called sepulchres of the gods, is unwilling even to name Osiris in reference to his death', a reluctance in which the Egyptians participated, since the slightest misapprehension of the figure leads immediately to the most revolting absurdities. Hence the vanity of the Cretans, whose real fault was the unadvised disclosure of mysterious doctrine, excited the ridicule and indignation of the other Greeks when pretending to show the sepulchre of Zeus". "The Cretans," they said, "were ever liars; all this," exclaims Callimachus", "is fiction; for thou, O father, livest for ever." And yet notwithstanding this conviction of the absolute immortality of the gods, Greece itself was full of traditional and monumental traces of Nature-worship. The story of Osiris is reflected in that of Orpheus and Dionysus Zagreus, and perhaps in the legends of Absyrtus and Pelias, of Æson, Thyestes, Melicertes, Itys, and Pelops. Io is as the disconsolate Isis, or Niobe; and Rhea mourns her dismembered lord, Hyperion, and the death of her son Helios, drowned in the Eridanus". The Titan gods had been consigned to Tartarus, and if Apollo and Dionysus are immortal, they had died under other names, as Orpheus, Linus, or Hyacinthus 13. Stories of like meaning were particularly frequent among the Greek colonies of the Euxine". Hippolytus was in many places associated in divine honours with Apollo 15; and, after he had been torn in pieces like Osiris, he was restored to life by the Paonian herbs of Diana, and kept darkling in the secret grove of Egeria 16. Even Zeus deserted Olympus to visit the Ethiopians, Apollo underwent servitude to Admetus"; Theseus,

7 Herod. ii. 61. 86. 132. 170.

• Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 78.

Diod. S. v. 77.

13

10 Lucian, de Sacrif. p. 355. Clem. Al. Protrep. p. 24. Philostr. Soph. xi. p. 565. Lucan 8, last verse.

11 Whom St. Paul calls the "prophet" Callimachus. Ep. Titus, i. 12.

12 Diod. S. iii. 57.

13 Plut. Isis and Osiris, 35. Creuzer, Symb. iv. p. 97. Cic. de N. D. Creuz.

p. 616, note.

"Müller, Orchom. 288.

15 Virg. Æn. vii. 775.

15 Comp. Buttman, Myth. ii. 145.

17 Pluto "Adamastus." Iliad, ix. 158.

Peirithous, Hercules, and other heroes, descended for a time to Hades; a dying Nature-god was exhibited in the mysteries, the Attic women fasted sitting on the ground during the Thesmophoria, and the Bæotians lamented the descent of CoraProserpina to the shades 18.

$12.

THEORY OF HEROES.

Under these circumstances it is curious to observe how the early Greek poets endeavoured to dispose of the death of the Nature-god without prejudice to his immortality. It did not suit their object to use the resource employed afterwards, as when Plutarch, relating the Osiris legend, attempts to mediate between incredulity and faith, by ascribing the stories of divine calamity to those intermediate beings of a spiritual kind who had been adopted by philosophy from an older theology. In the popular mythology there were but two kinds of beings among whom dying divinities could be placed. Prometheus, whose hard fate was lamented by the Asiatic tribes from Arabia to Scythia, had been classed among Titans. But the Titans were a race unfamiliar to the Epic, and not admitting indefinite extension, so that the most usual expedient was to suppose the sufferer whose story or tomb seemed irreconcilable with the attributes of divinity to have been a hero. The Greek heroes and demi-gods were a class of intermediate beings in direct contrast with the emanations and incarnations of the East. They had long obtained an independent place in mythology, and were popularly supposed to be deified public benefactors, or the exalted spirits of good and brave men'. This was in virtue of the doctrine of Apotheosis. In oriental theory, the

18 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 69.

1 Ps. Plut. de Plac. i. 6. “Ήρωας, τας ὑπολελειμμένας των σπουδαίων ψυχας." Diog. L. vii. 69. Comp. Plat. Meno. 81. Proclus in Plat. Cratyl. Boisson. ch. cxvii. p. 73.

universal Being descended into mortality without prejudice to his inherent godhead; with the Greek the proceeding appeared to be reversed, and it was imagined that in extraordinary cases a mortal had been elevated to superhuman rank, approaching or even rivalling that of a god. And though it would be wrong to say that emanation is wholly oriental, and personification wholly Greek, since in Indian as in Greek epos, gods act the part of men, and men reach Indra's heaven', yet it seems as if the obscurer doctrine had become less clearly understood at a distance from its reputed source, and that in Greece, where the epic system was so much more familiar than the religion of its local rites, they might almost be said to be extinct. The Egyptians are said to have paid no adoration to heroes in the Greek sense of the term'; and the Theban priests ridiculed the simplicity of the Greek traveller, who, adopting in a literal sense the ancestral character of deity, would have made the gods assume a real place in a mortal genealogy*. Both systems affected to bring humanity into an approximation with deity; but the one in a way displaying rather human vanity and ambition; the other the divine omnipresence and condescension. When the sensuous tendency of the Greek mind, rather than the premeditated device of poets and sculptors, had humanized the conception of the gods, there would be but little difficulty in assigning a modified divinity to eminent personages supposed to have once been men. The doctrine of Apotheosis was part and parcel of Greek Anthropomorphism; but the process in the former case was unconsciously read backward, and the humanized personages were popularly supposed to have been distinguished actors in the heroic or golden age. The poet, whose office consisted in describing the great deeds of the olden time (gorɛgwv nλɛa avdpwv), filled up his narrative with acts and names whose real significance had been forgotten, but which were, in reality, the gods as well as ancestors of the clans reputed to be descended from them. The national pride of the

* Lassen, Ind. Ant. i. 769. 773.

* Herod. ii. 50.

4 Herod. ii. 143.

Greeks was gratified by recollections of a time when their ancestral chiefs had been but little inferior to the deities with whom they were connected, and it was truly said that they pilfered oriental theology in order to fill up and ennoble the successions of their own patriarchal history. The earliest sort of Apotheosis was substantially a limited euhemerism; it was an application of the usual humanizing procedure to beings, who, originally divine, had obtained only a subordinate place in general estimation, either through the subjugation or absorption of the tribes by whom they were worshipped, the anomalous and scarcely intelligible character of their physical symbols, or because their theological place was already occupied under a different name by analogous personifications. Or it may be said that Apotheosis was a double process; first, the humanizing a god, and then the partial restoration of his honours. The story of the Dioscuri, whose original symbol was the two Spartan poles', might be told in two ways; it was necessary, in order to account for the buried deities of Aphidna or Therapne, to introduce into their legend something of human adventure, and the equilibrium of the conception was restored by imagining them to have revived on alternate days, and to have been immortalized by Zeus'. Dionysus and Hercules were born into the world of mortal mothers because they could not, as gods, have undergone the infirmities and sufferings imputed to them. Esculapius, too, the emanation of Apollo Pæan, or arch-chemic sun," was mortal by the mother's side, in order to supply a satisfactory basis for the story of his having been struck by the bolt of Zeus 10. For the same reason the majority of heroes, as Erechtheus, Cadmus, Iasion, and Medea", are

66

Diod. S. i. 23, at the end.

• Welcker, Tril. 171.

7 "Aoxava." Plutarch de Amor. Frat. 1. Winckelmann, Geschichte, i. 1. 8.

Welcker, Trilogie, p. 226.

Eurip. Helen. 138.

9 Iliad, iii. 243.

10 Paus. vii. 23.

solis subveniens.

Odyss. xi. 304.

Diod. S. iv. 71. Esculapius est vis salubris de substantiâ Macrob. Sat. i. 20.

"Müller, Orchom. 212. 267.

Schol. Pind. Ol. xiii. 74.

more nearly connected with the hieratic or mystic religion than with the epic, in which they perform a part inconsistent with their real character. Every case of apotheosis was presumed to be exceptional, indicating some great pre-eminence in the person so treated; yet it would have puzzled an impartial Greek to draw a distinction between the merits of Hercules and Amphiaraüs, considered as mere men, and those of Aristides and Epaminondas", or to define the circumstances which exempted the immortalized beings from the lot of their fellows. The truth is, that the heroes whose real character was half betrayed in the attributes of dio, arxileo, and nuibɛo, were themselves divine beings, or Nature-gods. The same notions, repeated and varied in endless profusion, became the inexhaustible dramatis persona of poetry; and the multitude of identical or analogous symbols so produced were a necessary result of the number of names and predicates of the Deity, or of the elements, among the many tribes whose traditions contributed to swell the general mass13.

The process which made gods become men long preceded that which transformed human beings into gods. The latter would perhaps have been impossible but for the precedent supplied by the former. It would be difficult to imagine how the Greeks, who so deeply felt the eminence and superiority of their gods, could have been otherwise induced to place men on the same level. Such a proceeding in the earlier times is incredible; and at a later period the admiration, which might have prompted the apotheosis of a cotemporary benefactor, was in great measure extinct. No local event would have so far confounded men's notions as to create such stories, or to give them currency as sacred legend; but if, among the wrecks of

12 Paus. viii. 2. 2.

13 Odin is said to have borne 12 names among the old Germans, and to have had 114 names besides. Allah is addressed in an Arab hymn under no less than 99 titles. The "myrionymy" of oriental Deities is notorious. Artemis was also called Iphigenia, Helena, Electra, Hecate, &c. Poseidon, Glaucus, and Egeon; Hades, Clymenus, Laomedon, Neleus, Admetus, Eurypylus, Polydegmon, &c.