1850.
Defense of an Essay, &c.
577
produced the mountains, habitations of the divine nymphs, and Pon- tus, the barren and billowy sea. Then Gæa intermarried with Uranos, and from this union came a numerous offspring—twelve Titans and Titanides, three Cyclopes and three Hekatoncheïres, or beings with a hundred hands each. The Titans were Oceanus, Koios, Krios, Hype- rion, Iapetos, and Kronos: the Titanides, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Moe- mosyne, Phœbe, and Tethys." Kronos and Rhea intermarry ; “ but Kronos foreboded to himself destruction from one of his own chil- dren, and accordingly as soon as any of them were born, he immediately swallowed them, and retained them in his own belly. In this manner had the five first been treated, and Rhea was on the point of being delivered of Zeus. Grieved and indignant at the loss of her children, she applied for counsel to her father and mother, Uranos and Gæa, who aided her to conceal the birth of Zeus. They conveyed her by night to Lyctus in Crete, hid the new-born child in a woody cavern on Mount Ida, and gave to Kronos, in place of it, a stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes, which he greedily swallowed, helieving it to be his child. Thus was the safety of Zeus ensured."* And this being is henceforth to be the chief god, the Father of gods and men.
There could surely be no knowledge of a self-existent, understand- ing Being, who was the first principle of all things, among those who could write and believe such a cosmogony as that above given. If Homer had believed in the existence of any being who could truly and properly be called God, could he have written Nxsavov i̇s éswY yeveriv, xai unseрav Tnovv ?—Ihad, XIV. 210, The Homeric and He- siodic gods are to us a mere fable, but the whole story to the men of their own times was not romance, but history—sacred history.
“Homer and Hesiod were the grand authorities in the Pagan world respecting theogony; but in the Iliad and Odyssey nothing is found except passing allusions and implications, and even in the Hymns (which were commonly believed in antiquity to be the productions of the same author as the Iliad and the Odyssey), there are only isolated, unconnected uarratives. Accordingly, men habitually took their in- formation respecting their theogonic antiquities from the Hesiodic poem, where it was ready laid out before them; and the legends con- secrated in that work acquired both an extent of circulation and a firm hold on the national faith, such as independent legends could seldom or never rival. Moreover, the scrupulous and sceptical Pagans, as well as the open assailants of Paganism in later times, derived their
* Grote's History of Greece, Vol. 1. pages 5, 6—8.
VOL. XIX. NO. XI.
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