efer the elements both
of agriculture and law. He is said to have instructed the Athenians
to till the land, and to watch the produce of the seasons; to have
imported from Egypt the olive-tree, for which the Attic soil was
afterward so celebrated, and even to have navigated to Sicily and to
Africa for supplies of corn. That such advances from a primitive and
savage state were not made in a single generation, is sufficiently
clear. With more probability, Cecrops is reputed to have imposed upon
the ignorance of his subjects and the license of his followers the
curb of impartial law, and to have founded a tribunal of justice
(doubtless the sole one for all disputes), in which after times
imagined to trace the origin of the solemn Areopagus.

VIII. Passing from these doubtful speculations on the detailed
improvements effected by Cecrops in the social life of the Attic
people, I shall enter now into some examination of two subjects far
more important. The first is the religion of the Athenians in common
with the rest of Greece; and the second the origin of the institution
of slavery.

The origin of religion in all countries is an inquiry of the deepest
interest and of the vaguest result. For, the desire of the pious to
trace throughout all creeds the principles of the one they themselves
profess--the vanity of the learned to display a various and recondite
erudition--the passion of the ingenious to harmonize conflicting
traditions--and the ambition of every speculator to say something new
upon an ancient but inexhaustible subject, so far from enlightening,
only perplex our conjectures. Scarcely is the theory of to-day
established, than the theory of to-morrow is invented to oppose it.
With one the religion of the Greeks is but a type of the mysteries of
the Jews, the event of the deluge, and the preservation of the ark;
with another it is as entirely an incorporation of the metaphysical
solemnities of the Egyptian;--now it is the crafty device of priests,
now the wise invention of sages. It is not too much to say, that
after the profoundest labours and the most plausible conjectures of
modern times, we remain yet more uncertain and confused than we were
before. It is the dark boast of every pagan mythology, as one of the
eldest of the pagan deities, that "none among mortals hath lifted up
its veil!"

After, then, some brief and preliminary remarks, tending to such
hypotheses as appear to me most probable and sim