MYTHOLOGY
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MYTHOLOGY
with him (Stesich. Frarj. in Bcrgk, 29 ; Herm. Prcpf. in Eurip. Hel. ; Bernhardy, Gesch. Griech. Lit. ii, 473). (4) The tragic poets indulged in still greater liberties. jEschylus and Sophocles, being religious believers, still respected the myths ; while Euripides, an unbeliever, cared little for them except as materials for his verse. (5) In a still later age they were mere materials for works of iwetry and art; and that a poet interwove them in his narrative is no proof that he received them as true. It must be observed, also, that in the mouth and recollection of the people myths could not remain exactly JiJced. They changed from age to age. The spot where the events were first reputed to happen had afterwards many competitors. The actors, especially the minor actors, varied. The poets chose what suited them best, or what first presented itself. Hence it hap- pens that a more antitpie form of a myth is sometimes picked out of the fragments of some obscure writer, or of some modern author like I'ausanias, who went about among the ptoiilc. or li;ul access to authorities now lost.
The main inquiry is. How did the myths arise, if neither priest nor poet, neither fraud nor conscious in- vention, was the source of the great mass of them? "When we say that they arose by the power of the im- agination looking at the world as being full of life, or by the mythologizing process, we say nothing. When we draw analogies from modern myths — as the story of Koland, or the Holy (irail, or the epic of Arthur and his Knights — or trace the marvellous alterations which the life of Alexander the (Jrcat underwent in a series of poems and prose narratives, to be found in all the languages of Europe and in some of those of Asia, we still fall short of the explanation (comp. Grote, Hist, of Greece, i, end). For in the first place there is in most of the modern myths a germ of fact, as, for instance, in the story of Koland; but the myths relating to the gods had no intrinsical, but only physical, facts for their foun- dation. When we come to the myths of the heroic times of Greece, there must have been historical events in some shape, perhaps very much distorted, out of which they grew. The machinery in the epic stories founded on these myths — in other words, the interven- tions of the gods — were conformed to a belief of an age v.-hen the material was first chosen for the songs of the rhapsodists; but the difficulty still remains how the re- ligious clement of the myths became united with the rest. It is easy enough to see that a story like that of Koland, or a tradition of a siege of Troy, possessing sources of interest for the national mind, should by and by grow in the multitude of its details, be worked over, be altered in the mouth of the pcojile or by the poets — this is what happens on a small scale every day ; but it is hard to account for the turning of celestial phenom- ena into events of history. This does not happen now. The power to do it is lost. If, for instance, the passage of the sun through tiic signs of the Zodiac — a yearly occurrence— becomes, through some faith of the ancient mind and some jiower of the imagination, the series of labors of a demigod like Ilercnlcs. struggling against monsters on the earth, and doing his work in its par- ticulars once for all, we must say tliat there is no anal- ogy for this in the present slate of the worlil. The world of physical nature and the world of history are separated now by fixed limits. How in the mytho- logical age did a fact of nature turn into a fact of his- tory? That is the great dilliculty which we encounter while speculating on mythology, and it meets us in all the fables concerning the gods of such a nation as Greece, India, or ancient (Jermany. Mythology must continue a mystery until this is explained.
In attempting a solution of a part of this problem, we must bear in mind the conception of the gods already spoken of, and the sway of the imagination looking out on the life of the world, and conceiving of it as directly originated by superhuman spiritual causes, and not as yet recognising, to the degree that we do, the control