hymns
of very great antiquity, and many of the myths are common to the other
peoples of the Pacific.[32]

Now let us turn from New Zealand to Athens, as she was in the days of
Pericles. Socrates is sitting in the porch of the King Archon, when
Euthyphro comes up and enters into conversation with the philosopher.
After some talk, Euthyphro says, 'You will think me mad when I tell
you whom I am prosecuting and pursuing!' 'Why, has the fugitive
wings?' asks Socrates. 'Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of
life!' 'Who is he?' 'My father.' 'Good heavens! you don't mean that.
What is he accused of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains
the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's
father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a
drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the
labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens
to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of
the diviner arrived, the labourer literally 'died in a ditch' of
hunger and cold. For this offence, Euthyphro was prosecuting his own
father. Socrates shows that he disapproves, and Euthyphro thus defends
the piety of his own conduct: 'The impious, whoever he may be, ought
not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most
righteous of gods? Yet even they admit that Zeus bound his own father
Cronus, because he wickedly devoured his sons; and that Cronus, too,
had punished his own father, Uranus, for a similar reason, in a
nameless manner. And yet when _I_ proceed against _my_ father, people
are angry with me. This is their inconsistent way of talking, when the
gods are concerned, and when I am concerned.'

Here Socrates breaks in. He 'cannot away with these stories about the
gods,' and so he has just been accused of impiety, the charge for
which he died. Socrates cannot believe that a god, Cronus, mutilated
his father Uranus, but Euthyphro believes the whole affair: 'I can
tell you many other things about the gods which would quite amaze
you.'[33]

* * * * *

We have here a typical example of the way in which mythology puzzled
the early philosophers of Greece. Socrates was anxious to be pious,
and to respect the most ancient traditions of the gods. Yet at the
very outset of sacred history he was met by tales of gods who
mutilated and bound their own parents. Not only were such tales
hateful t