Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome | Page 3

the daily recurring phenomena,
which to us, who know them to be the result of certain well-ascertained
laws of nature, are so familiar as to excite no remark, were, to the early
Greeks, matter of grave speculation, and not unfrequently of alarm. For
instance, when they heard the awful roar of thunder, and saw vivid
flashes of lightning, accompanied by black clouds and torrents of rain,
they believed that the great god of heaven was angry, and they trembled
at his wrath. If the calm and tranquil sea became suddenly agitated, and
the crested billows rose mountains high, dashing furiously against the
rocks, and threatening destruction to all within their reach, the sea-god
was supposed to be in a furious rage. When they beheld the sky
glowing with the hues of coming day they thought that the goddess of
the dawn, with rosy fingers, was drawing aside the dark veil of night, to
allow her brother, the sun-god, to enter upon his brilliant career. Thus

personifying all the powers of nature, this very imaginative and highly
poetical nation beheld a divinity in every tree that grew, in every stream
that flowed, in the bright beams of the glorious sun, and the clear, cold
rays of the silvery moon; for them the whole universe lived and
breathed, peopled by a thousand forms of grace and beauty.
The most important of these divinities may have been something more
than the mere creations of an active and poetical imagination. They
were possibly human beings who had so distinguished themselves in
life by their preeminence over their fellow-mortals that after death they
were deified by the people among whom they lived, and the poets
touched with their magic wand the details of lives, which, in more
prosaic times, would simply have been recorded as illustrious. {10}
It is highly probable that the reputed actions of these deified beings
were commemorated by bards, who, travelling from one state to
another, celebrated their praise in song; it therefore becomes
exceedingly difficult, nay almost impossible, to separate bare facts
from the exaggerations which never fail to accompany oral traditions.
In order to exemplify this, let us suppose that Orpheus, the son of
Apollo, so renowned for his extraordinary musical powers, had existed
at the present day. We should no doubt have ranked him among the
greatest of our musicians, and honoured him as such; but the Greeks,
with their vivid imagination and poetic license, exaggerated his
remarkable gifts, and attributed to his music supernatural influence
over animate and inanimate nature. Thus we hear of wild beasts tamed,
of mighty rivers arrested in their course, and of mountains being moved
by the sweet tones of his voice. The theory here advanced may possibly
prove useful in the future, in suggesting to the reader the probable basis
of many of the extraordinary accounts we meet with in the study of
classical mythology.
And now a few words will be necessary concerning the religious beliefs
of the Romans. When the Greeks first settled in Italy they found in the
country they colonized a mythology belonging to the Celtic inhabitants,
which, according to the Greek custom of paying reverence to all gods,
known or unknown, they readily adopted, selecting and appropriating

those divinities which had the greatest affinity to their own, and thus
they formed a religious belief which naturally bore the impress of its
ancient Greek source. As the primitive Celts, however, were a less
civilized people than the Greeks, their mythology was of a more
barbarous character, and this circumstance, combined with the fact that
the Romans were not gifted with the vivid imagination of their Greek
neighbours, leaves its mark on the Roman mythology, which is far less
fertile in fanciful conceits, and deficient in all those fairy-like stories
and wonderfully poetic ideas which so strongly characterize that of the
Greeks.
* * * * *
{11}
ORIGIN OF THE WORLD.--FIRST DYNASTY.
URANUS AND GÆA. (COELUS AND TERRA.)
The ancient Greeks had several different theories with regard to the
origin of the world, but the generally accepted notion was that before
this world came into existence, there was in its place a confused mass
of shapeless elements called Chaos. These elements becoming at length
consolidated (by what means does not appear), resolved themselves
into two widely different substances, the lighter portion of which,
soaring on high, formed the sky or firmament, and constituted itself
into a vast, overarching vault, which protected the firm and solid mass
beneath.
Thus came into being the two first great primeval deities of the Greeks,
Uranus and Ge or Gæa.
Uranus, the more refined deity, represented the light and air of heaven,
possessing the distinguishing qualities of light, heat, purity, and
omnipresence, whilst Gæa, the firm, flat,[1] life-sustaining earth, was
worshipped as the great all-nourishing