Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/100

 The Religion of the Veda and man about town. Too finished personification causes the break-down of Greek mythology even from the artistic side. The same poets in whom we praise above all aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, those Greek poets who in general fancy and say just enough, but not too much, run a close race with the most extravagant fancies of semi-civil- ised peoples in the description of their primeval gods. Uranos was maimed by his own son, Kronos; Kronos, the unnatural son, is also an unnatural father. For he swallows his own children, and, after years of tentative but unsuccessful digestion, vomits forth the whole brood. Fair Phoebus Apollo hangs Marsyas on a tree and flays him alive. Homicide without end, parricide and murder of children are the stock events of their mythology. No wonder that Plato banished even the Homeric poems from his ideal republic. And Epicurus had to say: "The gods are indeed, but they are not as many believe them to be. Not he is an infidel who denies the gods of the many, but he that fastens upon the gods the opinions of the many." Nothing so much as the complete humanisation of Greek mythology paved the way for the rapid spread of that Shemitic religion, deeply ethical in its teachings, Judaco- Christianity, among the Indo-European peoples. You may remember how skilfully Kingsley's novel, 84