and
rough fetish stones, in which Pausanias found the most ancient relics of
Hellenic theology. This is a proof of their antiquity and a presumption
in favour of their freedom from foreign influence. Most of these things
were survivals from that dimly remembered prehistoric age in which the
Greeks, not yet gathered into city states, lived in villages or kraals,
or pueblos, as we should translate (Greek text omitted), if we were
speaking of African or American tribes. In that stage the early
Greeks must have lacked both the civic and the national or Panhellenic
sentiment; their political unit was the clan, which, again, answered
in part to the totem kindred of America, or Africa, or Australia.(2) In
this stagnant condition they could not have made acquaintance with the
many creeds of Semitic and other alien peoples on the shores of the
Levant.(3) It was later, when Greece had developed the city life of the
heroic age, that her adventurous sons came into close contact with Egypt
and Phoenicia.

(1) Claus, De Antiq. Form. Dianae, 6,7,16.

(2) As C. O. Muller judiciously remarks: "The scenes of nine-tenths of
the Greek myths are laid in PARTICULAR DISTRICTS OF GREECE, and they
speak of the primeval inhabitants, of the lineage and adventures of
native heroes. They manifest an accurate acquaintance with individual
localities, which, at a time when Greece was neither explored by
antiquaries, nor did geographical handbooks exist, could be possessed
only by the inhabitants of these localities." Muller gives, as examples,
myths of bears more or less divine. Scientific Mythology, pp. 14, 15.

(3) Compare Claus, De Dianae Antiquissima Natura, p. 3.

In the colonising time, still later--perhaps from 900 B.C.
downwards--the Greeks, settled on sites whence they had expelled
Sidonians or Sicanians, very naturally continued, with modifications,
the worship of such gods as they found already in possession. Like the
Romans, the Greeks easily recognised their own deities in the analogous
members of foreign polytheistic systems. Thus we can allow for alien
elements in such gods and goddesses as Zeus Asterios, as Aphrodite of
Cyprus or Eryx, or the many-breasted Ephesian Artemis, whose monstrous
form had its exact analogue among the Aztecs in that many-breasted
goddess of the maguey plant whence beer was made. To discern and
disengage the borrowed factors in the Hellenic Olympus by analysis
of divine names is a task to which compara