made by way of silent omission. Thus most of the foulest myths of
early India are absent, and presumably were left out, in the Rig-Veda.
"The religious sentiment of the hymns, already so elevated, has
discarded most of the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded
in discarding them all."(1) Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to
avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so Homer
succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile tales about his own
gods.(2) The period of actual apology comes later. Pindar declines, as
we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana
invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not Indra, but
Trita, says the Brahmana apologetically, slew the three-headed son of
Tvashtri. "Indra assuredly was free from that sin, for he is a god,"
says the Indian apologist.(3) Yet sins which to us appear far more
monstrous than the peccadillo of killing a three-headed Brahman are
attributed freely to Indra.

(1) Les Religions de l'Inde, Barth, p. 14. See also postea, "Indian
Myths".

(2) The reasons for Homer's reticence are probably different in
different passages. Perhaps in some cases he had heard a purer version
of myth than what reached Hesiod; perhaps he sometimes purposely (like
Pindar) purified a myth; usually he must have selected, in conformity
with the noble humanity and purity of his taste, the tales that best
conformed to his ideal. He makes his deities reluctant to drag out in
dispute old scandals of their early unheroic adventures, some of which,
however, he gives, as the kicking of Hephaestus out of heaven, and the
imprisonment of Ares in a vessel of bronze. Compare Professor Jebb's
Homer, p. 83: "whatever the instinct of the great artist has tolerated,
at least it has purged these things away." that is, divine amours in
bestial form.

(3) Satapatha Brahmana, Oxford, 1882, vol. i. p. 47.

While poets could but omit a blasphemous tale or sketch an apology
in passing, it became the business of philosophers and of antiquarian
writers deliberately to "whitewash" the gods of popular religion.
Systematic explanations of the sacred stories, whether as preserved
in poetry or as told by priests, had to be provided. India had her
etymological and her legendary school of mythology.(1) Thus, while the
hymn SEEMED to tell how the Maruts were gods, "born together with the
spotted deer," the etymological interpreters explained that the wor