f events; and thus there arose in connection with all stories
that were early told, a certain number of judgments of what was high and
admirable in human nature. These were not grounded upon philosophical or
scientific bases, but upon the bed-rock of man's experience. Out of
these judgments there grew the great ideals which from first to last
have commanded the spirit of man.

In this connection it is interesting to remember that in Homer the men
were regarded as the means of revealing ideas and characters, and not as
mere natural objects in themselves. The things among which they lived
are described and known by their appearances; the men are known by their
words and deeds. "There is no inventory of the features of men, or of
fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline or in modern
novels. Man is something different from a curious bit of workmanship
that delights the eye. He is a 'speaker of words and a doer of deeds,'
and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought and
emotion." Thus, from the first, ideas are the central and important
element. They spring from and cling to stories of individual human
lives, and the finest of them become ideals handed down for the guidance
of the future race. The myths, with their stories of gods and men, and
their implied or declared religious doctrines, are but the forms in
which these ideals find expression. The ideals remain, but the forms of
their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more
fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture.
Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,--dwelling, like Plato's, in
heaven,--and there are always two alternatives for every man. He may go
back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in
sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in
their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human
experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly
stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the
former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In
what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous
Greek legends--those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo--in the
light of what has just been stated.

Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had
fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the
later