roduced by them. "But immediately after invocation of the Muses
the poet begins with Chaos, and Tartara, and Love, as the first
principles, and then proceeds to the production of the earth and of
night out of chaos; of the ether and of day, from night; of the starry
heavens, mountains, and seas. All which generation of gods is really
nothing but a poetic description of the cosmogonia; as through the
sequel of the poem all seems to be physiology veiled under fiction and
allegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the
world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or
abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the
Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with
the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all
probability, derived it from the Mosaic cabala, or tradition."[164]

But in spite of all this mythological obscuration, the belief in one
Supreme God is here and there most clearly recognizable. "That Zeus was
originally to the Greeks the Supreme God, the true God--nay, at some
time their only God--can be perceived in spite of the haze which
mythology has raised around his name."[165] True, they sometimes used
the word "Zeus" in a physical sense to denote the deep expanse of
heaven, and sometimes in a historic sense, to designate a hero or
deified man said to have been born in Crete. It is also true that the
Homeric Zeus is full of contradictions. He is "all-seeing," yet he is
cheated; he is "omnipotent," yet he is defied; he is "eternal," yet he
has a father; he is "just," yet he is guilty of crime. Now, as Mueller
very justly remarks, these contradictions may teach us a lesson. If all
the conceptions of Zeus had sprung from one origin, these contradictions
could not have existed. If Zeus had simply and only meant the Supreme
God, he could not have been the son of Kronos (Time). If, on the other
hand, Zeus had been a mere mythological personage, as Eos, the dawn, and
Helios, the sun, he could never have been addressed as he is addressed
in the famous prayer of Achilles (Iliad, bk. xxi.).[166]

[Footnote 163: Cudworth, vol. i. pp. 321, 332.]

[Footnote 164: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 478.]

[Footnote 165: Max Mueller, "Science of Language," p. 457.]

[Footnote 166: Id., ib., p. 458.]

In Homer there is a perpetual blending of the natural and the
supernatural, the human and divine. The _Iliad_ is an incongruo