[1] Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philos., Gothae, 1869, p. 82.

[2] Olympic Odes, i., Myers's translation: "To me it is impossible
to call one of the blessed gods a cannibal. . . . Meet it is for a
man that concerning the gods he speak honourably, for the reproach
is less. Of thee, son of Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to
them who have gone before me." In avoiding the story of the
cannibal god, however, Pindar tells a tale even more offensive to
our morality.


All early attempts at an interpretation of mythology are so many
efforts to explain the myths on some principle which shall seem not
unreasonable to men living at the time of the explanation.
Therefore the pious remonstrances and the forced constructions of
early thinkers like Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, of all
ancient Homeric scholars and Pagan apologists, from Theagenes of
Rhegium (525 B. C.), the early Homeric commentator, to Porphyry,
almost the last of the heathen philosophers, are so many proofs
that to Greece, as soon as she had a reflective literature, the
myths of Greece seemed impious and IRRATIONAL. The essays of the
native commentators on the Veda, in the same way, are endeavours to
put into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which
does not offend either piety or reason. We may therefore conclude
that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as
philosophy is now understood)--not men like Empedocles and
Heraclitus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumaeus, the pious
swineherd of the Odyssey--who evolved the blasphemous myths of
Greece, of Egypt and of India. We must look elsewhere for an