complete governmental
separation between the Underworld and the Upperworld. The Greeks, with
their joy in the present, gave comparatively little prominence to the
future (being herein sharply contrasted with the Egyptians).

+780+. The title generally given to the underground chief, Hades
(apparently 'the invisible one'), indicates the vagueness that attached
to this deity.[1347] In the Iliad he is a dark and dread divinity. The
precise significance of his title Plouton[1348] is uncertain; but under
this name he is connected in the myths with processes of vegetation--it
is Plouton who carries off Persephone, leaving the world in the deadness
of winter. The figure of the underground deity appears to have taken
shape from the combination of two mythological conceptions--the
underground fructifying forces of nature, and the assemblage of the dead
in a nether world or kingdom.[1349] His only moral significance lay in
his relation to oaths, wherein, perhaps, is an approach to the idea of a
divine judge below the earth.[1350]

+781+. The _female deities_ of the Greeks are no less elaborately worked
out than the male gods, and, like these, are types of human character
and representatives of human pursuits.[1351]

+782+. The great goddess Hera is in Homer attached especially to Argos,
Sparta, and Mycenae, but at a very early time was Pan-Hellenic. The
meaning of her name and her origin are uncertain. There is no good
ground for regarding her as having been originally a moon-goddess
(Selene was the real moon-goddess). What is certain is that she had a
special relation to women and particularly to childbirth; but such a
function is so generally attributed to some goddess that we can only
suppose that she rose to eminence through local conditions unknown to
us. The most interesting point about her is that she came to be the
representative of the respectable Greek matron, jealous of her wifely
rights, holding herself aloof from love affairs, a home person, entitled
to respect for the decency of her life, but without great womanly charm.

+783+. By a natural mythological law she was regarded as the consort of
Zeus, and gradually acquired dignity without, however, ever coming to be
a distinct embodiment of any form of intellectual or moral life. As Zeus
embodied the conception of civil and political headship, so Hera appears
to have embodied the idea of the wife as controller of the purely
domestic affairs of the family, her busi