Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/408

 376 HISTORY OF GREECE. to be dealt with. These mythes, the spontaneous growth of a creative and personifying interpretation of nature, had struck root in Grecian associations at a time when the national faith required no support from what we call evidence. They wore note submitted, not simply to a feeling, imagining, and believing public, but also to special clause? of instructed men. philoso- phers, historians, ethical teachers, and critics, and to a public partially modified by their ideas 1 as well as improved by a wider practical experience. They were not intended for such an au- dience ; they had ceased to be in complete harmony even with the lower strata of intellect and sentiment, much more so with the higher. But they were the cherished inheritance of a past time ; they were interwoven in a thousand ways with the religious faith, the patriotic retrospect, and the national worship, of every Gre- cian community ; the general type of the mythe was the ancient, familiar, and universal form of Grecian thought, which even the most cultivated men had imbibed in their childhood from the poets, 9 and by which they were to a certain degree unconsciously 1 It is carious to see that some of the most recondite doctrines of the IV thagnreaa philosophy were actually brought before the general Syraai^v.i public in the comedies of Epiehannus : " In comcEdiis suis personas sa?pe ita eoDoqra fecit, at sententias Pythagoricas et in onrrersum sublimia rita> pne- ceptt inuusceret" (Grysar, De Doriensinm Comoedn. p. 111. Col. I The fragments perjured in Diogen. LaeTt (iiL 9-17) present both criticisms upon the Hesiodk doctrine of a primaeval duos, and an exposition of the archetypal and tm^tM^ ideas ("as opposed to the fluctuating phenomena of sense) which Plato afterwards adopted and systematized. Epkharmus seems to hare combined with this abstruse philosophy a strong rein of comic shrewdness and some turn to scepticism (Cicero. toL ad Attic. L 19) : nt crebro mihi vafer ille Sicnlns Epiehannus insnsnnvt suam." Clemens Alex. Strom, r. p. 258. Noft cai fUfamff 1 man- of#pa Tofrra ruv aprruv. Z^uev up^i^uu cot xoywr^ty ravra ydp au^ei Also his contemptuous ridicule of the prophetesses of his time who cheated foolish women out of their money, pretending to universal knowledge, co2 Torra jryvucKom ru njpdr Ijoyu (ap Polluc. ix. 81). See, about Epicharmns. O. MnQer, Dorians, ir. 7, 4. These dramas seem to hare been exhibited at Syracuse between 4SO-460 B. c, anterior eren to Chionides and Magnes at Athens CAristot Poet. c. 3): he says ^o A i y irporepof, which can hardly be literally exact. The cri: the Horatiaaage looked upon Epicharmns as the prototype of Planrus (llor Epistol.ii. 1. 53).
 * The third book of the republic of Plato is particularly striking in refer-