This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ...equally have meant that, whether you had been told that the new inhabitants were made of ants, or sticks, or leaves, or dust. But what you have to discern, in any of the myths that have long dwelt in human thought, is not, what fact they represented, but what colour they were intended to give to it. You have ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ...equally have meant that, whether you had been told that the new inhabitants were made of ants, or sticks, or leaves, or dust. But what you have to discern, in any of the myths that have long dwelt in human thought, is not, what fact they represented, but what colour they were intended to give to it. You have all the Deucalionidae of the earth made of stones; they being, in the sum of them, little more than that--the mob of common men being as the shingle to the wave. You have the warrior-race of Thebes made of dragon's teeth. You have the commercial race1 of Aegina made of ants. And out of this industrial race, governed by strict justice, you have at last a warrior strength better than that at Thebes; the chief strength of Greece; a Peleus, noble 1 Mores, quos ante gerebant, Nunc quoque habent; parcumque genus, patiensque laborum Quiesitique tenax, et qui quaesita reservant. Ovid, Met. VII. 655. enough to have granted to him for wife the sea-goddess whom the immortals dared not wed, lest they should be dethroned by their children; and from them descended the chief soldier among men:1--" among men," I say, as distinguished from the half divine hero-nature of the Dioscuri, or Herakles; until at last the myth changes gradually into a literal historic truth, and you read that--in the fight of Salamis. 18. And now I must pass--too sharply, but necessarily--to quite another piece of mythology. We all recognise the importance, not only in the Greek mind, but in every subsequent conception, of the three great Titan Goddesses, Rhea, Themis, and Mnemosune. In a less degree we also acknowledge the powers The allusions may be made clearer by drawing out the genealogy of the Aeacidae: --Zeus = Aegina, daughter of Asopus. Aeacus = Endeis, daughter of...
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