It is clear from the Ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound, commonly attributed to Aeschylus, that primitive men were supposed to have at first lived like animals in caves and woods, until by the help of the gods and heroes they were raised to a stage of civilization.
[1] The ancient myth of autochthony in historiography is the belief of the historian, or of the tribe itself, that they were indigenous, the first humans to inhabit their possessed land.
[7]In Thucydides: The Sicanians appear to have been the next settlers, although they pretend to have been the first of all and autochthones; but the facts show that they were Iberians, driven by the Ligurians from the river Sicanus in Iberia.
[13] They had personified their autochthony in the form of Erechtheus or Cecrops I and wore golden tettiges,[14] or cicada-shaped ornaments in their hair as a token representing their belief that, like cicadas, Athenians were born from the soil and thus had always lived in Attica.
[19] In the epideictic oration of Panegyricus [la],[20] Isocrates addressed to his countrymen the following passage: for we did not become dwellers in this land by driving others out of it, nor by finding it uninhabited, nor by coming together here a motley horde composed of many races; but we are of a lineage so noble and so pure that throughout our history we have continued in possession of the very land which gave us birth, since we are sprung from its very soil and are able to address our city by the very names which we apply to our nearest kin; for we alone of all the Hellenes have the right to call our city at once nurse and fatherland and mother.Athenian autochthony also links to nationalistic political ideology in the fifth and fourth century.
For there cohabit with us none of the type of Pelops, or Cadmus, or Aegyptus or Danaus, and numerous others of the kind, who are naturally barbarians though nominally Greeks.
[22]It is unclear or unlikely that the above ideas belong to Plato himself, since Menexenus, the only non-philosophical Platonic work, has been regarded as a parody, a mock-patriotic funeral speech of Pericles or Aspasia,[23][24] but in any case it provides an image of the Athenian ideology of that time.