"Mine is the invention of the charming lyre;
Sweet notes, and heavenly numbers I inspire.
Med'cine is mine: what herbs and simples grow
In fields and forests, all their powers I know,
And am the great physician called below."
--Apollo to Daphne, in OVID'S Metam. PRYDEN'S Trans.

Then come Mercury, the winged messenger, interpreter and ambassador
of the gods; Diana, queen of the woods and goddess of hunting,
and hence the counterpart of her brother Apollo; and finally,
Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and skill, who is said to have
Sprung full-armed from the brain of Jupiter.

Besides these divinities there were many others--as Ceres, the
goddess of grain and harvests; and Vesta, the goddess of home
joys and comforts, who presided over the sanctity of the domestic
hearth. There were also inferior gods and goddesses innumerable--such
as deities of the woods and the mountains, the meadows and the
rivers--some terrestrial, others celestial, according to the places
over which they were supposed to preside, and rising in importance
in proportion to the powers they manifested. Even the Muses, the
Fates, and the Graces were numbered among Grecian deities.

But while, undoubtedly, the great mass of the Grecian people
believed that their divinities were real persons, who presided
over the affairs of men, their philosophers, while encouraging
this belief as the best adapted to the understanding of the people,
took quite a different view of them, and explained the mythological
legends as allegorical representations of general physical and