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By Root 542 0

pictures are profoundly disquieting. Whether we read of the rape of Helen, Achilles' wrath, Clytemnestra's vengeance, the unspeakable deeds of Pelop's line, the vainglory of the pharaohs, the Assyrian despots' craze for bloodshed, the good Yudhishthir's disastrous addiction to gambling, or the sinful concupiscence of worthy King David, we receive glimpses of a world in which the most memorable events were motivated by inordinate disruptive passions. If we suspect that the motives for some of the events reported in our oldest literary treasures were simplified or exaggerated for artistic purposes, it is only necessary to recall how much of the political history of later ages has been the result of similar passions.

We may wonder what kept these early societies going from generation to generation; why did they not consume themselves in the flames of their own excesses? Doubtless it was the common people, unconsidered and unsung, toiling stubbornly to fill the royal granaries and fashion the heroes' arms, pouring out their despised blood as footmen in the king's armies, who by their closeness to the soil, their steady adherence to ancestral ways, grimly carried on from century to century and restored all the destruction wrought by their too greedy, passionate, and ambitious rulers.

The barbaric splendor of the heroic age, the indulgence of pride, vainglory, and the craving for display by the ruling class on so vast a scale, was made possible by the advances in agriculture and practical arts accomplished by forgotten people of the Neolithic age. As Gordon Childe (1942) has pointed out, the new developments in agriculture, the domestication of animals, metallurgy, spinning and weaving, ceramics, building, and other techniques

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during the two millenia from about 6000 to 4000 B.C. effected an improvement in the material conditions of human life such as was hardly equaled by the whole long interval that separated this era from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.

As to agriculture, no subsequent period can claim achievements equal to those of our prehistoric ancestors. If we regard world agriculture as a single great edifice, the foundations were laid and the walls raised to nearly their present height by illiterate souls who could not record their accomplishments in writing; and all that literate or civilized people have done throughout the whole historic period has been to add a few statues and diverse ornaments to the façade, and to devise more efficient means of keeping the building in repair, as by chemical fertilizers and the deliberate development of disease-resistant strains of economic plants. In the invention of improved machinery for sowing and harvesting, the application of mechanical power to agricultural operations, and the increase of yields per acre, much has been accomplished in the last two centuries; but the plants on which the modern world depends for food and clothing were nearly all discovered and domesticated by stone age ancestors, who also worked out the basic principles of caring for them.

The primary effect of the substitution of agriculture for primitive hunting and food gathering was to diminish the strife between humans and the animals on which they were accustomed to prey, and to enable more people to dwell peacefully together in a given area, where the production of food was vastly increased by the new art. But why, after the good start they had made before the dawn of history, did humans almost cease to advance the beneficent work? Why did agriculture, like other arts and crafts, stagnate or progress so slowly during so many centuries?

The answer appears to be that the first grand period of agricultural and technical progress created conditions that made further advances increasingly difficult. This happened because people were not yet ready to make good and constructive use of the leisure, the freedom from incessant preoccupation with filling the stomach,

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the ease and the power, that husbandry and the