PROMETHEUS AND ORPHEUS. 465 



The earliest teacher of art among the Greeks, 

 was Prometheus, an Egyptian, who has been re- 

 presented in fable as stealing fire from heaven. 

 But it is probable that he merely taught them the 

 use of fire, in the manufacture of metals, and the 

 other arts of life. Cecrops, who introduced the 

 science of agriculture into Greece, was also a 

 native of Egypt ; and Cadmus, who taught the 

 use of letters, was from Sidon. But the most re 

 nowned of all the ancient pioneers of civilization 

 among the Greeks, was Orpheus of Thrace, who, 

 after visiting the East, is said to have instructed 

 them in music, poetry, religion, and philosophy. 

 The sum of his doctrine concerning the origin of 

 things, as collected from the fragments of hymns 

 preserved in the writings of Eusebius, Clemens 

 Alexandrinus, Proclus, Cedranus, and Apuleius, 

 and collected by M. Eschenbach, is, that the pri- 

 mitive seeds from which every thing was pro- 

 duced, existed from all eternity in a fluid and 

 chaotic state ; but that at a certain finite period, 

 the formless mass was reduced to order by the 

 agency of an intelligent, eternal, and self-active 

 (Enfield, vol. i. pp. 126, and 130.) 



* The views of Orpheus concerning the nature of this /Ether, 

 and its omnipresent agency in the phenomena of life, may be 

 further seen in the fragment of a hymn De Mundo, translated by 

 M. Good:- 



" Jove is the aether, Jove the boundless fire, 



That tills the world with feeling and desire :" 



as also in the following beautiful invocation to light : 



