Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/39

Rh of letter script and its utilization for writing records. This stage which is passed independently only on the Eastern Hemisphere, is richer in improvements of production than all preceding stages together. It is the stage of the Greek heroes, the Italian tribes shortly before the foundation of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus, the Norsemen of the Viking age. We are here confronted for the first time with the iron ploughshare drawn by animals, rendering possible agriculture on a large scale, in fields, and hence a practically unlimited increase in the production of food for the time being. The next consequence is the clearing of forests and their transformation into arable land and meadows — which process, however, could not be continued on a larger scale without the help of the iron ax and the iron spade. Naturally, these improvements brought a more rapid increase of population and a concentration of numbers into a small area. Before the time of field cultivation a combination of half a million of people under one central management could have been possible only under exceptionably favorable conditions; most likely this was never the case.

The greatest attainments of the higher stage of barbarism are presented in Homer's poems, especially in the Iliad. Improved iron tools; the bellows; the handmill; the potter's wheel; the preparation of oil and wine; a well developed fashioning of metals verging on artisanship; the wagon and chariot; ship-building with beams and boards; the beginning of artistic architecture; towns surrounded by walls with turrets and battlements; the Homeric epos and the entire mythology—these are the principal bequests transmitted by the Greeks from barbarism to civilization. In comparing these attainments with the description given by Cesar or even Tacitus of Germans, who were in