Characteristics Of The Noble Savages

The noble savage in antiquity is often characterised by the traits of the golden races accounted for by Hesiod in Works and Days and Ovid in Book I of the Metamorphoses. The two accounts mark the decline in human moral behaviour from the idealistic and peaceful Golden Age to their contemporary violent and competitive Iron Age world. Accordingly, the so-called noble savage is always discussed by the Graeco-Roman authors from an ethnocentric world-view wherein the spaces most familiar to them were deemed the most civilised while the places further from them become increasingly natural or primitive. In this way a reading of the noble savage is mostly negative for not only does it highlight the social and technological ineptitude of the people
Above all else they are peaceful, religious and communal. The difficulty with noble savages in antiquity is that they are not all described in the exact same way and some are noticeably unlike the Golden Age races. All depictions are due to the ‘writer’s preconceptions of the moral value of prehistoric peoples and their lifestyles will colour their valuation of noble savage’ therefore it is the ancient author who chooses how the noble savage is presented, usually to contrast Greek or Roman civilisation unfavourably with those generally regarded as the most primitive people in the known world. This essay will analyse the different kinds of noble savage in antiquity noting similarities and dissimilarities among them and how they were used by writers to invert their own ethnocentric reading in which the Graeco-Roman world is ironically found
Pindar’s Pythians ascribes to them two of the most significant traits of the golden race peoples, ‘fertility of the land and the favour of a god’. They are reported by Pausanias to have once lived among the people and as founders of the Delphic oracle. This produces an inversion on Greek civilisation because it links the mythical Hyperboreans to the origins of Greek religion; discrediting the civilised and cultured Greeks as founders of their own religion and in this context can be found to be non-Greek. However, this inversion may also be viewed as beneficial to the Greeks because they can trace their culture to the divine-like Hyperboreans. In Alcaeus’ fragment 1.1-14 Apollo is reticent to leave the Hyperboreans’ and stays an entire year before bringing laws to the Delphians. Here law and civilised life is suspended temporarily while the god Apollo marvels at the natural world of the Hyperboreans. Herodotus also attributes golden race traits to them noting that they have never migrated, so it is implied that they know no seafaring and thus warfare. Diodorus Siculus presents an ethnocentric view of the Hyperboreans as he accounts for the size of their land as no smaller than Sicily, which happens to be the author’s birthplace. He also relates that their land does not need