stances this process might have been carried resolutely
through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his
proper function and there was no overlapping--one Kore, one Kouros, one
Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had
been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified
and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb
some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythera
or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Kore or the Delian or the
Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was
greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of
Cyprus, Cythera, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be
one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis
absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of
various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility
Kore of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much
closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity,
the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the
same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes,
Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like.

As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense
formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Kore or Kouros was a
figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the
Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons; they melted
easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done
its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for
all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as
Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard.
They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary
temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal
about the gods all being one, 'Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios,
Helios the same as Dionysus',[64:1] but the amalgamation only takes
place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious
mysticism.

The best document preserved to us of this attempt to bring order into
Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. There are three poems, all devoted to
this object, composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and
certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a qua