agree in that number, but they were all of a nature
agreeable to the ideas of an heroic age--the destruction of
monsters, and bringing home to his own country the valuable
productions of other regions. These are, however, regarded by
Buttmann as being chiefly allegorical. The Hydra, for instance,
he takes to have been meant to represent the evils of democratic
anarchy, with its numerous heads, against which, though one may not
be able to effect anything, yet the union of even two may suffice to
become dominant over it.

"The toils of the hero conclude with the greatest and most rare of
all in the heroic age--the conquest over death. This is represented
by his descent into the under world, and dragging Cerberus to light
is a proof of his victory. In the old mythus, he was made to engage
with and wound Hades; and the Alcestis of Euripides exhibits him in
conflict with Death. But virtue, to be a useful example, must
occasionally succumb to human weakness in the power of the evil
principle. Hence, Hercules falls into fits of madness, sent on him
by Hera [Juno]; and hence--he becomes the willing slave of Omphale,
the fair queen of Lydia, and changes his club and lion's skin for
the distaff and the female robe.

"The mythus concludes most nobly with the assumption of the hero
into Olympus. His protecting Deity abandons him to the power of his
persevering enemy; his mortal part is consumed by fire, the fiercest
of elements; his shade (+eidolon+), like those of other men,
descends to the realms of Hades, while the divine portion himself
(+autos+) mounts from the pyre in a thunder-cloud, and the object of
Hera's persecution being now accomplished, espouses youth, the
daughter of his reconciled foe.

"Muller (Dorians, vol. i. part ii. ch. 11, 12) is also disposed to
view in Hercules a personification of the highest powers of man in
the heroic age. He regards him as having been the national hero of
the Dorian race, and appropriates to him all the exploits of the
hero in Thessaly, AEtolia, and Epirus, which last place he supposes
to have been the original scene of the Geryoneia, which was
afterwards transformed to the western stream of the ocean. He
thinks, however, that the Argives had an ancient hero of perhaps the
same name, to whom the Peloponnesus adventures belong, and whom the
Dorians combined with their own hero. The servitude to Eurystheus,
an