in his words and songs the happiness which he experienced in himself. Caring less, perhaps, to hold communion with the silent mountains and the heaving sea, he was drawn to the life of cities, where he could share his joys and sorrows with his kinsmen. The earth was his mother: the gods who dwelt on Olympos had the likeness of men without their pains or their doom of death. There Zeus sat on his golden throne, and beside him was the glorious Apollôn, not the deified man,[1] but the sun-god invested with a human personality. But (with whatever modifications caused by climate and circumstances) both were inheritors of a common mythology, which with much that was beautiful and good united also much that was repulsive and immoral. Both, from the ordinary speech of their common forefathers, had framed a number of legends which had their gross and impure aspects, but for the grossness of which they were not (as we have seen), and they could not be, responsible.
Full developement of Greek mythology.But if the mythology of the Greeks is in substance and in developement the same as that of the North, they differed widely in their later history. That of the Greeks passed through the stages of growth, maturity, and decay, without any violent external repression. The mythical language of the earliest age had supplied them with an inexhaustible fountain of legendary narrative; and the tales so framed had received an implicit belief, which, though intense and unquestioning, could scarcely be called religious, and in no sense could be regarded as moral. And just because the belief accorded to it was not moral, the time came gradually when thoughtful men rose through earnest effort (rather, we would say, through Divine guidance) to the conviction of higher and clearer truth. If even the Greek of the Heroic age found in his mythology neither a rule of life nor the ideal of that Deity whom in his heart he really worshipped, still less would this be the case with the poets and philosophers of later times. For Æschylos Zeus was the mere name[2] of a god whose actions were not those of the son of Kronos; to Sophokles it made no difference whether he were called Zeus or by any other name, as long as he might retain the conviction of His eternity and His righteousness.[3] If from his own moral perception- ↑ The common mythology of the whole Aryan race goes against the supposition that Apollôn and Athênê owe their existence to man-worship and woman-worship respectively. Athênê was to the Greek an embodiment of moral and intellectual greatness. The absence or deterioration of the former converts Athênê into the Kolchian Medeia. The latter type, when still further degraded, becomes the Latin Canidia, a close approximation to the ordinary witch of modern superstition.
- ↑ Agamemnon, 160.
- ↑ Oid. Tyr., 903.
