(4)
The origin of the common proverb 'worth so many beeves,' in which
we discern the unconscious survival of a purely pastoral state of
society before the use of metals was known, is ascribed by Plutarch
to the fact of Theseus having coined money bearing a bull's head.
Similarly, the Amathusian festival, in which a young man imitated
the labours of a woman in travail, is regarded by him as a rite
instituted in Ariadne's honour, and the Carian adoration of
asparagus as a simple commemoration of the adventure of the nymph
Perigune. In the first of these WE discern the beginning of
agnation and kinsmanship through the father, which still lingers in
the 'couvee' of New Zealand tribes: while the second is a relic of
the totem and fetish worship of plants.
Now, in entire opposition to this modern inductive principle of
research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive
man is entirely speculative and deductive.
The origin of society he ascribes to necessity, the mother of all
inventions, and imagines that individual man began deliberately to
herd together on account of the advantages of the principle of
division of labour and the rendering of mutual need.
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