The antiquities of every
people, however diversified, and however disguised, contain the same
information on this point.
In sacred history, we find the parents of the species, as yet a single
pair, sent forth to inherit the earth, and to force a subsistence for
themselves amidst the briars and thorns which were made to abound on its
surface. Their race, which was again reduced to a few, had to struggle with
the dangers that await a weak and infant species; and after many ages
elapsed, the most respectable nations took their rise from one or a few
families that had pastured their flocks in the desert.
The Grecians derive their own origin from unsettled tribes, whose frequent
migrations are a proof of the rude and infant state of their communities;
and whose warlike exploits, so much celebrated in story, only exhibit the
struggles with which they disputed the possession of a country they
afterwards, by their talent for fable, by their arts, and their policy,
rendered so famous in the history of mankind.
Italy must have been divided into many rude and feeble cantons, when a band
of robbers, as we are taught to consider them, found a secure settlement on
the banks of the Tiber, and when a people, yet composed only of one sex,
sustained the character of a nation.
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