ally eponymous;
the tendency in all ancient peoples was to refer their names and origins
to single persons. Such an eponym was the product of imagination, a
genealogical myth (Hellen, Ion, Dorus, Jacob, Israel), and was revered,
but was not always the object of a religious cult; such cults do not
appear among the Semites[658] or in the native Roman rites. Nor does the
custom seem to have originated in the earliest periods; it was rather a
creation of quasi-scientific reflection, the demand for definite
historical organization, and it appears first in relatively late
literary monuments.[659]

+357+. Still later arose the worship of these ancestral founders. In
Greece shrines were erected by various cities to their supposed
founders, and where, as in Athens, the tribes had their eponyms, these
received divine worship, though they never attained equal rank with the
gods proper. From Greece this cult was brought into Italy. It was
probably under Greek influence, and at a relatively late time, that
Romulus was created, made the immediate founder of Rome, and took his
place among the objects of worship;[660] on the other hand, AEneas (a
Greek importation), though he was accepted as original founder, never
received divine worship, doubtless because Romulus (nearer in name to
the city Roma) already held the position of divine patron. The cult of
eponyms tended naturally to coalesce with that of divine
'heroes'[661]--the two figures were alike in character, differing mainly
in function, and eponyms were styled 'heroes.'[662]

+358+. The inverse process, the reduction of divine beings to simple
human proportions, has gone on in early cults and in early attempts at
historical construction to a not inconsiderable degree. Thus, to take a
relatively late example, by Saxo Grammaticus and in the Heimskringla
(both of the thirteenth century) the god Odin is made into a human king
and the history of his exploits is given in detail.[663] It is, however,
especially in the treatment of the old divine heroes, originally true
gods, that the process of dedivinization appears. These figures, because
of their local character and for other reasons, entered into peculiarly
close relations with human societies, of which they thus tended to
become constituent parts, and the same feeling that gave the gods human
shapes converted the heroes into mere men, who are generally
reconstructers of society. Examples of this sort of anthropomorphizing
are fo