All willing shared the gatherings of their hands.”
was just that semi-state of nature which it only required the Bacchanalian tradition on the one side to transform into the fiction of the state of savage and absolute equality, or the touch of poetry to convert into the golden reminiscence on the other.
In this way, in the person of the patriarch Noah, the fiction of a state of nature was brought into contact with the tradition of a law of nature and a law of nations, regarded as the law of mankind “when men were nearest the gods.”
III. I have already noticed ([p. 127]) the double tradition of the succession of ages, the tradition from the fragment of Sanchoniathon, upon which Mr M’Lennan relies, being ante-, that of Hesiod partly ante- and partly post-diluvian. The following lines of Hesiod, for instance, bearing allusion to the confusion of tongues and the shortening of life, being plainly post-diluvian:—
“When Gods alike and mortals rose to birth,
The immortals formed a golden race on earth
Of many-languaged men; they lived of old,
When Saturn reigned in Heaven; an age of gold.
“The Sire of Heaven and earth created then
A race the third, of many-languaged men,