Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 1 (Greek and Roman).djvu/204

 II. ATTIKE The body of Attic myths is a relatively late creation. Careful study of it shows that its component parts were drawn from many different local Hellenic sources and that the process of weaving them together was long; but just what this process (or processes, it may be) was, will probably never be more than the object of conjecture. It is enough to say that the evidences point to an abundance of both conscious and unconscious imitation of other bodies of myth at various periods, to a deliberate fabrication of genealogies, and to the naive issuance of stories to account for rituals whose meanings had been lost in a dark past; but it is difficult to cite with certainty even a few instances of these, for there is a great gulf, as yet only precariously bridged, between the historical cults of Attike and the earliest period of which we have any religious remains.

Kekrops.—The early genealogies were, even to the ancients, a weird tangle, containing as they did many acknowledged double appearances, not a few dummy personages, and patent inversions of time relationships. Kekrops, who was commonly accepted as the great original ancestor of the Athenians, was reputed to have been born of the soil, and was regarded as being part man and part serpent. The most recent scholarship regards him as a form of Poseidon, the sea-god, imported from the east and later identified with the native agricultural divinity Erichthonios. Kekrops became the first ruler of Attike and changed its name from Akte ("Seaboard") to Kekropia. During his reign Poseidon came to Athens and with his trident struck a spot on the summit of the Acropolis whence gushed forth a spring of salt water afterward sacred to Poseidon and known as the "Sea." Poseidon was now the supreme divinity of the kingdom, but Athene soon came and wrested the supremacy from him. To bear legal witness to her conquest she summoned Kekrops, or, as some say, the citizenry of Athens, or the circle of the Olympians; and as material evidence of her