Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/376

 344 HISTORY OF GREECE. lineaments and combinations, " Gorgons and Harpies and Chi- maeras dire." As there were in every gens or family special gen- tile deities and foregone ancestors who watched over its members, forming in each the characteristic symbol and recognized guar- antee of their union, so there seem to have been in each guild or trade peculiar beings whose vocation it was to cooperate or to impede in various stages of the business. 1 The extensive and multiform personifications, here faintly sketched, pervaded in every direction the mental system of the Greeks, and were identified intimately both with their conception and with their description of phenomena, present as well as past. That which to us is interesting as the mere creation of an exube- rant fancy, was to the Greok genuine and venerated reality. Both the earth and the solid heaven (Gaea and Uranos) were both conceived and spoken of by him as endowed with appetite, feel- ing, sex, and most of the various attributes of humanity. Instead of a sun such as we now see, subject to astronomical laws, and forming the centre of a system the changes of which we can ascertain and foreknow, he saw the great god Helios, mounting his chariot in the morning in the east, reaching at mid-day the height of the solid heaven, and arriving in the evening at the western horizon, with horses fatigued and desirous of repose. tree, the cotton-tree, etc. (ch. ix. p. 112), and the description of the annual marriage celebrated between the sacred pebble, or pebble-god, Saligram, and the sacred shrub Toolsea, celebrated at great expense and with a nume- rous procession (chap. xix. p. 158 ; xxiii. p. 185). J See the song to the potters, in the Homeric Epigrams (14) : Ei filv duaers fiiadov, uelau, u Kepatiqee Atiip' uy' 'A&jjvaiT}, nal vxeipexe %Elpa Ka.fj.ivov. E> 6e (i&av&ELEV Koruli.oi, KO.I navra Kavaarpa $pvxdf]vai TE /caAwf, nal Tipjg uvov upecr&ai. ew <5j) Vetra KOUIV^I J^Ajf-riypaf f, Sfiupayov re, a? 'A, rj5s 'Zapu.KTTjv, of TTjtie Te%vy Kaicu Trohhii. Tropifri, etc. A certain kindred betwejn men and serpents (ovyyeveiuv nva npbf rodj o(j>sif) was recognized in the peculiar gens of the oQioyeveif near Parion, who possessed the gift of healing by their touches the bite of the serpent the original hero of this gens was said to have been transformed from a ser pent into a man (Strabo, xiii. p. 588).
 * Hv d' ETT' uvaitieiijv Tpetydevres tfievd^ ttpytn?? ,