Preface 



ton plots on which a host of legends and 

 tragedies have been built by the imagination 

 of poet-priests and poet-historians of the early- 

 days. 



I hope to have opened up some new vistas 

 into the meaning of various figures on classic 

 ground — Venus, Pan, Pallas Athene, Picus, 

 Kuknos, Sappho, Achilleus, Odysseus, Oidi- 

 pous, Orpheus, ^neas — and at the same time 

 thrown light on leading figures in the great 

 epics of the world — the Iliad and Odyssey, the 

 Mahabharata, the Shah Nameh, the Kalevala 

 and Kalevipoeg — and upon various characters 

 used by the playwrights of Greece in their 

 most famous dramas. 



There seems ever more reason for a belief 

 which many scholars still shrink from accept- 

 ing, namely, that the living races of Europe 

 still contain in their compound the strains of 

 races now apparently remote or only found 

 in odd corners of the world. It becomes ever 



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