riches; and Saturn's throwing the mutilated members of Uranus into the sea, denotes the origin of traffic with foreign countries. We know indeed from Cicero* that Zeno interpreted the whole Theogony in a physical sense; Plato did the same to a considerable extent; and it will be remembered that the first school of Greek philosophy, the Ionian, or disciples of Thales, devoted attention almost exclusively to inquiries into the origin and history of the mundane system. These primary philosophers, who were closely linked with Hesiod and the old cosmogonic poets, were styled Quazol-physicians, or natural philosophers, by way of distinction. Lord Bacon, indeed, gives a moral or political turn to most of the fables of the Greek mythology, oftentimes with singular and gratifying propriety, sometimes with an amusing, but unsatisfactory, display of fancy alone. In general it will be seen that the stem of the mythological tree is rooted, as it were, deeply in the earth, whilst moral or political maxims form its branches, and popular fancy its blossoms and its flowers. : But a great part of this extraordinary system has also been interpreted into a shadowing forth of the very earliest Greek history. According to this view of the subject, Uranus, or Heaven, represents, collectively, the primitive government of Thessaly and of the fertile regions round about; his burying his offspring as soon as born in the recesses of the earth, means that the youthful generation were compelled to emigrate and colonize abroad; the groaning of the earth is the indignation of the exiled Thessalians—who, by an obvious parallel with the Hesiodic legend, are supposed to find iron and to forge weapons in Thrace and Epirus, with which they, headed by Saturn, cut off or remove the hostile counsellors of Uranus these last escape in ships, and, retaining their hatred of the party which had banished them, settle in various parts among the islands, and on the shores of the neighbouring countries, and subsequently assist Jupiter in his successful attack upon Saturn. Some friends of Uranus wander a long time at sea, and ultimately settle in Cyprus, and there learn the worship of Aphrodite, or Venus, which they introduce into Greece at their return. In the meantime Saturn reigns in Thessaly, and is supported by the great majority of the Titans, his brethren, the sons of Heaven and Earth, that is, a race of whose ancestors nothing was certainly known. He is disturbed, however, by a prediction of rebellion on the part of his sons, and of ultimate dethronement; and in the common course of preventive tyranny he imprisons, or, as the story runs, swallows all his children. But Fate prevails; Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon (Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune)-escape, and, by the *De Nat. Deor., i. 13. advice advice of Mother Earth, give liberty to the three Titans,-Cottus, Gyges, and Briareus, who had been heavily chained as hostile to Saturn. Jupiter, now strengthened by all the rescued and irritated descendants of Saturn, and by such of the preceding or Titanian generation, and of the still earlier race of Heaven and Earth, the native inhabitants, -as had been respectively expelled or maltreated by Saturn,-seized upon Mount Olympus, and from that place waged open war with Saturn and his Titans, whose head-quarters were on Mount Othrys. A complete victory, after a tremendous conflict, left Jupiter the undisputed master of Olympus and Thessaly. Pluto obtained Epirus, a tract rich in mines, and the sea and the islands were assigned to Neptune. Hence arose the last or Olympian dynasty, which embraced all the objects of the popular, as contradistinguished from the mysterious, religion of the Greeks, and is, we think, undoubtedly treated in the Hesiodic Theogony as consisting, in fact, of the deified chiefs and colonizers under the final settlement of the first civilized country of Greece. The three dynasties are twice distinctly marked by Eschylus.* This historical mode of interpreting the Greek mythology is in immediate connexion, or rather is identical, with the celebrated system of Euhemerus. This person was a philosopher of the Cyrenaic school, and was born either at Messene, in the Peloponnesus, or at Messina, in Sicily,-at which of the two places is doubtful. He lived in the time of Cassander, King of Macedon, by whom he was commissioned to make a voyage of discovery in the Eastern Ocean. He embarked at a port of Arabia Felix, in the Red Sea, or rather, perhaps, in the Persian Gulf, and on his return published a book called lepa avaygan, Sacred History, in which he declared that in the course of his wanderings he had touched at a certain island called Panchaia, in the capital of which, Panara, he found a temple of the Triphylian Jupiter, and in the temple a register of the births and deaths of many of the Olympian deities, inscribed on a golden column, which had been placed there, as the title announced, by Jupiter himself. He particularly specified Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, and Neptune. His system was, that these popular deities were, in truth, mere mortal men, raised to the rank of gods on account of the benefits which they had conferred on, or the power which they had acquired among mankind. Ennius translated this work, but the original and the translation are now both lost. + Callimachus, as in hymnic duty bound, bitterly reviles Euhemerus; Plutarch, who, as associated in the priesthood, is also an interested witness upon this subject, ridicules the * Prom. V. 964-7. Agam. 176—80. + Cic. De Nat. Deor. i. 42. entire narrative, and says that no one besides had ever heard of such a place as Panchaia.* It is after Euhemerus that Virgil writes, 'Totaque thuriferis Panchäia pinguis arenis.' And, after all, whether there is any truth or not in any part of this story, the important fact still remains, that at least three centuries before the Christian era, the human origination of a principal department of the popular mythology was asserted, and the assertion countenanced by men of distinguished eminence. It may be remarked, by the way, as one among the many evidences of the Hesiodic poems being subsequent in date to those of Homer, that the Nile is mentioned by that name in the catalogue of rivers said to be the offspring of Ocean and Tethys. In the Odyssey, as in the Mosaic writings, we read of Egyptus, the Egyptus river, or the river of Egypt. Spenser and Milton drew largely, in different ways, from the Theogony. The Nereids, for example, who attend at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the Faery Queene, all belong to Hesiod: 'And after these the sea-nymphs marched all, All goodly damsels, deck'd with long green hair, All which the Ocean's daughter to him bare, Light Doto, wanton Glance, and Galene glad.' Strength and Force (Kpáros-Bin) were the sons of StyxHate. Jupiter promised to preserve, to all who would assist him against Saturn and the Titans, the honours and privileges which they had enjoyed under the old dynasty, and to recompense those who had been persecuted by it. Styx, and her sons, immediately went to Olympus, and declared themselves of Jupiter's party. Hence Styx was made the oath of the gods, and Strength and Force for ever after sat by the side of Jove : According to Lord Bacon, 'Styx, an irremeable river, represents Necessity; and he says, that if loss of honour or estate must be *It has, however, been placed by some in the Red Sea; the Abbé Fourmont, in particular, maintained that Panchaia was the Isle of Panck, in the Red Sea,-Panara, the modern Pharan,—and that the three tribes who had erected the temple to Jupiter were the descendants of Ishmael, Lot, and Esau.-Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscript., tome xv. We confess we can hardly make out what the learned Abbé would be at with his geography, though we by no means incline to treat Euhemerus as a mere impostor. the the consequence of breach of covenant, the league may be said to be ratified by the sacrament of Styx, since the dread of banishment from the banquets of the gods followed; by which term were signified the laws, prerogatives, affluence and felicity of empire.' The physical interpretation is, that Styx was a fountain in Arcadia, and that the story means that the Arcadians in the vicinity of Styx, being men of great strength and courage, came among the first to the assistance of Jupiter; while the belief was that the water was of a noxious quality in itself, but might be drunk with impunity by a person swearing truly. It is supposed to have been used as a species of water ordeal. The poetical merit of the Theogony rests principally on those passages which describe the conflict between Jupiter and the Titans. If it be true, as Quinctilian says, that Hesiod rarely rises, this, at least, is one pre-eminent instance in which he has risen to the utmost height of his great argument. Here he touches, per haps overpasses, the boundary line of the grand and the terrible in poetry; he walks on the perilous ridge between the sublime and the ridiculous, and directs the storming furies of his imagination to the very confines of bombast. Yet the language of these verses is not, generally, more than adequate to the imagery, and the images arise naturally out of the general subject. But there is, undoubtedly, a giant wildness of action, a colossal magnitude of figure, which could alone be germane to such a superhuman scene as this, -in which the gods of heaven and earth close together in mortal fight, and the land, and the air, and the sea quake, and the horrible subterranean hell itself gapes wide beneath the shock of torn-up mountains, and of the furious agonies of ten thousand Titans writhing in the flames of pursuing thunderbolts. The praise of absolute originality of conception cannot, indeed, be allowed to the author of these wonderful lines: here, as in a hundred other places, the Homeric genius first hewed out a path for the enterprise of succeeding poets. The Battle of the Gods gave birth to the Battle of the Titans, and both are reproduced in the Miltonian Battle of the Angels; and if our English bard has in any part of his imagery more than rivalled either of his great originals, his occasional superiority in such respects may be more truly traced to his peculiar command of the exhaustless treasures of the holy scriptures than to any other more noble conception of the subject itself. It is worth while to compare, with critical attention, these three *Pausanias, in speaking of this fountain of Styx, uses a form of expression which distinctly implies his belief that the Theogony was not in fact genuine :-va dè τὴν Στύγα Ἡσίοδος μὲν ἐν Θεογονίᾳ ἐποίησεν· (Ησιόδου γὰρ δὴ ἔπη τὴν Θεογονίαν εἰσὶν οἱ νομίζουσι.)-Arcad. viii. sublime sublime descriptions, never forgetting-(it is a sacred duty in literature not to forget) to render to invention those primary honours which are justly due to it. In the Iliad there is a perfect picture the drawing is clear, the colouring vivid, the proportions harmonious, the effect grand and imposing in the highest degree. But a taste, which is never wanting to the genius of that poem, limited the size of the imagery,-justly foreseeing that on a stage where mortal and immortal met together, the certain consequence of magnifying the gods too much would be in equal ratio to lessen the men; and that to preserve Achilles as he really was, Mars must needs be represented as something less than he probably might be. The poet, like a very powerful and skilful boxer, struck the more temperately as the more master of himself, and, in the very whirlwind of his passion,—— Half his strength he put not forth, but check'd But another measure was lawful and appropriate in the description of a conflict where Gods and Titans (who were also gods) fought alone and by themselves, and where no human warriors interfered, in favour of whose relative importance it might be necessary to contract the stature or the force of immortal combatants. The lowering check being withdrawn, each son of Earth and Heaven moves dilated through the luminous haze of poetic imagination; man and his petty efforts are swept away, and the great legendary figuresthe primeval offspring of all the elements-stand up distinctly visible in a size proportionate to their parents. These mighty beings are marshalled in phalanx on the bosom of their mother earth; rocks and mountains uptorn by the roots are the natural missiles for them to use against their enemies; and but for thunder and the portentous force of the three allied Titans, the conflict with these enemies would have been dubious. Uncontrolled by reference to any admixture of ordinary human action, the poet of the Theogony gave unbounded licence to the shapings of a dauntless imagination; and in shaking heaven and earth, and the abysmal chaos itself, with the roar and the tumult of this tremendous battle, strained every nerve to produce, and succeeded in producing, one unsurpassable example of the gigantesque in poetry : Εἶθαρ μὲν μένεος πλῆντο φρένες· ἐκ δέ τε πᾶσαν φαΐνε βίην. The defects in Milton's copy of the Homeric and Hesiodic battles were almost unavoidably caused by the nature of his subject, so totally different in association from those of his two pagan originals. What seems probable in them, when describing a furious struggle on earth between earth-born and fleshly combatants, |