Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/138

 106 HISTORY OF GREECE. recounted at the multiplied festivals of Greece, each on itt own special theme, have been lost : the religious narratives, which the Exegetes of every temple had present to his menu ry, explana- tory of the peculiar religious ceremonies and local customs in his own town or Deme, have passed away : all these primitive ele- ments, originally distinct and unconnected, are removed out of our sight, and we possess only an aggregate result, formed by many confluent streams of fable, and connected together by the agency of subsequent poets and logographers. Even the earliest agents in this work of connecting and systematizing the Hesio- dic poets have been hardly at all preserved. Our information respecting Grecian mythology is derived chiefly from the prose logographers who followed them, and in whose works, since a continuous narrative was above all things essential to them, the fabulous personages are woven into still more comprehensive pedigrees, and the original isolation of the legends still better disguised. Hekatseus, Pherekydes, Hellanikus, and Akusilaus lived at a time when the idea of Hellas as one great whole, com- posed of fraternal sections, was deeply rooted in the mind of every Greek ; and when the fancy of one or a few great families, branching out widely from one common stem, was more popular and acceptable than that of a distinct indigenous origin in each of the separate districts. These logographers, indeed, have them- selves been lost ; but Apollodorus and the various scholiasts, our great immediate sources of information respecting Grecian mytho- logy, chiefly borrowed from them : so that the legendary world of Greece is in fact known to us through them, combined with the dramatic and Alexandrine poets, their Latin imitators, and the still later class of scholiasts except indeed such occasional glimpses as we obtain from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the remaining Hesiodic fragments, which exhibit but too frequently a hopeless diversity when confronted with the narratives of the logographers. Though JEolus (as has been already stated) is himself called the son of Hellen along with Dorus and Xuthus, yet the legend? concerning the JEolids, far from being dependent upon this genealogy, are not all even coherent with it : moreover the name of ^Eolus in the legend is older than that of Hellon, inasmuch as