Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/41

Rh it. If, again, this corrupting process had for its cause a moral corruption going on in the hearts and lives of men, then this corruption would be intensified in proportion to the degree in which the original revelation was overlaid. In the Hellenic mythology this process is reversed. Even as it appears in the poems which we call Homeric it must have undergone a developement of centuries; but if it is impossible to measure, by any reference to an older Greek literature, the personality and attributes of each god as compared with the conceptions of a previous age, it is obvious that the general tone of feeling and action, and the popular standard of morality had not been debased with the growth of their mythology. Whether the Hesiodic poems belong to a later period than our Iliad and Odyssey is a question into which it is unnecessary here to enter: but it must be admitted that if their theology is more systematised, and their theogony more repulsive, their morality and philosophy is immeasurably higher and more true. With the growth of a mythology and its more systematic arrangement the perception of moral truth has become more keen and intense; and the same age which listened to the book of the generations of Zeus, Kronos, and Aphroditê, learnt wisdom from the pensive precepts of the "Works and Days."

It is perhaps difficult to determine how far the characters of Phoibos and Athênê have been drawn out and systematised by the genius and moral instinct of the poet himself. We have no evidence, in any extant literature, of the precise state in which he found the national mythology; but it seems unlikely that he had what may be termed a theological authority for every statement which he makes and every attribute which he assigns to the one or the other. It is certain that Athênê once conspired against the freedom of Zeus; but we cannot tell how far the poet himself intensified the general harmony of her will to that of the King of gods and men, nor can we forget that Ushas is as dear to gods and men as Athênê herself, and that Ushas is undeniably nothing but the morning. But language has furnished evidence, which it is impossible to resist, of the gradual process which imparted to these mythical deities both their personality and their attributes. The literature of another branch of the same Aryan race exhibits a mythology whose substantial identity with that of the Greeks it is impossible to dispute; but in that mythology beings, whose personality in our Homeric poems is sharply drawn and whose attributes are strictly defined, are still dim and shadowy. Even the great Olympian king has not received the passions and appetites, and certainly not the form of man. Nay, in that older mythology their