Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/462

430 ROOK pass them by in contemptuous silence. They must therefore be placed by themselves in a position which breaks the ethical order of the primeval ages ; ^ and thus the poet contents himself with saying that many of them slew each other at Thebes fighting for the apples or the cows of Oidipous, while others met their doom at Troy. All these were placed by Zeus in a region far away from the undying gods and beyond the bounds of the earth, where Kronos is their king, and where the teeming soil produces yearly its triple harvests in the islands of the blessed by the deep eddying ocean.

The Pro- In contrast with this gloomier belief, the Promethean myth /Eschyios. exhibits mankind in a scale ascending from the savage state in which they knew the use neither of fire nor of metals to that high civilisation in which Zeus fears that men may become like the gods in wisdom and thus share their power. For this myth, as related by ^schylos, knows nothing of a previous knowledge of fire, which, according to the Hesiodic version, Zeus took away from men in revenge for the cheat which left only the fat and bones of victims as the portion of the gods. This explanation, which is not alto- gether consistent with other passages in the Hesiodic Theogony, completely excludes the idea which lies at the very root of the ^schylean tradition, for Prometheus expressly speaks of men not as having lost high powers and the fruits of great results achieved by those powers, but as never having been awakened to the conscious- ness of the powers with which they were endowed. From the first, until he came to their aid, they were beings to whom sight and hearing were wholly useless, and for whom life presented only the confused shapes of a dream. The sunless caves, in which they lived like ants, were not wrought into shape by their hands. For them there were no distinctions of seasons, no knowledge of the rising and setting of the stars. For this state of unspeakable misery there was no remedy until men could be roused to a knowledge of their own powers and be placed in the conditions indispensable for their exercise — a result to be achieved only by bestowing on them the boon of fire. But this very idea involves the fact that till then fire was a thing unknown to men upon the earth. They might see it in the cloven thunderclouds, or tremble at the fiery streams hurled into the air from the heaving volcano, but to them fire Avas at the least a thing which they dared not approach with the thought of mastering and turning it to use. Some wiser being than they must therefore bring it to them in a form which shall deprive it of its terrors and make it the servant, not the

' It is noteworlhy lliat llie genera- Vuh are inloiruplcd after the third lions given in the TheogotiyfA the Popol creation.— Max Miiller, Chips, i. 335.