Aryan Nations," and "Tales of Ancient Greece," the reader will find the
entire contents of the Iliad and Odyssey thus minutely illustrated by
comparison with the Veda, the Edda, and the Lay of the Nibelungs.

Ancient as the Homeric poems undoubtedly are, they are modern in
comparison with the tale of Achilleus and Helena, as here unfolded. The
date of the entrance of the Greeks into Europe will perhaps never be
determined; but I do not see how any competent scholar can well place it
at less than eight hundred or a thousand years before the time of Homer.
Between the two epochs the Greek, Latin, Umbrian, and Keltic lauguages
had time to acquire distinct individualities. Far earlier, therefore,
than the Homeric "juventus mundi" was that "youth of the world," in
which the Aryan forefathers, knowing no abstract terms, and possessing
no philosophy but fetichism, deliberately spoke of the Sun, and the
Dawn, and the Clouds, as persons or as animals. The Veda,
though composed much later than this,--perhaps as late as the
Iliad,--nevertheless preserves the record of the mental life of this
period. The Vedic poet is still dimly aware that Sarama is the fickle
twilight, and the Panis the night-demons who strive to coax her from her
allegiance to the day-god. He keeps the scene of action in the sky. But
the Homeric Greek had long since forgotten that Helena and Paris were
anything more than semi-divine mortals, the daughter of Zeus and the
son of the Zeus-descended Priam. The Hindu understood that Dyaus ("the
bright one") meant the sky, and Sarama ("the creeping one") the dawn,
and spoke significantly when he called the latter the daughter of the
former. But the Greek could not know that Zeus was derived from a root
div, "to shine," or that Helena belonged to a root sar, "to creep."
Phonetic change thus helped him to rise from fetichism to polytheism.
His nature-gods became thoroughly anthropomorphic; and he probably no
more remembered that Achilleus originally signified the sun, than we
remember that the word God, which we use to denote the most vast of
conceptions, originally meant simply the Storm-wind. Indeed, when the
fetichistic tendency led the Greek again to personify the powers of
nature, he had recourse to new names formed from his own language. Thus,
beside Apollo we have Helios; Selene beside Artemis and Persephone; Eos
beside Athene; Gaia beside Demeter. As a further consequence of this
decomposition and new development