Creation of Man out of Clay 153 



Greece. Next day the scene had changed : summer was gone. A 

 grey November mist hung low on the hills which only yesterday had 

 shone resplendent in the sun, and under its melancholy curtain the 

 dead flat of the Chaeronean plain, a wide treeless expanse shut in by 

 desolate slopes, wore an aspect of chilly sadness befitting the battle- 

 field where a nation's freedom was lost. 



But crowded as the prospect from Panopeus is with memories of the 

 past, the place itself, now so still and deserted, was once the scene of an 

 event even more ancient and memorable, if Greek story-tellers can be 

 trusted. For here, they say, the sage Prometheus created our first 

 parents by fashioning them, like a potter, out of clay 1 . The very spot 

 where he did so can still be seen. It is a forlorn little glen or rather 

 hollow behind the hill of Panopeus, below the ruined but still stately 

 walls and towers which crown the grey rocks of the summit. The glen, 

 when I visited it that hot day after the long drought of summer, was 

 quite dry ; no water trickled down its bushy sides, but in the bottom 

 I found a reddish crumbling earth, a relic perhaps of the clay out of 

 which the potter Prometheus moulded the Greek Adam and Eve. In 

 a volume dedicated to the honour of one who has done more than any 

 other in modern times to shape the ideas of mankind as to their 

 origin it may not be out of place to recall this crude Greek notion of 

 the creation of the human race, and to compare or contrast it with 

 other rudimentary speculations of primitive peoples on the same 

 subject, if only for the sake of marking the interval which divides 

 the childhood from the maturity of science. 



The simple notion that the first man and woman were modelled 

 out of clay by a god or other superhuman being is found in the 

 traditions of many peoples. This is the Hebrew belief recorded in 

 Genesis : "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and 

 breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living 

 soul 2 ." To the Hebrews this derivation of our species suggested itself 

 all the more naturally because in their language the word for 

 "ground" (adamah) is in form the feminine of the word for man 



1 Pausanias, x. 4. 4. Compare Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, i. 7. 1 ; Ovid, Metamorph. 

 i. 82 sq. ; Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 35. According to another version of the tale, this creation of 

 mankind took place not at Panopeus, but at Iconium in Lycaonia. After the original race 

 of mankind had been destroyed in the great flood of Deucalion, the Greek Noah, Zeus 

 commanded Prometheus and Athena to create men afresh by moulding images out of clay, 

 breathing the winds into them, and making them live. See Etyviologicum Magnum, s.v. 

 'Ik6viov, pp. 470 sq. It is said that Prometheus fashioned the animals as well as men, giving 

 to each kind of beast its proper nature. See Philemon, quoted by Stobaeus, Florilegium, 

 ii. 27. The creation of man by Prometheus is figured on ancient works of art. See 

 J. Toutain, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Histoire des Religions Antiques (Paris, 1909), p. 190. 

 According to Hesiod (Works and Days, 60 sqq.) it was Hephaestus who at the bidding 

 of Zeus moulded the first woman out of moist earth. 



2 Genesis ii. 7. 



