Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/198

184 quarrel to abet, and she had her jealousy to incite her the more; for to become father of the human families Zeus must have been faithless to her. Indeed, in a passage (possibly interpolated) of the fourteenth Iliad he acts as his own Leporello, and recites the list of his conquests. The Perseidæ. the Heraclidæ, the Pirithoidæ, with Dionysus, Apollo, and Artemis spring from the amours there recounted. Moved by such passions, Hera urges on the ruin of Troy, and Zeus accuses her of a cannibal hatred. "Perchance wert thou to enter within the gates and long walls, and devour Priam raw, and Priam's sons, and all the Trojans, then mightest thou assuage thine anger." That great stumbling-block of Greek piety, the battle in which the gods take part, was explained as a physical allegory by the Neo-Platonists. It is in reality only a refraction of the wars of men, a battle produced among the heavenly folk by men's battles, as the earthly imitations of rain in the Vedic ritual beget rain from the firmament. The favouritism which Zeus throughout shows to Athene is explained by that rude and ancient myth of her birth from his brain after he had swallowed her pregnant mother.

But Zeus cannot allow the wars of the gods to go on unreproved, and he asserts his power, and threatens to cast the offenders into Tartarus, "as far beneath