of Dionysos tells of man-stealing
and piracy; the rapes of Europa and Helen, of the abduction of women.
The dinner at which Itys was served up assures us that cannibalism was
practised; the threat of Laomedon that he would sell Poseidon and Apollo
for slaves shows how compulsory labour might be obtained. The polygamy
of many heroes often appears in its worst form under the practice of
sister-marriage, a crime indulged in from the King of Olympus downward.
Upon the whole, then, we must admit that Greek mythology indicates a
barbarian social state, man-stealing, piracy, human sacrifice,
polygamy, cannibalism, and crimes of revenge that are unmentionable. A
personal interpretation, such as man in his infancy resorts to, is
embodied in circumstances suitable to a savage time. It was not until a
later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and
Dreams were introduced, and still later when the whole system was
affected by Lydian, Phrygian, Assyrian, and Egyptian ideas.

[Sidenote: Their gradual improvement in the historic times.]

[Sidenote: The inevitable tendency is to the Ionic philosophy.]

Not only thus from their intrinsic nature, but also from their recorded
gradual development, are we warranted in imputing to the greater part of
the myths an indigenous origin. The theogony of Homer is extended by
Hesiod in many essential points. He prefixes the dynasty of Uranos, and
differs in minor conceptions, as in the character of the Cyclops. The
Orphic theogony is again another advance, having new fictions and new
personages, as in the case of Zagreus, the horned child of Jupiter by
his own daughter Persephone. Indeed, there is hardly one of the great
and venerable gods of Olympus whose character does not change with his
age, and, seen from this point of view, the origin of the Ionic
philosophy becomes a necessary step in the advance. That philosophy, as
we shall soon find, was due not only to the expansion of the Greek
intellect and the necessary improvement of Greek morals; an extraneous
cause, the sudden opening of the Egyptian ports, 670 B.C., accelerated
it. European religion became more mysterious and more solemn. European
philosophy learned the error of its chronology, and the necessity of
applying a more strict and correct standard of evidence for ancient
events.

It was an ominous circumstance that the Ionian Greeks, who first began
to philosophize, commenced their labours by depersonifying the