But this attempt to save the native Greek character for "blitheness" and humanity must not be pushed too far.[1] It must be remembered that the cruder and wilder sacrifices and legends of Greece were strictly local; that they were attached to these ancient temples, old altars, barbarous xoana, or wooden idols, and rough fetish stones, in which Pausanias found the most ancient relics of Hellenic theology. This is a proof of their antiquity and a presumption in favour of their freedom from foreign influence. Most of these things were survivals from that dimly remembered prehistoric age in which the Greeks, not yet gathered into city states, lived in villages, or kraals, or pueblos, as we should translate κατὰ κώμας, if we were speaking of African or American tribes. In that stage the early Greeks must have lacked both the civic and the national or Panhellenic sentiment; their political unit was the clan, which, again, answered in part to the totem kindred of America, or Africa, or Australia.[2] In this stagnant condition they could not have made acquaintance with the many creeds of Semitic and other alien peoples on the shores of the Levant.[3] It was later, when Greece had developed
- ↑ Claus, De Antiq. Form. Dianæ, 6, 7, 16.
- ↑ As C. O. Müller judiciously remarks: "The scenes of nine-tenths of the Greek myths are laid in particular districts of Greece, and they speak of the primeval inhabitants of the lineage and adventures of native heroes. They manifest an accurate acquaintance with individual localities, which, at a time when Greece was neither explored by antiquaries nor did geographical handbooks exist, could be possessed only by the inhabitants of these localities." Müller gives, as examples, myths of bears more or less divine. Scientific Mythology, pp. 14–15.
- ↑ Compare Claus, De Dianæ Antiquissima Natura, p. 3.
