poets, the heroes of this magnificent but chequered age were utterly different from the miserable race which had followed them, nor could they be identified with the beings of the three races who had gone before them. It was, however, im- possible even for a poet, who probably preferred his ethical maxims to the story of the wrath of Achilleus or the avenging of Helen, to

the reality of the evil demons thus brought new creed was insured. The old into existence, and then, as the gods mythology was not killed, but it took themselves are in the ///W and O./jWdy a dilTerent shape, and, losing all its and elsewhere called demons, to include ancient beauty, acquired new powers of all lo'^etherin the one class of malignant mischief and corruption. — Grole, ///>/, devils : and at once the victory of the Greece, i. 96, &c.