[49\2: Before Hesiod we have no mention of the myth of a Golden, Saturnian Age, nor any complete description of the imaginary life upon Blessed Islands. But epic poetry had already, as we have seen, provided him with occasional examples of translation to a place of blessedness, and he only collects these into a combined picture of such a place. To that extent the belief in a blessed life beyond the grave meets us earlier than the myth of a Golden Age. But we have not the slightest ground for saying that the former "must have existed from the beginning among the Greeks" (as Milchhöfer at least thinks, _Anf. Kunst_, p. 230). On the other hand, it may be mere accident that the myth of the Golden Age has no older authority than Hesiod--the story itself _may_ be much earlier. After Hesiod it was frequently taken up and improved upon; not, however, first by Empedocles as Graf supposes, _ad aureæ aet. fab. sym._ (_Leip. Stud._ viii, p. 15), but already in the epic ~Alkmeôni/s~, see Philod. _Piet._, p. 51 Gp. (See also some remarks by Alfred Nutt, _The Voyage of Bran_, p. 269 f., 1895, with which I cannot agree.)] {{88}} CHAPTER III CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION The history of Greek culture and religion shows no sudden break or revolution in its course. The Greeks neither at any time experienced a movement from within that caused a violent recoil from the path which they had chosen, nor were they ever diverted by the overwhelming might of an invading force from the natural course of their evolution. Out of their own natural feelings and reflexion this most intellectually gifted nation evolved the great ideas that nourished succeeding centuries. They anticipated all later ages. The profoundest and the boldest, the most devout as well as the most irreverent speculations as to the nature of God, the world and men have their origin among the Greeks. But this excessive many-sidedness led to a general condition of equipoise in which individual factors restrained or balanced each other. Whereas the most violent impacts and sudden revolutions in the history of civilization are given by just those nations who are only able to embrace one idea at a time and who, confined in the narrow limits of their fanaticism, throw everything else overboard.