But know, that I alone am king of me.
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

Dryden

From the Roman historian Tacitus’ praise of the barbarians in the first century AD to Rousseau’s Treatise in the eighteenth, the idea of a pure and morally unsullied savage, existing in a state of nature, free from the decadent moral baseness of civilisation, has saturated the western intellect for millennia.