Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/39

 DEMETER AND APOLLO. 21 the Dorians were not very likely to adopt for its own sake a merely elementary worship, which is the usual idolatry of the tillers of the soil, their national deity Apollo would of course retain his traditionary position as a sun-god; and it was quite in accordance with the usual procedure that he should supersede the coiTcsponding divinity, whom the northern tribes found esta- blished among their Pelasgian or Achaean subjects. The Dorians, when they conquered any countiy, generally introduced the wor- ship of their own gods, but they endeavoured at the same time to unite it with the religion which they found established in their settlements. Thus they adopted the elementary gods of Laconia, the Tyndaridse, taking care, however, to give their worship a mili- tary and political reference^ so as to make it coincide with the attributes of Apollo, whose office of leader of the army was trans- ferred to them. Similarly xlpollo was made the object of the Hyacinthia, an ancient festival connected with the elementary reli- gion of the aEgidse^. Now the Dorians worshipped, along with Apollo, a female form of that god, called by the same name (with of course a different termination), invested with the same attri- butes, and looked upon as his sister^ This need not sm-prise any one who has paid ordinary attention to systematic mythology ; for we constantly find in all polytheisms sets of duplicate divinities, male and female Xow this is most particularly the case with those divinities who were the a'/D^T/Yerat of the different nations. Thus there was both a Romus and a Eoma^, a Vitellius and a VitelHa^ In some instances it may be accounted for from the fact that the original division of the nation has been two-fold^: and in this way we would explain the double form of the national divinity of the Dorians ; for it appears to us that they were not always Isocr. Panath. p. 326, Bekker: Aa/ceSatyUwtoi aixeK-qa avre's yecvpyiQii' Kal rexvCov koX aXXuv a-KavTuv. "^ See Muller's Dorians, II. ch. 10, § 8, and compare our remarks in the following chapter of this Book. 2 MuUer's Dor. ii. ch. 8, § 15. 3 For instance, if Apollo was Loxias, Artemis was Loxo, if he was Hecaergos, she was Hecaerge. See Muller's Dor. 11. ch. 9, § 2, notes (m) and {x) especially. Butt- mann, Mytholog. I. p. 16. compare Thirlwall in ihePhilol. Museum, Vol. I. pp. 116, 117; and on the androgynous character of Bacchus, see Welcker on the Frogs of Aristophanes, p. 224. ^ Maiden's Borne, p. 123. ® Niebuhr, Hist. Rom. i. p. 14. ^ Xiebuhr, I. p. 287; comp, 224.
 * See Xiebuhr, Hist. Horn. I. pp. 100, 10 1. And sometimes deities of doubtful sex :