again, turned not only the gods, but the Homeric heroes into "elemental combinations and physical agencies"; for there is nothing new in the mythological philosophy recently popular, which saw the sun, and the cloud, and the wind in Achilles, Athene, and Hermes.(1)
(1) Grote, Hist, of Greece, ed. 1869, i. p. 404.
In the Bacchae (291–297), Euripides puts another of the mythological systems of his own time into the mouth of Cadmus, the Theban king, who advances a philological explanation of the story that Dionysus was sewn up in the thigh of Zeus. The most famous of the later theories was that of Euhemerus (316 B.C.). In a kind of philosophical romance, Euhemerus declared that he had sailed to some No-man's-land, Panchaea, where he found the verity about mythical times engraved on pillars of bronze. This truth he published in the Sacra Historia, where he rationalised the fables, averring that the gods had been men, and that the myths were exaggerated and distorted records of facts. (See Eusebius, Praep. E., ii 55.) The Abbe Banier (La Mythologie expliquee par l'Histoire, Paris, 1738, vol. ii. p. 218) attempts the defence of Euhemerus, whom most of the ancients regarded as an atheist. There was an element of truth in his romantic hypothesis.(1)
(1) See Block, Euhemere et sa Doctrine, Mons, 1876.
Sometimes the old stories were said to conceal a moral, sometimes a physical, sometimes a mystical or Neo-platonic sort of meaning. As every apologist interpreted the legends in his own fashion, the interpretations usually disagreed and killed each other. Just as one modern mythologist sees the wind in Aeetes and the dawn in Medea, while another of the same school believes, on equally good evidence, that both Aeetes and Medea are the moon, so writers like Porphyry (270 AD) and Plutarch (60 AD) made the ancient deities types of their own favourite doctrines, whatever these might happen to be.
When Christianity became powerful, the Christian writers naturally attacked heathen religion where it was most vulnerable, on the side of the myths, and of the mysteries which were dramatic representations of the myths. "Pretty gods you worship," said the Fathers, in effect, "homicides, adulterers, bulls, bears, mice, ants, and what not." The heathen apologists for the old religion were thus driven in the early ages of Christianity to various methods of explaining away the myths of their discredited religion.
The early Christian writers very easily, and with considerable argumentative power, disposed of the apologies for the myths advanced by Porphyry and Plutarch. Thus Eusebius in the Praeparatio Evangelica first attacks the Egyptian interpretations of their own bestial or semi-bestial gods. He shows that the various interpretations destroy each other, and goes on to point out that Greek myth is in essence only a veneered and varnished version of the faith of Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of humour, the old theories which resolved so many mythical heroes into the sun; he shows that while one system is contented to regard Zeus as mere fire and air, another system recognises in him the higher reason, while Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and Asclepius, father and child, are all indifferently the sun.
Granting that the myth-makers were only constructing physical allegories, why did they wrap them up, asks Eusebius, in what WE consider abominable fictions? In what state were the people who could not look at the pure processes of Nature without being reminded of the most hideous and unnatural offences? Once more: "The physical interpreters do not even agree in their physical interpretations". All these are equally facile, equally plausible, and equally incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For example, if Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of Zeus would be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned. Now, the ancient believers in the "physical phenomena theory" of myths made out that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was really the same person under another name as Leto, his mistress. "For Hera is the earth" (they said at other times that Hera was the air), "and Leto is the night; but night is only the shadow of the earth, and therefore Leto is only the shadow of Hera." It was easy, however, to prove that this scientific view of night as the shadow of earth was not likely to be known to myth-makers, who regarded "swift Night" as an actual person. Plutarch, too, had an abstruse theory to explain the legend about the dummy wife—a log of oak-wood, which Zeus pretended to marry when at variance with Hera.(1)
(1) Pausanias, ix. 31.
This quarrel, he said, was merely the confusion and strife of elements. Zeus was heat, Hera was cold (she had already been explained as earth and air), the dummy wife of oak-wood was a tree that emerged after a flood, and so forth. Of course, there was no evidence that mythopoeic men held Plutarchian theories of heat and cold and the conflict of the elements; besides, as Eusebius pointed out, Hera had already been defined once as an allegory of wedded life, and once as the earth, and again as the air, and it was rather too late to assert that she was also the cold and watery element in the world. As for his own explanation of the myths, Eusebius holds that they descend from a period when men in their lawless barbarism knew no better than to tell such tales. "Ancient folk, in the exceeding savagery of their lives, made no account of God, the universal Creator (here Eusebius is probably wrong) … but betook them to all manner of abominations. For the laws of decent existence were not yet established, nor was any settled and peaceful state ordained among men, but only a loose and savage fashion of wandering life, while, as beasts irrational, they cared for no more than to fill their bellies, being in a manner without God in the world." Growing a little more civilised, men, according to Eusebius, sought after something divine, which they found in the heavenly bodies. Later, they fell to worshipping living persons, especially "medicine men" and conjurors, and continued to worship them even after their decease, so that Greek temples are really tombs of the dead.(1) Finally, the civilised ancients, with a conservative reluctance to abandon their old myths (Greek text omitted), invented for them moral or physical explanations, like those of Plutarch and others, earlier and later.(2)
(1) Praep. E., ii. 5.
(2) Ibid., 6,19.
As Eusebius, like Clemens of Alexandria, Arnobius, and the other early Christian disputants, had no prejudice in favour of Hellenic mythology, and no sentimental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin of its impurities was pure, he found his way almost to the theory of the irrational element in mythology which we propose to offer.
Even to sketch the history of mythological hypothesis in modern times would require a book to itself. It must suffice here to indicate the various lines which speculation as to mythology has pursued.
All interpretations of myth have been formed in accordance with the ideas prevalent in the time of the interpreters. The early Greek physicists thought that mythopoeic men had been physicists. Aristotle hints that they were (like himself) political philosophers.(1) Neo-platonists sought in the myths for Neo-platonism; most Christians (unlike Eusebius) either sided with Euhemerus, or found in myth the inventions of devils, or a tarnished and distorted memory of the Biblical revelation.
(1) Met., xi. 8,19.
This was the theory, for example, of good old Jacob Bryant, who saw everywhere memories of the Noachian deluge and proofs of the correctness of Old Testament ethnology.(1)
(1) Bryant, A New System, wherein an Attempt is made to Divest Tradition of Fable, 1774.
Much the same attempt to find the Biblical truth at the bottom of savage and ancient fable has been recently made by the late M. Lenormant, a Catholic scholar.(1)
(1) Les Origines de l'Histoire d'apres le Bible, 1880–1884.
In the beginning of the present century Germany turned her attention to mythology. As usual, men's ideas were biassed by the general nature of their opinions. In a pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer sought to find SYMBOLS of some pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths and mysteries of Greece. Certainly the Greeks of the philosophical period explained their own myths as symbols of higher things, but the explanation
