Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/112

 80 HISTORY OF GREECE. this belief continue, that the Roman general Pompey, when in command of an army in Kolchis, made with his companion, the lit- erary Greek Theophanes, a special march to view the spot in Caucasus where Prometheus had been transfixed. 1 CHAPTER IV. HEROIC LEGENDS. -GENEALOGY OF ARGOS. HAVING briefly enumerated the gods of Greece, with their chief attributes as described in legend, we come to those geneal- ogies which connected them with historical men. In the retrospective faith of a Greek, the ideas of worship and ancestry coalesced. Every association of men, large or small, in whom there existed a feeling of present union, traced back that union to some common initial progenitor ; that progenitor being either the common god whom they worshipped, or some semi-divine person closely allied to him. What the feelings of the commu- nity require is, a continuous pedigree to connect them with this respected source of existence, beyond which they do not think of looking back. A series of names, placed in filiation or fraternity, together with a certain number of family or personal adventures ascribed to some of the individuals among them, constitute the ante-historical past through which the Greek looks back to his gods. The names of this genealogy are, to a great degree, gen- tile or local names familiar to the people, rivers, mountains, springs, lakes, villages, demes, etc., embodied as persons, and introduced as acting or suffering. They are moreover called kings or chiefs, but the existence of a body of subjects surround- ing them is tacitly implied rather than distinctly set forth ; for their own personal exploits or family proceedings constitute for the most part the whole matter of narrative. And thus the gene- 1 Appian, Bell. Mithridat. c. 103.