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 ANCIENT AND MODERN MYTHICAL VEEN- 46i to strengthen it in all its various ramifications. The renewed activity of the god or hero both brought to mind and accredited the preexisting mythes connected with his name. When Boreas, during the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and in compliance with the fervent prayers of the Athenians, had sent forth a provi- dential storm, to the irreparable damage of the Persian armada, 1 the sceptical minority (alluded to by Plato), who doubted the mythe of Boreas and Oreithyia, and his close connection thus ac quired with Erechtheus, and the Erechtheids generally, must for the time have been reduced to absolute silence. CHAPTER XVII. THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE. I HAVE already remarked that the existence of that popular narrative talk, which the Germans express by the significant word Sage or Volks-Sage, in a greater or less degree of perfection or development, is a phenomenon common to almost all stages of society and to almost all quarters of the globe. It is the natural effusion of the unlettered, imaginative, and believing man, and its maximum of influence belongs to an early state of the human mind ; for the multiplication of recorded facts, the diffu- sion of positive science, and the formation of a critical standard of belief, tend to discredit its dignity and to repress its easy and 1 Herodot. vii. 189. Compare the gratitude of the Megalopolitans to Boreas for having preserved them from the attack of the Lacedaemonian king Agis (Pausan. viii. 27, 4. viii. 36, 4). When the Ten Thousand Greeks were on their retreat through the cold mountains of Armenia, Boreas blew in their faces, " parching and freezing intolerably." One of the prophets recommended that a sacrifice should be offered to him, which was done, " and the painful effect of the wind appeared to every one forthwith to cease in a marked manner;" (nal TTUOI 6fi nepi^avu; edo^e XT/^GI rd fafairbv roi icvEvnaTo<;. Xenoph. Anab. iv. 5, 3.)