them are impersonations of natural forces. Some, however, figure prominently as patrons of special arts or special places, as Apollo of prophecy and music, of Delos and Delphi; and yet others seem to be wholly personifications of human powers, as Athena of prudence and of martial and industrial arts.

Underlying this mythology is another element, probably more ancient, the worship of ancestors, local divinities, and domestic gods. With these were naturally connected various ritual observances, and especially the noblest and most important of rites, the sacrifice. Such practices may be supposed to have belonged originally to the tribal religion, and to have passed by analogy to the great natural gods, when these had been once created by the poet and perhaps identified with the older genius of that spot where their efficacy was first signally manifested.

Finally, as a third element, we find the religion of the priests, soothsayers, and magicians, as well as the rites of Orpheus, Bacchus, and the Great Goddesses at Eleusis. These forms of worship showed Oriental affinities and partook of a kind of nocturnal horror and mystical enthusiasm. They were the Greek representatives of the religion of revelation and of sacraments, and bore much the same relation to the supernaturalistic elements in Christianity as does the idea of a shade in Hades to the idea of a soul in heaven. The fundamental intuitions were the same, but in Pagan times they remained vague, doubtful, and incoherent.

These three forms of religion lay together in men's minds and habits throughout the formative period of Greek literature. There was an occasional rivalry among them, but the tolerance characteristic of Paganism could reconcile their claims without much difficulty, and admit them all to a share of honour. The history of the three elements, however, differs essentially, as might be expected after a consideration of their respective natures. The antique family religion lived by inertia; it was obeyed without being justified theoretically, and remained strong by its very obscurity. Many customs which a man may have occasion to conform to only once or twice in his life endure for ages and survive the ebb and flow of intellectual and political systems. Nursery tales, trivial superstitions, customs connected with weddings or funerals, or with certain days of the year, have a strange and irrational persistence; they surprise us by emerging into prominence after centuries of a sort of subterraneous existence. Thus the deification of Roman emperors was not the sacrilegious innovation which it might appear to be, but on the contrary a restoration of 

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