80 On the Theogony. 



youngest of the divine Titans. But his parents had two other sets of mon- 

 strous children, viz. 1 . the three Cyclops, the artificers of the thunderbolt, 

 named by titles which need no commentary, Brontfe, Sterope, and Argo ; 

 BpojTjj, SrfpoTTjj, Apyjj, (apyj/e (cepauj'oe) ; Thunder, Lightning, Rapidity. 

 These have little, except their single eye, in common with Homer's Sicilian 

 Cyclops, and both differ from the Cyclopian builders of Tiryus. 2. The 

 three Centimani, or hundred-handed monsters, with fifty heads, Cottus, 

 Briareus, andGyges. The allegorizing scholiast transforms these into the 

 three seasons of the year, taking Cottus as the heat of Summer ; Briareus, 

 from BpuEtv, as the Spring ; and Gyges as the Winter. He does not inform 

 us why the winter is to be omitted in this list of seasons : their multiplicity 

 of heads and arms are said to denote their various energies. 



Although these absurd attempts of the scholiasts to unravel this tangled 

 skein of allegory, may well convince us of the utter futility of any endeav- 

 our to reduce the whole to any thing like a consistent scheme ; still it will 

 always remain evident that a considerable proportion of these deities are 

 undoubted physical personifications ; and therefore it seems almost demon- 

 strable, that physical allegory did indeed form the original basis of the 

 system, though that original basis was already, in the age of Hesiod, over- 

 laid by much extraneous and incongruous addition, and the primary inten- 

 tion probably in most instances forgotten. 



We now arrive at the first of those great revolutions, to which this sys- 

 tem of mythology supposed the dynasties of Olympus to be no less liable 

 than those of Earth ; the son usually dethroning tiie father, so that it might 

 be said of the inhabitants of Olympus, as of certain Asiatic tribes, that the 

 grandfather loves his grandchildren, as seeing in them the enemies of his 

 enemies. Heaven, we are told, abhorred his children, and hid them in 

 the recesses of the Earth. Their mother. Earth, resenting his cruelty, 

 endeavours to urge her offspring to revenge. Saturn alone is bold enough 

 to listen to her counsels. The story of his mutilation of his father is well 

 known, and probably veils, under somewhat coarse images, a physical 

 allegory. From the drops of the wounded parent's blood which fell on the 

 earth, sprang the Furies and the Giants j wliile under the influence of a 

 similar cause, Venus arose from the foam of the sea.* We may quote 

 Hesiod's description of this latter event, as a favourable specimen of his 

 poetry. 



departs from the Phoenician system. The Greek Jupiter was clearly borrowed from 

 another source, probably Egyptian : this god was worshipped with human sacrifices 

 in all the Phoenician countries. Diodorus Siculus especially describes his barbarous 

 rites at Carthage, LXX. 756. 



* The physical allegory contained in this legend appears to be very justly ex- 

 plained by Macrobius, in the first book of his Saturnalia, C. viii. Est idem Kpovoe kui 

 X()oi'oe ; hunc aiunt abscidisse Coeli patris pudenda ; quibus in mare dejectis Venerem 

 procreatam ; quse a spum& undc coaluit, AippoStri], nomen accepit. Ex quo intelligi 

 volunt cirni chaos esset tempera non fuissc : si quidem tempus est certa dimensio. 



