[274] Boulanger (“L’Antiquité Devoilée,” i. 10), recognises, although it perplexes him, the tradition which places the gold and silver age after the Deluge—“à la suite de cet évenement, les traditions de l’age d’or, et du regne des Dieux paroissent encore plus bizarres;” also id. iii. 338; also 308. Also 328, “Ce n’est donc point un état politique qu’il faut chercher dans l’age d’or, ce fut un état tout religieux. Chaque famille pénétrée des jugemens d’en haut, vecut quelque temps sous la conduite des pères qui rassembloient leurs enfans.” It is thus that Seneca depicts the golden age. Vide [p. 231].
[275] It might be a sufficient answer to say that they did not operate because a miraculous intervention ordained it otherwise; but if we seek the explanation in natural causes they will be found such as will exactly confirm the theory. The causes which lead to dispersion are the necessities of the pastoral life. If there, then, was no dispersion, the conclusion is that during the three or four centuries after the Deluge mankind were mainly engaged in husbandry—“and Noe, a husbandman, began to till the ground.” But husbandry is the first and essential condition of civilisation. We have seen that Mr Mill, Mr Hepworth Dixon, &c., believe that mankind slowly arrived at this stage through the intermediate stages of shepherd and hunter. On the contrary it would appear that they started in this career. Again, given the conditions which Genesis describes—families living in patriarchal subjection to a chief who had the knowledge of husbandry—cultivation would be the natural consequence; for the one and only hindrance to cultivation, supposing the knowledge, is insecurity. “Most critical of all are the causes which conduce to agriculture, agriculture at once the most fruitful and the most dangerous expedients for life. He who tills the soil exposes his valuable stores to the malice or enmity of the whole world. Any marauder,” &c. (“Miscell.” by Francis W. Newman, 1869). But as the conditions described in Genesis exclude the probability of such interruption—agriculture would have been the preferable resource of life—and so it would have continued until circumstances led to the extension of the pastoral mode. So far, then, as we are brought to regard the different modes of life as progressive or successive (I believe that even at this early stage they were contemporaneous), the order of the succession according to the theory now in vogue must be reversed; and we must regard mankind as first a community of husbandmen, gradually extending themselves as shepherds, to be finally still more dispersed in some of their branches as hunters.
[276] “And truly there is a sap in nations as well as in trees, a vigorous inward power, ever tending upwards, drawing its freshest energies from the simplest institutions, and the purest virtues and the healthiest moral action.... And if of nations we may so speak, what shall we say of the entire human race, when all its energies were, in a manner, pent up in its early and few progenitors; when the children of Noah, removed but a few generations from the recollections and lessons of Eden, and possessing the accumulated wisdom of long-lived patriarchs, were marvellously fitted to receive those strange and novel impressions, which a world, just burst forth in all its newness, was calculated to make?”—Card. Wiseman, “Science and Revealed Religion,” Lect. ii.
It is to this period that I am inclined to refer the belief in an age of high chivalry and virtue, with subsequent degeneracy, widely diffused in the legends of King Arthur. I will surrender my opinion whenever the historical information respecting that monarch shall have been more exactly determined.
[277] “The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards and puts back the bolt.”—Gladstone, “Homer and the Homeric Age,” ii. 30.
[278] Plato’s testimony to this tradition is remarkable (Plato de Legibus, lib. i.) Boulanger extracts the passage with reference to the golden age (iii. 296). (Vide also Grote’s Plato, iii. 337.) Plato says—“That it is a tradition that there was formerly a great destruction of mankind caused by inundations and other general calamities [are not these calamities those to which Horace alludes, I. Ode iii.,
“Semotique prius tarda necessitas
Lethi corripuit gradum,”
from which only a few escaped?] those who were spared led a pastoral life on the mountains. We may suppose,” he adds, “that these men possessed the knowledge of some useful arts, of some usages to which they had previously conformed.” Plato indeed goes on to tell how this knowledge must have been lost, and one reason he gives is, “mankind remained many centuries on the summits of the highest mountains—fear and remembrance of the past did not permit them to descend into the plains.” Strabo (apud Boulanger, iii. 301) also discusses this question. He says that mankind descended into the plains at different periods according to their courage and sociability (lib. xiii.) Varro (De re Rustica, lib. xiii. cap. i.) says they were a long time before they descended.” Now, in these passages from Plato, Strabo, and Varro, there is distinct testimony to the fact of mankind remaining on the mountains after the Deluge, and their subsequent inferences are drawn from the fact that they supposed them to have remained there a long time. Is not this merely that they have recorded one tradition to the exclusion of another—viz., that mankind were brought into the plains by Saturn, in accordance with the indications in Genesis ix. 20, “and Noe, a husbandman began to till the ground.” Compare supra, [p. 137], and [p. 212]; Bryant, “Mythology,” iii. p. 22, following [St] Epiphanius, says the descendants of Noah remained 659 years in the vicinity of Ararat—i.e. five generations.