meant to represent the political and religious contests between the ancient inhabitants and the invaders. The mythology of Heracles at Thebes was, he thinks, introduced from Delphi, or by the Doric Heracleids. That he did not belong to the Cadmeian mythology, is proved by the legend of the coming of Alcmena to Thebes, and by the fact of his temples there being without the walls, a fact which is quite conclusive, as the ancient deities of a city always had their temples on or near the citadel. Returning to the Peloponnese; the adventures there, he says, may be divided into two classes, the combats with men and those with beasts. Of the former are the conquest of Pylos, Laconia and Elis, and the establishment of the Olympic games, in all of which there is a historic reference. The latter are perhaps of a symbolical nature. Many of the adventures out of Greece are to be referred to the Greek colonists of the places which are made the scene of them.

We have thus given a sketch of the theory of this most able mythologist, and there is much in it to which it is difficult to refuse assent. But we think that, like his theory of Apollo, it is too much affected by what appear to us his exaggerated idea of the influence of Doric ideas and institutions in Greece. There are, in fact, parts of the Heraclean mythology to our apprehension almost inexplicable on this hypothesis: his name too, Hera-renowned, seems quite unsuitable to a hero of the Dorians anterior to the Migration. This however may be obviated by supposing the name of the Dorian hero to have been different, and that of the Argive to have been adopted in its stead. But again, it does not seem likely that an Argive hero should be the object of persecution to the Argive goddess; on the contrary, all analogy would lead us to suppose him, from his name, to have been her favouritea. We would therefore hint as a possibility, that the original Heracles was the conception of a Peloponnesian herob, who, in obedience to the great goddess of the country (the goddess of the

a All the compounds of this form seem to be in a good sense. Such are Sophocles, Agathocles, Callicles, Hierocles, Themistocles, Eucles. Diocles, Hermocles, Theocles, seem to intimate the divine favour.

b Heracles, son of the Strong-one (Alcmena) by Zeus-Amphitryôn (Wearer-out or Vanquisher).

earth), cleared it of the noxious animals that infested it, and, it may be, went on toilsome journeys to distant regions to bring home cattle and plants to adorn and improve it; but that when he was identified with the Doric hero a new series of adventures was devised for him, and he was made the object of the persecution instead of the favour of the Argive goddess. We do not think that the identification with Melcart had much influence beyond that of localising some of the legends, such as that of Geryoneus.

In the Homeric poems there is, as we have seen, frequent mention of Heracles; and in the Theogony his birth at Thebes, his combats with the Nemean lion, the hydra and Geryoneus, his release of Prometheus and marriage with Hebe, are noticed. In the Eoiæ the conquest of Pylos and other events were recorded; the Shield relates the combat with Cycnos; and the Ægimios and Wedding of Ceyx, ascribed to Hesiod, contained adventures of this hero. Of the age of these poems however we can only make a conjecture; for it is well known that some of the Hesiodic poems, as they are called, come down even below the thirtieth Olympiad. Cinathos of Lacedæmôn, who flourished about the fifth Olympiad, composed a Heracleia, and Peisander of Cameiros (about Ol. 33.) another very celebrated one; Stesichorus of Himera (Ol. 48.) also composed a lyric poem named the Geryoneïs, on the expedition to Erytheia; Panyasis of Samos (Ol. 72.) wrote a Heracleia in fourteen books, containing nearly as many verses as the Odyssey.

Pherecydes, Hellanicus and Hecatæus all gave the adventures of Heracles a place in their works; and Herodorus of Heracleia on the Pontus, a contemporary of Socrates, composed a long Heracleia in prose. The Attic tragedians also introduced Heracles into their dramas; and as they viewed him as a Boeotian, his character was treated with but little ceremony on some occasions. Apollodorus and Diodorus relate the adventures of this hero; they were also the subjects of the verses of the Alexandrian and the Latin poets.

CHAPTER V.

MYTHES OF ATTICA.

Kékpof. Cecrops.

OGYGES, in whose time the Bootic flood is placed, is said by some to have been the first who reigned over Attica and Boeotia: his son Eleusinos was the founder of Eleusis.

But in general Cecrops is held to have been the first who ruled over the country called Cecropia from him, and Attica from its peninsular form. He is said by mythologists to have been an autochthôn, i. e. one who came from no foreign country, but was born in, and as it were from, the land; and, like autochthones in general, to have had a body composed of those of a man and a snake. In his time the gods began to choose cities for themselves; and Poseidôn and Athena both fixed on Athens. The former came and struck the middle of the future Acropolis with his trident, and formed the well of salt water in the Erichtheion; Athena then came, and making Cecrops witness of her taking possession, planted the olive which stood in the Pandrosion. Twelve gods sat to decide the cause; and on the testimony of Cecrops, they adjudged the place to Athena. She named the city from herself, and Poseidôn testified his anger by laying the Thriasian plain under water a.

Cecrops married Agraulos the daughter of Actæos, who bore him a son Erysichthôn, and three daughters, Agraulos, Herse, and Pandrosos. Erysichthôn died without children; Agraulos had by Ares a daughter named Alcippeb, and Herse by Hermes a son named Cephalose.

One of the earliest events recorded in modern histories of Greece is the coming of Cecrops, at the head of a colony, from

a Apollod. iii. 14. For other marks of the vengeance of this god, see Sch. Aristoph. Eccles. 473. Varro, Fr. p. 360. (Bip.)

b Above, p. 107.

e Above, p. 164.

Saïs in Lower Egypt to Attica, where he civilised the rude aborigines, gave them religion, marriage, and other social institutions, and taught them to cultivate corn for their subsistence. This remarkable event is placed, on the authority of the Parian Chronicle, B.c. 1582.

It may therefore seem strange that Cecrops should apparently have been utterly unknown to Homer and Hesiod; that the cyclic and the lyric poets do not speak of him; that the logographers, and their follower Apollodorus, seem ignorant of his Egyptian birth; that the same should be the case with the dramatists; and that Herodotus should speak of the Athena of Saïs and of the Attic Cecrops without giving the slightest hint of any connexion between them. Plato is, in fact, the first who intimates it; the priests of Saïs, he says, informed Solon out of their temple-archives that the goddess Neïth or Athena was the founder of both their cities, but that Athens was the elder by one thousand years. When in those remote ages the people of the isle Atlantis invaded the countries within the Pillars of Heracles, the Athenians bravely repelled them; and in the war Cecrops, Erechtheus, Erichthonios and Erysichthôn distinguished themselves a.

We should think it hardly necessary to inform the reader that the whole story of the Atlantis, and everything relating to it, is as pure a fiction as the Utopia or any other political romance, and that Plato makes in it the same use of Solôn that he does of Socrates on other occasions. At all events he gives not the slightest hint of Cecrops being an Egyptian, but rather the very reverse. Elsewhere he states the genuine Athenian creed of his day. "Neither a Pelops nor a Danaos, nor a Cadmos, nor an Ægyptos, nor any other, who, being originally a Barbarian, has been naturalised among the Hellenes, has settled among us. We are of pure Hellenic blood, no mixed people, and thence the hatred of foreign manners and customs is especially implanted in our city"."

The first notice of the Egyptian origin of the Athenians ap

Menexenus, 245.

Isocrates (Enc. Hel. 20. Panath. 19.) omits Cecrops in his list of Athenian kings; and he speaks (Panath. 258.) of the Athenian autochthony in the same manner as Plato. See also Euripides Fr. Erechtheus, i. 7. seq.

peared in a work which went under the name of Theopompus, but which was a forgery intended to injure him. It was named Tρikápavos, and it attacked the traditions and history of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. On the other hand Callistratus and Phanodemus maintained that Saïs was colonised from Athens. In the time of the Ptolemies it became the fashion to regard the Egyptians as the colonisers of half the world. Still it is only in an imperfect fragment of Diodorus and in Scholia that the Egyptian Cecrops occurs. Few then, we think, will now dissent from the following judgement: "The derivation of Cecrops from Saïs is a historic sophism and no mythea"

Cecrops then is purely an ideal being, and the names of his family all relate to agriculture and to the worship of the tutelar deity of Athens. Thus he is married to Field-dwelling (Agraulos), the daughter of the land (Actæos). He has one son, Mildew (Erysichthôn), who dies childless and before himself; and three daughters, Field-dwelling (Agraulos), All-dew (Pandrosos) and Dew (Herse). The first bears a daughter, Strongmare (Alcippe), to the god of war; the third a son, Shady (Cephalos), to the rural deity Hermes. There were temples of both Agraulos and Pandrosos at Athens; and, as Athena herself was called by these names, they were probably only personifications of her epithets. As Herse and Pandrosos are the same in signification, it is probable that, like the Athenian Graces and Seasons, the Cecropides were only two originally. There only remains to be explained the name Cecrops or Cercops; and when we recollect that the ancient Athenians wore golden tettiges or tree-hoppers in their hair to signify their autochthony, as it was said, and that a species of this insect was named керкάжη, we have perhaps the simple origin of Cecrops.

a See Müller, Orchom. 106. seq. Proleg. 175. Voss. Myth. Br. iii. 180. seq. b Sch. Aristoph. Lys. 439. Harpocrat. v. "Aypavλos.

The Erechtheides Protogeneia and Pandora formed another pair.

4 Mr. Kenrick, in his ingenious Essay on the Mythic Kings of Attica, in the Philological Museum (ii. 357.), thinks that the original form was Kpéro from kρékw.