Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/445

 POLYBIUS, DIODOKU V ETC. 413 appointment from Zeus, was in reality a man eminently skilled in navigation, and exact in predicting the weather ; that the Cy- clopes and Laestrygones were wild and savage real men in Sicily ; and that Scylla and Charybdis were a figurative representation of dangers arising from pirates in the Strait of Messina. Strabo speaks of the amazing expeditions of Dionysus and Herakles, and of the long wanderings of Jason, Menelaus, and Odysseus, in the same category with the extended commercial range of the Phoanician merchant-ships : he explains the report of Theseus and Peirithous having descended to Hades, by their dangerous earthly pilgrimages, and the invocation of the Dioskuri as the protectors of the imperiled mariner, by the celebrity which they had acquired as real men and navigators. Diodorus gave at considerable length versions of the current fables respecting the most illustrious names in the Grecian myth- ical world, compiled confusedly out of distinct and incongruous authors. Sometimes the mythe is reproduced in its primitive simplicity, but for the most part it is partially, and sometimes wholly, historicized. Amidst this jumble of dissentient authori- ties we can trace little of a systematic view, except the general conviction that there was at the bottom of the mythes a real chronological sequence of persons, and real matter of fact, his- torical or ultra-historical. Nevertheless, there are some few occasions on which Diodorus brings us back a step nearer to the point of view of the old logographers. For, in reference to Herakles, he protests against the scheme of cutting down the mythes to the level of present reality, and contends that a special standard of ultra-historical credibility ought to be constituted, so as to include the mythe in its native dimensions, and do fitting honor to the grand, beneficent, and superhuman personality of Herakles and other heroes or demi-gods. To apply to such per- sons the common measure of humanity (he says), and to cavil at the glorious picture which grateful man has drawn of them, is at once ungracious and irrational. All nice criticism into the truth of the legendary narratives is out of place : we show our reve- rence to the god by acquiescing in the incredibilities of his his- toi-y, and we must be content with the best guesses which we can make, amidst the inextricable confusion and numberless discrep*