Note 49 — Chapter II · ISLANDS OF THE BLEST TRANSLATION

Before Hesiod we have no mention of the myth of a Golden, Saturnian Age, nor any complete description of the imaginary life upon Blessed Islands. But epic poetry had already, as we have seen, provided him with occasional examples of translation to a place of blessedness, and he only collects these into a combined picture of such a place. To that extent the belief in a blessed life beyond the grave meets us earlier than the myth of a Golden Age. But we have not the slightest ground for saying that the former “must have existed from the beginning among the Greeks” (as Milchhöfer at least thinks, Anf. Kunst, p. 230). On the other hand, it may be mere accident that the myth of the Golden Age has no older authority than Hesiod—the story itself may be much earlier. After Hesiod it was frequently taken up and improved upon; not, however, first by Empedocles as Graf supposes, ad aureæ aet. fab. sym. (Leip. Stud. viii, p. 15), but already in the epic Ἀλκμεωνίς, see Philod. Piet., p. 51 Gp. (See also some remarks by Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, p. 269 f., 1895, with which I cannot agree.)