Archaeologia Graeca, or The antiquities of Greece. To which is added, an appendix, containing a concise history of the Grecian states [&c.] by G. Dunbar

ALL ages have had a great esteem and veneration for antiquity; and not only of men, but of families, cities, and countries, the most ancient have always been accounted the most honourable. Hence arose one of the first and most universal disputes that ever troubled mankind'; almost every nation, whose first original was not very manifest, pretending to have been of an equal duration with the earth itself. Thus the Egyptians, Scythians, and Phrygians, fancied themselves to be the first race of mankind, and the Arcadians boasted that they were gorivo, or before the moon. The want of letters did not a little contribute to these opinions; for almost every colony and plantation, wanting means whereby to preserve the memory of their ancestors, and deliver them down to posterity, in a few generations forgot their mother nation, and thought they had inhabited their own country from the beginning of the world.

Our Athenians too had their share in this vanity, and made as great and loud pretensions to antiquity as the best of their neighbours; they gave out that they were produced at the same time with the sun, and assumed to themselves the honourable name (for so they thought it) of Arixloves, which word signifies persons produced out of the same soil that they inhabit; for it was an old opinion, and almost every where received among the vulgar, that in the beginning of the world, men, like plants, were, by some strange prolific virtue, produced out of the fertile womb of one common mother, earth; and therefore the ancients generally call

VOL. I.

Menander Rhetor.

ed themselves raysvis, sons of the earth, as Hesychius informs usb alluding to the same original, the Athenians sometimes styled themselves TITTIES, grasshoppers; and some of them wore grasshoppers of gold, binding them in their hair, as badges of honour, and marks to distinguish them from others of later duration and less noble extraction, because those insects were believed to be generated out of the ground. Virgil has mentioned this custom in his poem entitled Ciris.

Ergo omnis caro residebat cura capillo,
Aurea solemni comptum quem fibula ritu
Cecropia tereti nectebat dente cicada.

Wherefore she did, as was her constant care,
With grasshoppers adorn her comely hair,

J. ABELL OF LINC. COL.

Brac'd with a golden clasp, as do the Attic fair. Without doubt the Athenians were a very ancient nation, and it may be the first that ever inhabited that country; for, when Thessaly and Peloponnesus, and almost all the fertile regions of Greece, changed their old masters every year, the barrenness of their soil secured them from foreign invasions. Greece at that time had no constant and settled inhabitants, but there were continual removes, the stronger always dispossessing the weaker; and therefore they lived, as we say, from hand to mouth, and provided no more than what was necessary for present sustenance, expecting every day when some more powerful nation should come. and displace them, as they had lately done their predecessors. Amidst all these troubles and tumults, Attica lay secure and unmolested, being protected from foreign enemies, by means of a craggy and unfruitful soil, that could not afford fuel for contention; and secured from intestine and civil broils by the quiet and peaceable dispositions of its inhabitants; for, in these golden days, no affectation of supremacy, nor any sparks of ambition had fired men's minds, but every one lived full of content and satisfaction in the enjoyment of an equal share of land, and other necessaries, with the rest of his neighbours.

The usual attendants of a long and uninterrupted peace, are riches and plenty; but in those days, when men lived upon the products of their own soil, and had not found out the way of supplying their wants by traffic, the case was quite contrary, aud peace was only the mother of poverty and scarceness, producing a great many new mouths to consume, but affording no new supb In voce гnysrös. с Thucydides, lib. 1. Eustathius ad Iliad, y'. d Thucyd. ib.

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Archaeologia Graeca, or The antiquities of Greece. To which is added ..., Том 1