Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/166

Rh 154 MYTHOLOGY chief personage in a society of immortals, organized on the type of contemporary human society. &quot; There is a great deal of human nature &quot; in his wife Hera (Skr. Soar, Heaven). 1 It is to be remembered that philologists differ widely as to the origin and meaning of the names of almost all the Greek gods. Thus the light which the science of language throws on Greek myths is extremely uncertain. Hera is explained as &quot; the feminine side of heaven &quot; by some authorities. The quarrels of Hera with Zeus (which are a humorous anthropomorphic study in Homer) are represented as a way of speaking about winter and rough weather. The other chief Homeric deities are Apollo and Artemis, children of Zeus by Leto, a mortal mother raised to divinity. Apollo is clearly connected in some way with light, as his name 4&amp;gt;ot/3os seems to indicate, and with purity. 2 Homer knows the legend that a giant sought to lay violent hands on Leto (Od., xi. 580). Smintheus, one of Apollo s titles in Homer, is connected with the field-mouse (o-fjLivdos), one of his many sacred animals. His names, At /ao?, AuKr/yevvys, were connected by antiquity with the wolf, by most modern writers with the light. According to some legends Leto had been a were- wolf. 3 The whole subject of the relations of Greek gods to animals is best set forth in the words of Plutarch (De Is. et Os., Ixxi.), where he says that the Egyptians worship actual beasts, &quot;whereas the Greeks both speak and believe correctly, saying that the dove is the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis,&quot; and so forth. Each Greek god had a small menagerie of sacred animals, and it may be conjectured that these animals were originally the totems of various stocks, subsumed into the worship of the anthropomorphic god. Apollo, in any case, is the young and beautiful archer-god of Homer ; Artemis, his sister, is the goddess of archery, who takes her pastime in the chase. She holds no considerable place in the Iliad ; in the Odyssey, Nausicaa is compared to her, as to the pure and lovely lady of maidenhood. Her name is commonly connected with apre^rys, pure, unpol luted. Her close relations (un-Homeric) with the bear and bear- worship have suggested a derivation from CI/DKTOS &quot;ApKre/zis. In Homer her &quot; gentle shafts &quot; deal sudden and painless death ; she is a beautiful Azrael. A much more important daughter of Zeus in Homer is Athene, the &quot; grey-eyed &quot; or (as some take yAauKWTrts, rather improbably) the &quot;owl-headed&quot; goddess. Her birth from the head of Zeus is not explicitly alluded to in Homer. 4 In Homer, Athene is a warlike maiden, the patron-goddess of wisdom and manly resolution. In the twenty-second book of the Odyssey she assumes the form of a swallow, and she can put on the shape of any man. She bears the aegis, the awful shield of Zeus. Another Homeric child of Zeus, or, according to Hesiod (Th., 927), of Hera alone, is Hephaestus, the lame craftsman and arti ficer. In the Iliad 3 will be found some of the crudest Homeric myths. Zeus or Hera throws Hephaestus or Ate out of heaven, as in the Iroquois myth of the tossing from heaven of Ataentsic. There is, as usual, no agreement as to the etymology of the name of Hephaestus. Preller 1 Cf. Preller, Griechische Mythologie, i. ]28, note 1, for this and other philological conjectures. - The derivation of AwoXXuv remains obscure. The derivation of Leto from adelv, and the conclusion that her name means &quot;the con cealer,&quot; that is, the night, whence the sun is born, is disputed by Cur- tiu.s (Pi-eller, i. 190, 191, note 4), but appears to be accepted by Mr Max Muller (Selected Essays, i. 386), Latmos being derived from the same root as Leto, Latona, the riiglit. 3 Aristotle, H. An., 6 ; ^Elian, N. A., 4, 4. 4 Her name, as usual, is variously interpreted by various etymolo gists. Some connect AOrjvr] with aid, us in a.10^. Mr Max Muller connects it with a/iana (Skr., dawn), but it is not universally admitted that ahana does mean &quot;dawn,&quot; nor that the derivation is correct. 5 xiv. 257 ; xviii. 395 ; xix. 91, 132. inclines to a connexion with i?&amp;lt;#cu, to kindle fire, but Mr Max Muller differs from this theory. About the close relations of Hephaestus with fire there can be no doubt. He is a rough, kind, good-humoured being in the Iliad. In the Odyssey he is naturally annoyed by the adultery of his wife, Aphrodite, with Ares. Ares is a god with whom Homer has no sympathy. He is a son of Hera, and detested by Zeus (Iliad, v. 890). He is cowardly in war, and on one occasion was shut up for years in a huge brazen pot. This adventure was even more ignominious than that of Poseidon and Apollo when they were compelled to serve Laomedon for hire. The payment he refused, and threatened to &quot; cut off their ears with the sword &quot; (Iliad, xxi. 455). Poseidon is to the sea what Zeus is to the air, and Hades to the underworld in Homer. 6 His own view of his social position may be stated in his own words (Iliad, xv. 183, 211). Three brethren are we, and sons of Cronus, sons whom Rhea bare, even Zeus and myself, and Hades is the third, the ruler of the people in the underworld. And in three lots were all things divided, and each drew a lot of his own, 7 and to me fell the hoary sea, and Hades drew the mirky darkness, and Zeus the wide heaven in clear air and clouds, but the earth and high Olympus are yet common to all.&quot; Zeus, however, is, as Poseidon admits, the elder-born, and therefore the revered head of the family. Thus Homer adopts the system of primogeniture, while Hesiod is all for the opposite and probably earlier custom of &quot; jungsten-recht,&quot; and makes supreme Zeus the youngest of the sons of Cronus. Among the other gods Dionysus is but slightly alluded to in Homer as the son of Zeus and Semele, as the object of persecution, and as connected with the myth of Ariadne. The name of Hermes is derived from various sources, as from opp-av and op/j.ij, or, by Mr Max Muller, the name is connected with Sarameya (Sky). If he had originally an elemental character, it is now diffi cult to distinguish, though interpreters connect him with the wind. He is the messenger of the gods, the bringer of good luck, and the conductor of men s souls down the dark ways of death. In addition to the great Homeric gods, the poet knows a whole &quot; Olympian consistory &quot; of deities, nymphs, nereids, sea-gods and goddesses, river- gods, Iris the rainbow goddess, Sleep, Demeter who lay with a mortal, Aphrodite the goddess of love, wife of Hephaestus and leman of Ares, and so forth. As to the origin of the gods, Homer is not very explicit. He is acquainted with the existence of an older dynasty now deposed, the dynasty of Cronus and the Titans. In the Iliad (viii. 478) Zeus says to Hera, &quot; For thine anger reck I not, not even though thou go to the nether most bounds of earth and sea, where sit lapetus and Cronus. . . and deep Tartarus is round about them.&quot; &quot; The gods below that are with Cronus &quot; are mentioned (II., xiv. 274 ; xv. 225). Rumours of old divine wars echo in the Iliad, as (i. 400) where it is said that when the other immortals revolted against and bound Zeus, Thetis brought to his aid ^Egaeon of the hundred arms. The streams of Oceanus (II., xiv. 246) are spoken of as the source of all the gods, and in the same book (290) &quot;Oceanus and mother Tethys &quot; are regarded as the parents of the immortals. Zeus is usually called Cronion and Cronides, which Homer certainly understood to mean &quot;son of Cronus,&quot; yet it is expressly stated that Zeus &quot; imprisoned Cronus beneath the earth and the unvintaged sea.&quot; The whole subject is only alluded to incidentally. On the whole it may be said that the Homeric deities are power ful anthropomorphic beings, departmental rulers, united by the ordinary social and family ties of the Homeric 6 The root of his name is soujrht in such words as Triros and 7rora/it6s. 7 We learn from the Odyssey (xiv. 209) that this was the custom of sons on the death of their father.