Greeks of that time would
accordingly be placed in the middle status of barbarism. (See
Schliemann's _Mycenae_, pp. 75, 364; _Tiryns_, p. 171.) In the
state of society described in the Homeric poems the smelting of
iron was well known, but the process seems to have been costly,
so that bronze weapons were still commonly used. (Tylor,
_Anthropology_, p. 279.) The Romans of the regal period were
ignorant of iron. (Lanciani, _Ancient Rome in the Light of
Recent Discoveries_, Boston, 1888, pp. 39-48.) The upper period
of barbarism was shortened for Greece and Rome through the
circumstance that they learned the working of iron from Egypt
and the use of the alphabet from Phoenicia. Such copying, of
course, affects the symmetry of such schemes as Mr. Morgan's,
and allowances have to be made for it. It is curious that both
Greeks and Romans seem to have preserved some tradition of the
Bronze Age:--

[Greek: tois d' en chalkea men teuchea, chalkeoi de te oikoi,
chalko d' eirgazonto; melas d' ouk eske sideros.]
Hesiod, _Opp. Di._ 134.

Arma antiqua manus ungues dentesque fuerunt
Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami,
Et flamma atque ignes, postquam sunt cognita primum.
Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta.
Et prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus, etc.
Lucretius, v. 1283.

Perhaps, as Munro suggests, Lucretius was thinking of Hesiod;
but it does not seem improbable that in both cases there may
have been a genuine tradition that their ancestors used bronze
tools and weapons before iron, since the change was
comparatively recent, and sundry religious observances tended
to perpetuate the memory of it.]

[Sidenote: "Civilizations" of Mexico and Peru.]

This brilliant classification of the stages of early culture will be
found very helpful if we only keep in mind the fact that in all wide
generalizations of this sort the case is liable to be somewhat unduly
simplified. The story of human progress is really not quite so easy to
decipher as such descriptions would make it appear, and when we have
laid down rules of this sort we need not be surprised if we now a