he rudiments but the continuing inspiration, so that--though entirely
superseded in worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they were
worshipped only by an easy, urbane, more than half humorous
tolerance--Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus,
Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher the
foam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our
literature, beside whom the gods of northern Europe--Odin, Thor,
Freya--are strangers, unhomely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliar
furniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though great numbers of us are
from the loins of Northmen, it is in these gracious deities of the South
that we find the familiar and the real, as from the heroes of the
sister-island, Cucullain and Concobar, we turn to Hercules, to Perseus,
to Bellerophon, even to actual men of history, saying 'Give us Leonidas,
give us Horatius, give us Regulus. These are the mighty ones we
understand, and from whom, in a direct line of tradition, we understand
Harry of Agincourt, Philip Sidney and our Nelson.'

Now since, of the Mediterranean peoples, the Hebrews discovered the
Unseen God whom the body of Western civilisation has learnt to worship;
since the Greeks invented art, philosophy, letters; since Rome found and
developed the idea of imperial government, of imperial colonies as
superseding merely fissiparous ones, of settling where she conquered
(_ubi Romanus vicit ibi habitat_) and so extending with Government that
system of law which Europe still obeys; we cannot be surprised that
Israel, Greece, Rome--each in turn--set store on a pure ancestry. Though
Christ be the veritable Son of God, his ancestry must be traced back
through his supposed father Joseph to the stem of Jesse, and so to
Abraham, father of the race. Again, as jealously as the Evangelist
claimed Jesus for a Hebrew of the Hebrews, so, if you will turn to the
"Menexenus" of Plato in the Oration of Aspasia over the dead who perished
in battle, you hear her claim that 'No Pelopes nor Cadmians, nor
Egyptians, nor Dauni, nor the rest of the crowd of born foreigners dwell
with us; but ours is the land of pure Hellenes, free from admixture.'
These proud Athenians, as you know, wore brooches in the shape of golden
grasshoppers, to signify that they were [Greek: autochthones], children
of Attica, sprung direct from her soil. And so, again, the true Roman,
while enlarging Rome's citizenship over Asia