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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
