to believe--all this about Hercules, without any latent moral or history
whatever. And it is very necessary, in reading traditions of this kind,
to determine, first of all, whether you are listening to a simple person,
who is relating what, at all events, he believes to be true, (and may,
therefore, possibly have been so to some extent), or to a reserved
philosopher, who is veiling a theory of the universe under the grotesque
of a fairy tale. It is, in general, more likely that the first
supposition should be the right one: simple and credulous persons are,
perhaps fortunately, more common than philosophers; and it is of the
highest importance that you should take their innocent testimony as it
was meant, and not efface, under the graceful explanation which your
cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence their story may
contain (such as it is worth) of an extraordinary event having really
taken place, or the unquestionable light which it will cast upon the
character of the person by whom it was frankly believed. And to deal
with Greek religion honestly, you must at once understand that this
literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply rooted
as ours in the legends of our own sacred book; and that a basis of
unmiraculous event was as little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism
as rarely traced, by them, as by us.

You must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade the position which
such a myth as that just referred to occupied in the Greek mind, by
comparing it (for fear of offending you) to our story of St. George and
the Dragon. Still, the analogy is perfect in minor respects; and though
it fails to give you any notion of the Greek faith, it will exactly
illustrate the manner in which faith laid hold of its objects.

4. This story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to the general Greek
mind, in its best days, a tale about a real hero and a real monster. Not