erposes as a peacemaker,
saying, "There will be no enjoyment in our delightful banquet if you twain
thus contend." Then he arose and placed the double cup in her hands and
said, "Be patient, my mother, lest I again behold thee beaten, and cannot
help thee."

He here refers to a time when Jupiter hung his wife up in mid-heaven with
anvils tied to her heels; and when Vulcan untied them he was pitched from
Olympus down into the island of Lemnos, whence came his lameness. A rude
and brutal head of a household was the poetic Zeus.

No doubt other and much more sublime views of the gods are to be found in
Homer. Thus (Il. XV. 80) he compares the motion of Juno to the rapid
thought of a traveller, who, having visited many countries, says, "I was
here," "I was there." Such also is the description (Il. XIII. 17) of
Neptune descending from the top of Samothrace, with the hills and forests
trembling beneath his immortal feet. Infinite power, infinite faculty, the
gods of Homer possessed; but these were only human faculty and power
pushed to the utmost. Nothing is more beautiful than the description of
the sleep of Jupiter and Juno, "imparadised in each other's arms" (Il.
XIV. 350), while the divine earth produced beneath them a bed of flowers,
softly lifting them from the ground. But the picture is eminently human;
quite as much so as that which Milton has imitated from it.

After Homer and Hesiod, among the Greek poets, come the lyrists. Callinus,
the Ephesian, made a religion of patriotism. Tyrtaeus (B.C. 660), somewhat
later, of Sparta, was devoted to the same theme. Pindar, the Theban, began
his career (B.C. 494) in the time of the conquests of Darius, and composed
one of his Pythian odes in the year of the battle of Marathon. He taught a
divine retribution on good and evil; taught that "the bitterest end awaits
the pleasure that is contrary to right,"[231] taught moderation, and that
"a man should always keep in view the bounds and limits of things."[232]
He declared that "Law was the ruler of gods and men." Moreover, he
proclaimed that gods and men were of one family, and though the gods were
far higher, yet that something divine was in all men.[233] And in a
famous fragment (quoted by Bunsen[234]) he calls mankind the majestic
offspring of earth; mankind, "a gentle race, beloved of heaven."

The tragic poet, Aeschylus, is a figure like that of Michael Angelo in
Italian art, grand, sombre, and possessed by his ideas. The o