same verb was ESMI, which became ASMI, and in Latin the first
and last vowels have disappeared, the verb is SUM. Similar
relationships are traced in the numerals, and throughout all the
languages of these nations.

The Romans, like the Etruscans who came before them, were neither
poetical nor imaginative in temperament. Their activity ran in
practical directions. They therefore invented few, if any
stories, of the gods whom they worshipped with fixed rites. Mr.
Macaulay speaks of these gods as "the sober abstractions of the
Roman pantheon." We owe most of the stories of the ancient
mythology to the wit and fancy of the Greeks, more playful and
imaginative, who seized from Egypt and from the East such
legends as pleased them, and adapted them in their own way. It
often happens that such stories, resembling each other in their
foundation, are found in the Greek and Roman authors in several
different forms.

To understand these stories, we will here first acquaint
ourselves with the ideas of the structure of the universe, which
the poets and others held, and which will form the scenery, so to
speak, of the narratives.

The Greek poets believed the earth to be flat and circular, their
own country occupying the middle of it, the central point being
either Mount Olympus, the abode of the gods, or Delphi, so famous
for its oracle.

The circular disk of the earth was crossed from west to east, and
divided into two equal parts by the SEA, as they called the