It was, in fine, a society immediately proceeding out of that of the gods, which as we know was the climax of the state of nature. In its passage from the prehistoric age as we should say in modern language into the dawn of history it still retained much of the earlier customs, those customs which Vico thinking of the lonely Polyphemus in his cave called "Cyclopean rules." The age of gold out of which it came, innocent, kindly, humane, tolerant and dutiful, as scholars and poets believed, was in reality one perpetual "superstitious fanaticism," tormented by a continual terror of the gods, to placate whom men used to offer human sacrifice, traces of which remain among the historic Phoenicians, Scyths and Germans, the tribes of America and even the Romans themselves, who afterwards substituted for it the ceremony of throwing straw puppets into the Tiber. Even the sacrifice of children was not unknown; memories of it are preserved in Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia and elsewhere. But in this age of the gods, in spite of or by means of this cruel superstition, were founded the great institutions of humanity; religious cults together with augurial divination, marriage and burial. Weddings, judgment-seats and altars, and the removal of the bodies of the dead from the reach of the malignant air and the wild beasts "taught the human brutes to be pious" as Foscolo says in his _Sepolcri,_ merely versifying Vico's prose. These "Cyclopes" who conjoined and confused in themselves the functions of king, wise man (that is divination) and priest, at first placed their dwellings on the heights of mountains, in places airy and therefore healthy, naturally fortified, and near the perennial springs, where were the nests of eagles and vultures, the birds with which augury dealt. Hence the importance of water and fire, which became symbols of the family; the earliest marriages were solemnised _"aqua et igni"_ between parties who shared a common spring and hearth, and therefore belonged to the same household; so that they must have been between brothers and sisters. The period of the cyclopes was a strongly moral period. It was not true of it that "pleasure and law were one" in the sense fancied by later effeminate poets; for these men, whose minds like those which we may still find among the peasants of to-day were insensible to the refinements of vice, found that alone pleasant which was lawful and that alone lawful which was useful. They were just with the justice of a savage towards his god; continent, for they had made an end of promiscuous intercourse; brave, hard-working and high-spirited, as they were bound to be, surrounded as they were by hardships and perils. It was only later that these primeval groups of humanity descended into the plains and began to till them, and then, from living inland as they did at first, travelled gradually to the sea, learnt the art of navigation and founded colonies.