Hellenic society, just as there is now. For while the majority of
the orthodox public, of whom Hesiod may be taken as the
representative, looked back, as a great many of our own day still
do, to a fabulous age of innocent happiness, a BELL' ETE DELL'
AURO, where sin and death were unknown and men and women were like
Gods, the foremost men of intellect such as Aristotle and Plato,
AEschylus and many of the other poets (1) saw in primitive man 'a
few small sparks of humanity preserved on the tops of mountains
after some deluge,' 'without an idea of cities, governments or
legislation,' 'living the lives of wild beasts in sunless caves,'
'their only law being the survival of the fittest.'

And this, too, was the opinion of Thucydides, whose ARCHAEOLOGIA as
it is contains a most valuable disquisition on the early condition
of Hellas, which it will be necessary to examine at some length.

Now, as regards the means employed generally by Thucydides for the
elucidation of ancient history, I have already pointed out how
that, while acknowledging that 'it is the tendency of every poet to
exaggerate, as it is of every chronicler to seek to be attractive
at the expense of truth; he yet assumes in the thoroughly
euhemeristic way, that under the veil of myth and legend there does
yet exist a rational basis of fact discoverable by the method of
rejecting all supernatural interference as well as any
extraordinary motives influencing the actors. It is in complete
accordance with this spirit that he appeals, for instance, to the
Homeric epithet of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as
applied to Corinth, as a proof of the early commercial prosperity
of that city; to the fact of the generic name HELLENES not
occurring in the ILIAD as a corroboration of his theory of the