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place. Now I quite acknowledge that these explanations are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to give them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimæras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and impossible monstrosities and marvels of nature. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them all to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his time." The fantastic world of mythology confronted the cultivated Greek of the age of Sokrates and Plato in a way which it is hard for us to realize, and there were few equally bold enough to confess their inability to explain it. For it much needed explanation; the popular mythology shocked the morality of the Greeks of the Sophistic and philosophic age, as much as it offended their reason and experience. And yet this mythology formed the background of their art and their religion; it had been made familiar to them in their childhood, and every spot their eyes rested on recalled some ancient myth. It was not so very long before the time of Sokrates that the old mythology had exercised a potent influence upon the politics of the day; the five Spartan arbitrators had adjudged Salamis to Athens, when Solon had wrested it from the hands of the Megarians, on the ground that it was to Athens that the sons of Ajax had once migrated. Unless the Greek was prepared, like Xenophanes, to denounce Homer and Hesiod as the inventors of his mythology and the "lies " it told about God, or to banish the Phædrus," p. 229. Jowett's translation.

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poets from the ideal state, like Plato in his Republic, and forbid them to repeat their legends in the hearing of the young, he was sorely tried to harmonize the belief of his manhood with the myths that had been bequeathed to him by the childhood of his race.

Theagenes of Rhegium (B.C. 520) is said to have first attacked the problem, and like the Jewish and Christian commentators of a later time to have found the key in allegory. The tales of Homer were but veiled forms beneath which the truth lay hidden to be revealed by the qualified interpreter. The myths had ceased to be fairy-tales belonging to another world than this, and constituting no rule of action; their absolute incompatibility, when literally understood, with the morality and science of a newer age, was brought out in full relief, and the doctrine laid down that "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." What, however, this spirit was, what the allegory was intended to convey, admitted of dispute, and led to the formation of different schools of interpretation. There were those who saw in them symbols of scientific phænomena, and regarded the old poets as wonderful physicists acquainted with all the facts and phænomena of nature which a later age had to rediscover. Thus we find Metrodorus resolving Agamemnon and the other heroes of the Trojan Epic into the elements and physical agencies, the gods themselves not escaping the process of transmutation. There were others, again, like the Neo-Platonists, for whom the myths were moral symbols, and with them Helen became the soul of man, around which must fight the powers of light and darkness, the reason and the

passions, the strivings after good, and the temptation to evil. Plato, we have seen, hesitated in his opinion on the matter. At one time he looks upon the myths as the mischievous products of the poets, between whom and the philosophers there must be perpetual war; at another time he shrinks from pronouncing sentence against them, and confesses that they embody feeling and religion. The more practical mind of Aristotle accepted the facts, and made no attempt to explain them away. Secure in his own conception of the impersonal reason, of thought thinking upon itself, he was content to leave to the multitude their myths partly as yielding an easy and popular explanation of the difficulties of life, partly as serving to satisfy their spiritual needs and prevent them from becoming dangerous to the State. The myths themselves, he holds, are the "waifs and strays" which have come down to us from those earlier cycles of existence through which the universe has been eternally passing; though how they survived the cataclysms with which each cycle ended we are not told.

Aristotle was the last of the philosophers who saw in the old myths something more than the deliberate fabrications of an interested class of persons. Such belief as still remained in the traditional mythology was rapidly passing away: the educated classes had found a religious resting-place in the atheism of Epikurus, while the masses were eagerly accepting the strange and wonder-working superstitions which were pouring in from the East. On all sides it was agreed that, if the gods of Hellas existed at all, they took no part in the affairs of this world. Their holy serenity could never be ruffled by the passions

and the miseries of human life. With them, therefore, the myths could have nothing to do, and the contrary belief was but one of those worn-out superstitions which could not survive the extinction of Greek freedom. To Euhemerus was due the great discovery that the gods and demi-gods of the ancient mythology were but deified men; men, too, more immoral and dissolute than even the polished coteries of Alexandria or Pergamus. Euhemerus, it would seem, threw the statement of his doctrine into the form of a romance. In the words of Diodorus, it began by asserting that "the ancients have delivered to their posterity two different notions of the gods; one of those that were eternal and immortal, as the sun, moon, stars, and other parts of the universe; while others were terrestrial gods that were so made because they were benefactors to mankind, as Herakles, Dionysius, and others." Euhemerus professed to have derived his information from inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphics on a golden pillar in an ancient temple of Zeus at Panara, a town in the island of Pankhæa, off the coast of Arabia Felix. Above Panara rose a mountain where Uranus had once dwelt, and the inhabitants were named Triphyllians, being three Kretan tribes who had settled in the country in the time of Zeus, but were afterwards expelled by Ammon. The inscriptions were written by Hermes or Thoth, and recorded the lives and adventures of Uranus, Zeus, Artemis, and Apollo.

Such was the framework into which the rationalistic explanation of mythology, since known as Euhemerism, was fitted by its author. It suited the spirit of the time, and was transplanted to Rome by Ennius, the apostle of

Epicurean scepticism, where it found a ready welcome among an unimaginative and rationalizing people. Histories were now written in which the old myths, stripped of all that was marvellous in them, and therefore of their real life and essence, figured side by side with the facts of contemporaneous history. The primitive condition of the human mind, the character of the age in which the myths arose, was grotesquely misconceived, and in destroying the halo of divinity which encircled its ancient myths, paganism destroyed itself. The work begun by Euhemerus was completed by the irreverent satire of Lucian, the Voltaire of the Roman Empire.

But a new power was growing up in their midst, of which the wits and sceptics knew and thought but little. Christianity was slowly attracting to itself all those who still felt that they needed a religious creed. And Christianity, not yet freed from the influences of its Jewish birthplace, was prone to identify the deities of heathenism with the demons of Pharisaic philosophy and to turn the mythology of ancient Greece into a record of demoniac activity. The Christian was quite ready to accept the element of the miraculous contained in a myth, but he referred it to the agency of Satan. In the hands of the Christian writers, therefore, Greek mythology lost all its beauty and attractiveness; reminiscences of it still survived to mingle with the legends-Jewish, Norse, or Arabic-which satisfied the literary cravings of the Middle Ages, but otherwise it was lost and forgotten, or else looked upon with dread and abhorrence. It remained for the Renaissance, for the new birth of Europe from the slumber of the

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