the latter sprang Nestor who connects
the Pre-Trojan and Trojan ages, since he appears both in the Iliad
and Odyssey. In the Third Book of the latter epos we have already
seen Nestor sacrificing to his divine ancestor; so the present
passage has its pertinence to the total poem. In the same group are
Antiope and Alemena, the latter of whom was the mother of Hercules,
whose father was Zeus. At the end of the present Book, Hercules
himself will appear as the supreme example of the Greek Hero.

Such were three typical mothers, famed in Hellenic legend, being
the women who bore Heroes, the offspring of Gods. It was deemed the
highest function of the Greek mother to bring forth a Hero, the
child of divinity, with an immortal portion. This view, in its
purely sensuous aspect, is dubious enough to the modern ethical
mind, still its real meaning must be looked at with sympathetic
vision, which sees therein the divine descent into mortal flesh, a
mythical utterance of the faith that the great man is the son of
God. The Christian view universalizes this conception, holding that
all men, and not merely the Heroes, are God's children. Yet the
Christian world has also retained its faith in the Son of God, son
by a mortal woman, which faith the old Greek had too, and expressed
in his way. Thus we may extract out of this Homeric account
something more than divine license; it has indeed a wonderful
pre-Christian suggestiveness, and gives a glimpse of the movement
of Universal Religion.

The second group of famous mothers are mortal women with mortal
husbands. The wedded wife brings up now the domestic relation,
which is passingly introduced by the spouse of Hercules, Megara,
who is simply mentioned. The two chief women of the group are
Epicaste and Chloris, the one supremely tragic in her motherhood,
the other reasonably happy. Epicaste is mother of OEdipus, who
marries her after slaying his own father who is her husband, both
deeds being done in ignorance; thus the closest domestic ties are
whelmed into guilt and tragedy, whereof Sophocles has made a
world-famous use, in his two dramas on the subject of OEdipus.
Chloris is, on the contrary, the mother of Nestor, not a tragic
character by any means; also she is mother of Pero, the beautiful
maiden, "whom all the people around were wooing," an