WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO GREEK MYTHOLOGY. 55 



the female one ; and the old Heraclitan principle that fire is the origin of all 

 things, rudely conceived by the popular imagination, is manifestly that which 

 in this god identifies the fervour of the vine juice, the brewst of the sun, with 

 the fervour of the generative process. The fact that the worship of Dionysus 

 was not native in Greece, but travelled from the East, naturally led to the 

 representation of this god as a wonderful conqueror, in the fashion of Sesostris 

 and Alexander the Great ; from which analogy, coupled with his preaching 

 the gospel of wine, Bryant and other speculators have been eager to find in 

 him a perverted Noah ; but the application of the principle of Euhemerus in 

 this case evidently rests on too slender a foundation to afford any grounds for a 

 scientific interpretation. 



XLI. Aphrodite is that goddess in whose case Mr Gladstone's favourite 

 idea of Phoenician influence on the Greek Pantheon has long been recognised 

 as the most certain (Herod, i. 105 ; Pausan. i. 14, 6). The recognition of this 

 Phoenician element, however, does by no means imply that the existence of an 

 original Hellenic impersonation of the passion of love, and the seductions of 

 personal beauty, should be denied. On the contrary, the female deity whom 

 the Phoenicians were seen worshipping in their factories on the coasts of the 

 Mediterranean, would most probably be accepted by the ancient Pelasgic tribes 

 chiefly because they found in her attributes a striking identity with their own 

 native Aphrodite. 



XLII. Phoenician influence is also undoubtedly to be acknowledged in the 

 very complex and composite mythology connected with the name of Heracles. 

 But the person of Heracles, as we find him in Homer, exhibits nothing beyond 

 the exaggerated traits of a stout and muscular humanity in combat with late 

 and circumstance, and the wild beasts of the forest — a plain ITellenic counter- 

 part, in fact, to the Hebrew Samson, of whose historical reality, to a mind not 

 violently possessed by German theories, there cannot be the slightest reason 

 to doubt. The exaggerations connected with his story are the natural and 

 necessary effects of the excited popular imagination brought to bear on such 

 a character; but these exaggerations, taken at their highest, are exhibited 

 on a very small platform in Homer, and present a very modest array of achieve- 

 ments compared with, the multiform mass of myth that afterwards accumulated 

 round this representative Greek hero. The principle of growth, of such 

 luxuriant vitality in popular myths, has been obviously at work here ; and the 

 sort of omnipresence latterly attributed to this wandering queller of monsters 

 is most readily explained from the influence of the Phoenician factories in the 

 Mediterranean, in whose Melcarth the Greeks delighted to recognise their 

 own stout son of Jove and Semele. And if this Tyrian Hercules, as Phoenician 



