so large in custom and ritual, it is not unfair to
argue that portions of it will also be found in myths. It is now time to
discuss Greek myths of the origin of things, and decide whether they are
or are not analogous in ideas to the myths which spring from the wild
and ignorant fancy of Australians, Cahrocs, Nootkas and Bushmen.

CHAPTER X. GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS.

Nature of the evidence--Traditions of origin of the world and
man--Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths--Later evidence of historians,
dramatists, commentators--The Homeric story comparatively pure--The
story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues--The explanations of the
myth of Cronus, modern and ancient--The Orphic cosmogony--Phanes and
Prajapati--Greek myths of the origin of man--Their savage analogues.

The authorities for Greek cosmogonic myth are extremely various in date,
character and value. The most ancient texts are the Iliad and the poems
attributed to Hesiod. The Iliad, whatever its date, whatever the place
of its composition, was intended to please a noble class of warriors.
The Hesiodic poems, at least the Theogony, have clearly a didactic aim,
and the intention of presenting a systematic and orderly account of the
divine genealogies. To neither would we willingly attribute a date much
later than the ninth century of our era, but the question of the dates
of all the epic and Hesiodic poems, and even of their various parts, is
greatly disputed among scholars. Yet it is nowhere denied that, however
late the present form of some of the poems may be, they contain ideas of
extreme antiquity. Although the Homeric poems are usually considered, on
the whole, more ancient than those attributed to Hesiod,(1) it is a fact
worth remembering that the notions of the origin of things in Hesiod are
much more savage and (as we hold) much more archaic than the opinions of
Homer.

(1) Grote assigns his Theogony to circ. 750 A.D. The Thegony was taught
to boys in Greece, much as the Church Catechism and Bible are taught in
England; Aeschines in Ctesiph., 135, p. 73. Libanius, 400 years after
Christ (i. 502-509, iv. 874).

While Hesiod offers a complete theogony or genealogy of deities and
heroes, Homer gives no more than hints and allusions to the stormy past
of the gods. It is clear, however, that his conception of that past
differed considerably from the traditions of Hesiod. However we explain
it, the Homeric mythology (though itself repugnant to the