re Zeus
resides, and the epithet is applied to his wife Here and his daughter
Helena, as well as to the dog of Odysseus, who reappears with Sarameyas
in the Veda. As for yellow hair, there is no evidence that Greeks have
ever commonly possessed it; but no other colour would do for a solar
hero, and it accordingly characterizes the entire company of them,
wherever found, while for the Trojans, or children of night, it is not
required.

A wider acquaintance with the results which have been obtained during
the past thirty years by the comparative study of languages and
mythologies would have led Mr. Gladstone to reconsider many of his views
concerning the Homeric poems, and might perhaps have led him to cut out
half or two thirds of his book as hopelessly antiquated. The chapter on
the divinities of Olympos would certainly have had to be rewritten, and
the ridiculous theory of a primeval revelation abandoned. One can hardly
preserve one's gravity when Mr. Gladstone derives Apollo from the
Hebrew Messiah, and Athene from the Logos. To accredit Homer with an
acquaintance with the doctrine of the Logos, which did not exist until
the time of Philo, and did not receive its authorized Christian form
until the middle of the second century after Christ, is certainly a
strange proceeding. We shall next perhaps be invited to believe that the
authors of the Volsunga Saga obtained the conception of Sigurd from
the "Thirty-Nine Articles." It is true that these deities, Athene and
Apollo, are wiser, purer, and more dignified, on the whole, than any
of the other divinities of the Homeric Olympos. They alone, as Mr.
Gladstone truly observes, are never deceived or frustrated. For all
Hellas, Apollo was the interpreter of futurity, and in the maid Athene
we have perhaps the highest conception of deity to which the Greek mind
had attained in the early times. In the Veda, Athene is nothing but the
dawn; but in the Greek mythology, while the merely sensuous glories of
daybreak are assigned to Eos, Athene becomes the impersonation of the
illuminating and knowledge-giving light of the sky. As the dawn, she
is daughter of Zeus, the sky, and in mythic language springs from his
forehead; but, according to the Greek conception, this imagery signifies
that she shares, more than any other deity, in the boundless wisdom
of Zeus. The knowledge of Apollo, on the other hand, is the peculiar
privilege of the sun, who, from his lofty position, sees everythi