Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/374

 342 HISTORY OF GREECE. If even the rudiments of scientific geography and physics, now BO universally diffused and so invaluable as a security against error and delusion, were wanting in this early stage of society, their place was abundantly supplied by vivacity of imagination and by personifying sympathy. The unbounded tendency of the Homeric Greeks to multiply fictitious persons, and to construe the phenomena which interested them into manifestations of de- sign, is above all things here to be noticed, because the form of personal narrative, universal in their mythes, is one of its many manifestations. Their polytheism (comprising some elements of an original fetichism, in which particular objects had themselves been supposed to be endued with life, volition, and design) recog- nized agencies of unseen beings identified and confounded with the different localities and departments of the physical world. Of such beings there were numerous varieties, and many grada- tions both in power and attributes ; there were differences of age, sex and local residence, relations both conjugal and filial between them, and tendencies sympathetic as well as repugnant. The gods formed a sort of political community of their own, which had its hierarchy, its distribution of ranks and duties, its conten- tions for power and occasional revolutions, its public meetings in the agora of Olympus, and its multitudinous banquets or festi- vals. 1 The great Olympic gods were in fact only the most exalted amongst an aggregate of quasi-human or ultra-human personages, dsemons, heroes, nymphs, eponymous (or name-giving) genii, identified with each river, mountain, 2 cape, town, village, or known 1 Homer, Iliad, i. 603; xx. 7. Hesiod. Theogon. 802. 2 We read in the Iliad that Asteropoeus was grandson of the beautiful river Axius, and Achilles, after having slain him, admits the dignity of this parentage, but boasts that his own descent from Zeus was much greater, since even the great river Achelous and Oceanus himself is inferior to Zeus (xxi. 157-191). Skamander fights with Achilles, calling his brother Simo'is to his aid (213-308). Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus, falls in love with Enipcus, the most beautiful of rivers (Odyss. xi. 237). Achelous appears as a suitor of Deianira (Sophokl. Trach. 9). There cannot be a better illustration of this feeling than what is told of the New Zealanders at the present time. The chief Heu-Heu appeals to his ancestor, ihe great mountain Tonga Riro : " I am the Heu-Heu, and rulo over you all, just as my ancestor Tonga Riro, the mountain of snow, stands bove all this land." (E. J. Wakefield, Adventures in New Zealand, vol. i.