Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE HESIODIC AGES. 203
are the men of the iron age, who know no peace by day and CHAP.
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 The
poet accounts for the present condition of mankind— a state
not only opposed 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 armour. 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, impos-
sible even for a poet, who probably preferred his ethical
maxims to the story of the wrath of Achilleus or the aveng-
ing of Helen, to 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
1 It is noteworthy that the genera- Vuh are interrupted after the third
tions given in the Theogonyoi the Popol creation. Max Muller, Chips, i. 335.
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