elf
half doubting its own existence.

But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own
immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of
him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be
disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of
their genius. The singleness of their structure--the unity of
design--the distinctness of drawing in the characters--the inimitable
peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious
question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both
Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at
least each of them singly the work of one.

Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they
may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what
slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of
Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical
allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical
one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the
entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early
thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this
time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the
philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the
stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never
assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to
the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.
The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.
With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the
old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later
in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was
the OEtolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before
he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of
Atreus, and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with
appearance of certainty,[Y] are humanised stories of the physical
struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and
darkness, night and day, winter and summer.

And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no
substantial basis for these tale