and equally incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the
interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount
of physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For
example, if Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of
Zeus would be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned.
Now, the ancient believers in the "physical phenomena theory" of
myths made out that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was really the same
person under another name as Leto, his mistress. "For Hera is the
earth" (they said at other times that Hera was the air), "and Leto
is the night; but night is only the shadow of the earth, and
therefore Leto is only the shadow of Hera." It was easy, however,
to prove that this scientific view of night as the shadow of earth
was not likely to be known to myth-makers, who regarded "swift
Night" as an actual person. Plutarch, too, had an abstruse theory
to explain the legend about the dummy wife,--a log of oak-wood,
which Zeus pretended to marry when at variance with Hera.[1]


[1] Pausanias, ix. 31.


This quarrel, he said, was merely the confusion and strife of
elements. Zeus was heat, Hera was cold (she had already been
explained as earth and air), the dummy wife of oak-wood was a tree
that emerged after a flood, and so forth. Of course, there was no
evidence that mythopoeic men held Plutarchian theories of heat and
cold and the conflict of the elements; besides, as Eusebius pointed
out, Hera had already been defined once as an allegory of wedded
life, and once as the earth, and again as the air, and it was
rather too late to assert that she was also the cold and watery