There was a time when mortals lived like brutes In caves and unsunned hollows of the earth, For neither house nor city flanked with towers Had then been reared: no ploughshare cut the clod To make it yield a bounteous harvest, nor Were the vines ranked and trimmed with pruning-knives, But fruitless births the sterile earth did bear. Men on each other fed with mutual slaughter, For Law was feeble, Violence enthroned, And to the strong the weaker fell a prey. But soon as Time that bears and nurtures all Wrought out another change in human life,— Whether some rapt Promethean utterance, Or strong Necessity, or Nature’s teaching Through long experience, their deliverance brought,— Holy Dêmêter’s fruit it gave them; the sweet spring Of Bacchus they discovered, and the earth, Unsown before, was ploughed with oxen; cities then They girt with towers and sheltering houses raised, And turned their savage life to civil ways; And after that Law bade entomb the dead And measure out to each his share of dust, Nor leave unburied and exposed to sight Ghastly reminders of their former feasts.[192] The merit of having worked up these loose materials into a connected sketch was, no doubt, considerable; but, according to Zeller, there is reason for attributing it to Theophrastus or even to Democritus rather than to Epicurus.[193] On the other hand, the purely mechanical manner in which Lucretius supposes every invention to have been suggested by some accidental occurrence or natural phenomenon, is quite in the style of Epicurus, and reminds us of the method by which he is known to have explained every operation of the human mind.[194] VIII. We have already repeatedly alluded to the only man of genius whom Epicureanism ever counted among its disciples. It is time that we should determine with more precision the actual relation in which he stood to the master whom, with a touching survival of religious sentiment, he revered as a saviour and a god.