E
consider abominable fictions? In what state were the people who could
not look at the pure processes of Nature without being reminded of
the most hideous and unnatural offences? Once more: "The physical
interpreters do not even agree in their physical interpretations". All
these are equally facile, equally plausible, and equally incapable of
proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the interpreters take for granted in the
makers of the myths an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly
did not possess. For example, if Leto were only another name for Hera,
the character of Zeus would be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is
concerned. Now, the ancient believers in the "physical phenomena theory"
of myths made out that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was really the same
person under another name as Leto, his mistress. "For Hera is the earth"
(they said at other times that Hera was the air), "and Leto is the
night; but night is only the shadow of the earth, and therefore Leto
is only the shadow of Hera." It was easy, however, to prove that this
scientific view of night as the shadow of earth was not likely to be
known to myth-makers, who regarded "swift Night" as an actual person.
Plutarch, too, had an abstruse theory to explain the legend about the
dummy wife,--a log of oak-wood, which Zeus pretended to marry when at
variance with Hera.(1)

(1) Pausanias, ix. 31.

This quarrel, he said, was merely the confusion and strife of elements.
Zeus was heat, Hera was cold (she had already been explained as earth
and air), the dummy wife of oak-wood was a tree that emerged after a
flood, and so forth. Of course, there was no evidence that mythopoeic
men held Plutarchian theories of heat and cold and the conflict of
the elements; besides, as Eusebius pointed out, Hera had already been
defined once as an allegory of wedded life, and once as the earth, and
again as the air, and it was rather too late to assert that she was also
the cold and watery element in the world. As for his own explanation of
the myths, Eusebius holds that they descend from a period when men in
their lawless barbarism knew no better than to tell such tales. "Ancient
folk, in the exceeding savagery of their lives, made no account of God,
the universal Creator (here Eusebius is probably wrong)... but betook
them to all manner of abominations. For the laws of decent existence
were not yet established, nor was any settled and peaceful state
ordained among men, but