ad large
commercial dealings with the people of Tyre and Sidon. In the matter of
religion they were comparatively free and unrestrained. Their deities,
though, in myth, capricious in character, might be regarded in many
ways as "making for righteousness". They protected the stranger and the
suppliant; they sanctioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned
arrows; marriage and domestic life were guarded by their good-will;
they dispensed good and evil fortune, to be accepted with humility and
resignation among mortals.

The patriarchal head of each family performed the sacrifices for his
household, the king for the state, the ruler of Mycenae, Agamemnon, for
the whole Achaean host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same
time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable influence,
due partly to an hereditary gift of second-sight, as in the case of
Theoclymenus,(1) partly to acquired professional skill in observing
omens, partly to the direct inspiration of the gods. The oracle at
Delphi, or, as it is called by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, and
religion recognised, in various degrees, all the gods familiar to the
later cult of Hellas. In a people so advanced, so much in contact with
foreign races and foreign ideas, and so wonderfully gifted by nature
with keen intellect and perfect taste, it is natural to expect, if
anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive elements, and almost
purged of all that we regard as survivals from the condition of
savagery. But while Greek mythology is richer far than any other in
beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and majestic forms of
gods and goddesses, nymphs and oreads ideally fair, none the less a very
large proportion of its legends is practically on a level with the myths
of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen.

(1) Odyssey, xx. 354.

This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all times excited
most curiosity, and has been made the subject of many systems of
interpretation. The Greeks themselves, from almost the earliest
historical ages, were deeply concerned either to veil or explain
away the blasphemous horrors of their own "sacred chapters," poetic
traditions and temple legends. We endeavour to account for these
as relics of an age of barbarism lying very far behind the time of
Homer--an age when the ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or more
probably developed for themselves, the kind of myths by which savage
peoples endea