are men; they have clothing, palaces,
bodies similar to ours; if they cannot die, they can at least be
wounded. Homer relates how Ares, the god of war, struck by a warrior,
fled howling with pain. This fashion of making gods like men is what
is called _Anthropomorphism_.

=Mythology.=--The gods, being men, have parents, children, property.
Their mothers were goddesses, their brothers were gods, and their
children other gods or men who were half divine. This genealogy of the
gods is what is called the _Theogony_. The gods have also a history;
we are told the story of their birth, the adventures of their youth,
their exploits. Apollo, for example, was born on the island of Delos
to which his mother Latona had fled; he slew a monster which was
desolating the country at the foot of Parnassus. Each canton of Greece
had thus its tales of the gods. These are called myths; the sum of
them is termed _Mythology_, or the history of the gods.

=The Local Gods.=--The Greek gods, even under their human form,
remained what they were at first, phenomena of nature. They were
thought of both as men and as forces of nature. The Naiad is a young
woman, but at the same time a bubbling fountain. Homer represents the
river Xanthus as a god, and yet he says, "The Xanthus threw itself on
Achilles, boiling with fury, full of tumult, foam, and the bodies of
the dead." The people itself continued to say "Zeus rains" or "Zeus
thunders." To the Greek the god was first of all rain, storm, heaven,
or sun, and not the heaven, sun, or earth in general, but that corner
of the heaven under which he lived, the land of his canton, the river
which traversed it. Each city, then, had its divinities, its sun-god,
its earth-goddess, its sea-god, and these are not to be confounded
with the sun, the earth, and the sea of the neighboring city. The
Zeus of Sparta is not the same as the Zeus of Athens; in the same oath
one sometimes invokes two Athenas or two Apollos. A traveller who
would journey through Greece[51] would therefore meet thousands of
local gods (they called them Poliades, or gods of the city). No
torrent, no wood, no mountain was without its own deity,[52] although
often a minor divinity, adored only by the people of the vicinity and
whose sanctuary was only a grotto in the rock.

=The Great Gods.=--Above the innumerable legion of local gods of each
canton the Greeks imagined certain great divinities--the heaven, the
sun, the earth, and the sea--a