Nothing remains, according to our plan, but to say a few words on the explanations of the myths of heathen- dom, especially by the ancients. Great difficulties and uncertainties attend such explanations, because in A-ery many cases the myths are not homogeneous, and be- cause the minds that created them were in a condition
unlike our own. To the Greeks especially this was a subject of deep interest, and a number of solutions Avere offered ; most of which were unsuccessful, because the Greeks of a historic and philosophic age could not com- prehend their own remote ancestors. The spirit to at- tempt such solutions began perhaps in scepticism, and especially in moral revolt from the low conceptions of the mythology. Xenophanes, the founder of the early Eleatic school, more than five hundred years before Christ, says, in an extant fragment of a poem, that "Homer and Hesiod ascribed everything to the gods that was shameful and blamable among men, as to steal, commit adultery, and deceive one another;" and, in an- other place, that " those who say the gods are born are equally impious with those who say that they die." He also inveighed against the anthropomorphisms of mythology, and rejected a plurality of gods (comp. Nii- gelsbach,' Post koni. Theol. p. 428). Such utterances so early could not but meet with responses. The race was not ready to give up its faith in the only divinities known to it ; some compromise was therefore necessary ; and even the sceptics felt themselves bound to account for the series of events in the mythological times, and for the belief in the gods itself One of the explana- tions was the historical. Thus Hecatseus of Miletus (about B.C. 520) taught that the myth of Cerberus owed its origin to a poisonous snake lying by the great cavern of Ttenarum, in Southern Laconia, which was accounted an opening into the subterranean world. He- rodorus of Heraclea turned Atlas into an astrologer and Prometheus into a Scythian king, who was troubled by a river gnawing away, so to speak, the fat of his land by its floods, but was freed from the plague by Hercules changing the course of the stream. The river was called the Aetus, or eagle river, whence the fable of the eagle consuming the liver of Prometheus (see Lobeck, Agla- oph. ii, 987 sq.). So Herodotus mentions a version of the story of lo, which made her the daughter of the king of Argos, whereas modern students of mythology regard her as one of the forms of the moon-goddess. This method reminds us of the older rationahsts— Pau- lus, for instance— who nibbled at the supernatural with- out daring to deny it, and are now deservedly almost forgotten. The gods themselves, however, were not as yet explained away.
A new form of the historical interpretation appeared in the 3d century B.C., which is called, after the name of its founder, Euemerus (Euhemerus, Evemerus), a Si- cilian Greek of jNIessene, who enjoyed the acquaintance of Cassander (ob. 296 B.C.). This man published a book called Sacred Records, which claimed to give au- thentic accounts of Zeus and other gods, drawn from sacred titles and inscriptions found in the most ancient temples, and especially in one of Zeus Triphylius, on an Indian island called "Panchasa. His theory was that the gods were deceased men deified : " Great personages in the confusions of uncivilized life, being desirous of obtaining from the common mass of men greater admira- tion and respect, feigned that they had a certain extraor- dinary and divine power, on which account they were thought by the multitude to be gods." We have near- ly followed the words of Sextus Empiricus (ix, 7, p. 394, ed. Bekker). Lactantius {Inst, i, § 2) says that Eue- merus stated that Zeus lived on Mount Olympus, and was much resorted to for the settlement of disputes by those who had found out anything new and useful to society. The poet Ennius translated this book into Latin, and, although Cicero speaks of it (De Kat. Deor. i, 42, 118) as entirely overthrowing religion, it had great currency as a rational account of the religious system. It was accepted by some of the Christian fa- thers, and a theory of polytheism somewhat like it was advocated by some of the scholars two centuries ago. Euemerus was without question a forger of records ; but the theory found favor (1) because some of the old fa- bles spoke of the birth and reign of Zeus in Crete, and even of his death and burial, and so also of the death
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of other gods; (2) because the interval between gods and men in (ireek polytheism was not very wide, and was almost obliterated by the bestowal of divine honors on such men as Alexander the Great. Heathenism destroyed itself just by destroying all essential differen- ces between tlie divine and the human. (3) Although the man does not seem to have been an atheist, it was a convenient theory for getting rid of the popular gods, now offensive to ])hilosophy and morality (comp. Hoeck, Cre/a, in, :i->i), 337).
The phijskul explanation was forced upon the minds of thinking men by noticing the veneration paid to licaveiily bodies, the earth, and the elements, in almost all nations. Tliis was obvious enough in the religions of riKcnicia and Egypt. The great mother, or Cybele, the leading divinity of Asia Minor, was the earth-god- dess, according to a generally received interpretation which Lucretius (ii, GUI sq.) gives at large. Etymol- ogy was used in the service of this theorA'. A Roman could hardly fail to perceive the connection between Ju- jiitor or Diespiter (Jovis or Diovis) and divum, the clear, iiroad heaven, or sky; or to notice that the phrases sub ./ore and sub Dico are identical in sense. The poet Enniiis, in a line cited by Cicero, says, "Look on this bright space on high which all invoke as Jove." The ])aiitluistic ]]liiIos(iphy of the Stoics adopted this ex- planation of the objects of popular religion. Varro, who was a Stoic, thought that the authors of religion in the old time believed in a world-soul, and that the princi- pal gods were symbolical of the principal portions of the world. Jupiter was heaven, and branclied out into various manifestations, while the female jirincipal was airth under many names. The Stoics sup])orted their philosophy by etymologies as worthless. Saturnus, or Time, is so called because it is saturated (satur), so to speak, with years. He swallowed his children, which means that duration consumes the spaces of time, and is tilled with times past, without being full.