The-mythology-of-ancient-greece-and-italy-thomas-keightley

HISTORIC VIEW. 21
mixed up with the old tales of gods and heroes ; and the fable
to be represented on the stage often varied so much from that
handed down by tradition, that, as is more especially the case
with Euripides, the poet appears at times to have found it
necessary to inform his audience in a long prologue of what
they were about to witness.
Such was -the state of the ancient mythology of Greece in
her days of greatest intellectual culture. Few of the mythes
remained unaltered. Priests, philosophers, and poets com
bined to vary, change, and modify them. The imagination
of these various classes produced new mythes, and the local
tales of foreign lands were incorporated into the Grecian
mythic cycle.
When the Ptolemies, those munificent patrons of learning,
had assembled around them at Alexandria the scholars and
the men of genius of Greece, the science of antiquity was, by
the aid of the extensive royal library, assiduously cultivated ;
and the ancient mythology soon became a favourite subject
of learned investigation. Some worked up the mythes into
poems ; others arranged them in prose narratives ; several oc
cupied themselves in the explication of them.
At this time what is named Pragmatism, or the effort to
reduce the mythes to history, began greatly to prevail8. It
is probable that this took its rise from the Egyptian priests,
who, as we may see in Herodotus, represented their gods as
having dwelt and reigned on earth b. Hecataeus of Miletus,
one of the earliest Grecian historians, would seem to have
laboured to give a rational form to the old legendsc; and we
may observe in the explanation given by Herodotus, after the
Egyptian priests, of the legend of the soothsaying pigeon of
Dodona, and in other places of that historian, a similar de
sired. This mode of rationalising was carried to a much
greater extent by Ephorus : but the work which may be re
garded as having contributed by far the most to give it vogue,
* Miiller, Proleg. 97-99. Lobeck, Aglaoph. 987. seg. Buttmann, i. 197.
b Herodotus, ii. 144.
c HecatEeus began his work in these words : " I write as it appears to me to be
true ; for the narratives of the Hellenes are very various and ridiculous, as it
seems to me." He said that Cerberos was a serpent that lay at Tjenaron,
1 Herod, ii. 54-57.