in poetry, here come under our consideration: epic, lyric, and dramatic poets, together with authors of hymns, elegies, and idyls; logographers, mythographers, historians, orators, sophists, lexicographers, scholiasts, and ecclesiastical writers. There are probably very few authors of antiquity in whom some mythological notice is not to be found; and amid such a mass and variety of sources, it becomes difficult to discover how they can all be made available. However, from the literary character itself, and from the designs and aims of these various authors, as well in their works in general, as in their treatment of the mythus in particular, a conclusion may be drawn as to the method of this treatment. We shall try what can be done in this way with some of them.

The contents of the two great poems of HOMER are, according to the definition given above, of an entirely mythic character. They treat divers series of legends, which stand in close uninterrupted concatenation, and only here and there take notice of others lying apart from this connexion: these series, moreover, are so handled, as to form each a rounded off and complete whole.1 Whatever is brought into action in these poems, acts in human fashion. Gods behave after the manner of men; nay, even horses of divine breed feel; and swine, though merely enchanted, think. The actions recorded are carried out into their most minute details; and the will which begets the deed, and the thought which prompts the will, are exhibited with equal precision. All hearts are

1 I must here remark, that whatever judgment may be formed as to the origin of these wholes, I think I must, with others, assume the aiming at, the endeavour to produce them, to have been given in the first germ and commencement.

laid open to the poet's eye. With all this apparent fidelity of representation, the marvellous is by no means excluded: and if the poet never exalts the deeds of his heroes, the main actions, beyond the limits of possibility; on the other hand, the influence of an upper and nether, a purely ideal supernatural world, is powerfully exerted in the way of cause and coöperation. But this imaginary is, in so many respects, modelled after the real world, that we are scarcely ever reminded of the marvellous, and follow the poet with a species of faith. This linking together into a whole, this circumstantiality of description, this systematic exposition of the motives to action, together with the treatment of the wonderful, may here be already laid down as principles of mythic representation in the Homeric poems; but, on the other hand, it may also be observed, that all these properties are yet perfectly compatible with the design to relate the actual and true. The reflecting mind may gather this from the praise bestowed on Demodocus by Odysseus, for having sung the sad fates of the Achæans in strict order, and conformably to truth; the chief excellence of the Оéσπis doidn being made to consist precisely in that quality. But with regard to the relations in which Homer, generally speaking, stands to tradition and history, some observations will be communicated in a following chapter.

HESIOD'S THEOGONY, in like manner, furnishes a relation, in the historical form, wherein the characters who first appear are the chief objects and elements of external nature, as the Earth, the Heavens, and the Sea; then come into action an order of beings called 1 Od., viii. 489 sqq.

Titans, evidently belonging in part to the sensible, and partly to an ideal world; and these, again, are succeeded by the gods who were usually worshipped in the temples of Greece. The sequel takes in the descendants of these three classes of beings, their marriages and progeny, their wars and combats. It is manifest that the gods to whom dominion is ascribed in this poem, are the same that were adored in ancient Greece. This, indeed, is pointed out by the poet in regard to Hecate,1 to the Aphrodite worshipped in Cyprus and Cythera, and others. The heroes, too, are those that were already celebrated in Grecian mythi. If this were not the case, and we were to suppose that these names here bore a signification different from what they bear in the religion and legends of Greece, then must the poet have made it his deliberate aim to impose upon his hearers, or he must have been deceived himself, in the same way, by a more ancient bard,suppositions which would, at all events, require a very strong foundation. If the contrary is clear, it follows that even the original framer of the Theogony adopted previously-existing materials into his connexion. For the estimate we should form of the proportion which these bear to his own creations, we must, in like manner, refer the reader to a following chapter.

From the so-called CYCLIC EPOPEES, the astonishingly copious Exce of Hesiod, and the genealogical epic poets, such as Eumelus and Asius, we have a considerable mass of fragments and notices, which enable us to form a judgment as to the treatment of the materials in all these works. We know that the poems just mentioned bear less resemblance to a circle

I V. 417.

than to a line indefinitely prolonged; inasmuch as their authors frequently strung together numerous legendary stories on a very loose thread, without possessing the Homeric art of connecting with each other the beginning and the end. Further, we know also from these fragments, that here the events recorded were not so well accounted for, evolved, and detailed, that they stood more naked in the relation. If Homer may be compared to a regular historian, they may be rather said to resemble annalists and chroniclers. Hence it is plain, that the predominant aim of these poetical works was to hand down legends undisguised by drapery, that their main object was the transmission of mythi. To make these the ground of so animated a picture of the human soul as Homer produced, was a task for which perhaps they altogether wanted genius.

1

The LYRIC had a far more definite aim than the epic poets, not only in the composition of their works, but also in the treatment of the mythus. They wrote to celebrate the festival of a deity, to extol a conqueror at public games; they wrote for banquets and funeral solemnities. Accordingly, they selected mythi suitable to such occasions; and it may readily be supposed that they also often adapted the story to their design. Besides, there were other motives of various kinds for altering a mythus: a certain moral criticism, in particular, exercised a great modifying influence. Stesichorus had employed this sort of criticism in the character of Helen, as it is exhibited in the current mythi; but he afterwards sought to atone for

1 See e. g. the fragment of the Ecce, which now forms the introduction to the Hesiodic Amig

his offence by a palinode, where, in order that he might free the heroine from all reproach, he availed himself of a probably very obscure tradition, then still existing, that she had never been carried away to Troy. Pindar altered a number of mythi, because they did not harmonize with his own pure and elevated conceptions of the dignity of gods and heroes ;1 ⚫ and must therefore, in his judgment, be untrue. He was not actuated, then, by a species of levity, to which mythi might seem nothing more than mere indifferent materials of poetical treatment, but on the contrary by a regard for truth. A remarkable circumstance must here be noticed. Pindar never doubts in the least that the mythus really relates a fact; and the presence of the wonderful disturbs him so little, that he never shows the slightest disposition to dissolve that coöperation of the divine and the human nature, which is the distinguishing characteristic of the mythus. He only thinks, that in many cases the fact was from the very first distorted, either through ignorance or evil design;2 and especially, that "stories decked out beyond the bounds of truth, with manycoloured fictions, had misled the minds of men; for that grace which bestows on mortals all that gives delight, obtained for them belief, and often caused what should be distrusted to pass for truth."3 In accordance with this, he says elsewhere: "I think that the legends of Odysseus are drawn out by the mellifluous Homer further than his destinies extended; for a certain dignity dwells in his fictions and winged art, and his genius insensibly deludes the mind with

1 Comp. Pyth. iii. 27, ix. 45.

2

Olymp. i. 47.

3 Olymp. i. 28., according to Böckh's reading.