Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/31

Rh the moderns follow Strabo.—The mythical faith not shaken by topographical impossibilities.—Historical Trôas and the Teukrians.—Æolic Greeks in the Trôad—the whole territory gradually Æolized.—Old date, and long prevalence of the worship of Apollo Sminthius.—Asiatic customs and religion blended with Hellenic.—Sibylline prophecies.—Settlements from Milêteus, Mitylênê, and Athens.

The mythes formed the entire mental stock of the early Greeks.—State of mind out of which they arose.—Tendency to universal personification.—Absence of positive knowledge—supplied by personifying faith.—Multitude and variety of quasi-human personages.—What we read as poetical fanies, were to the Greeks serious realities.—The gods and heroes—their chief agency cast back into the past, and embodied in the mythes.—Marked and manifold types of the Homeric gods.—Stimulus which they afforded to the mythopoeic faculty.—Easy faith in popular and plausible stories.—Poets—receive their matter from the divine inspiration of the Muse.—Meaning of the word mythe—original—altered.—Matter of actual history—uninteresting to early Greeks.—Mythical faith and religious point of view—paramount in the Homeric age.—Gradual development of the scientific point of view—its opposition to the religious.—Mythopœeic age—anterior to this dissent.—Expansive force of Grecian intellect.—Transition towards positive and present fact—The poet becomes the organ of present time instead of past.—Iambic, elegiac, and lyric poets.—Influence of the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, 660.—Progress—historical, geographical, social—from that period to  500.—Altered standard of judgment, ethical and intellectual.—Commencement of physical science—Thalês, Xenophanês, Pythagoras.—Impersonal nature conceived as an object of study.—Opposition between scientific method and the religious feeling of the multitude.—How dealt with by different philosophers.—Socratês.—Hippocratês.—Anaxagoras.—Contrasted with Grecian religious belief.—Treatment of Socratês by the Athenians.—Scission between the superior men and the multitude—important in reference to the mythes.—The mythes accommodated to a new tone of feeling and judgment.—The poets and logographers.—Pindar.—Tragic poets.—Æchylus and Sophoklês.—Ten dencies of Æschylus in regard to the old legends.—He maintains undiminished the grandeur of the mythical world.—Euripidês—accused of vulgarizing the mythical heroes, and of introducing exaggerated pathos, refinement, and rhetoric.—The logographers Pherekydês, etc.—Hekatæus—the mythes rationalized.—The historians—Herodotus.—Earnest piety of Herodotus—his mystic reserve.—His views of the mythical world.—His deference for Egypt and Egyptian statements.—His general faith in the mythical heroes and eponyms—yet combined with scepticism as to matters of fact.—His remarks upon the miraculous foundation of the oracle at Dôdôna.—His remarks upon Melampus and his prophetic powers.—His remarks upon the Thessalian legend of Tempê.—Allegorical interpretation of the mythes—more and more esteemed and applied.—Divine legends allegorized.—Heroic legends historicized.—Limits to this interpreting process.—Distinction between gods and dæmons—altered and widened by Empedoclês.—Admission of dæmons as partially evil beings—effect of such admission.—Semi-historical