Proteus, and Nereus ruled the waters,
Zeus was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who hurled the
bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of men, and Hera,
originally the air, became the protecting goddess of married life;
Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth his arrows, not at first
identified with Helios, became the god of divination and poetry, who led
the choir of the muses; the goddess of light, Athene, became the
contentious goddess of wisdom; Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea,
once the symbol of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled by the
Graces, became the type of womanly beauty and charm, to which the
strength of man, personified in Ares, corresponds. In like manner in the
later mythology, Hephaestus, the god of fire, appeared as the god of the
forge, Hestia, the goddess of fire, as the protector of the household
hearth, and Hermes, the god of the storm and of rain, as the messenger
of the gods, the type of cunning and craftiness, while Artemis, the
goddess of the moon, the fruitful mother of nature, took the character
of the chaste maiden, the goddess of hunting, who with her nymphs and
hounds nightly roamed the fields and woods. The monsters, the Sphinx,
the Minotaur, the Cyclops, the Centaurs, symbols of a yet unhuman or
half human power of nature, were overcome by the Greek heroes, Perseus,
Hercules, Jason, Theseus, OEdipus, the types of human strength and
valor. The religious festivals were enlivened by trials of men's
strength and skill in games, and the historian and poet offered to the
gods the products of human genius. In the religion of the Greeks,
however, the moral element, although not passed over and in the Greek
epic and tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood
nevertheless too little in the foreground, so that the worship of the
divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the feasts in
honor of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by immoral practices. The
conception of a future life, which taken in connection with a future
retribution has a moral tendency, had but little attraction for the
Greek, who rejoiced in the glory of the earth, and saw in nature and in
man the kingdom of the divine. The passage from the earlier poetical
nature-worship to the worship of the divine in human form seems to be
indicated in the war which Olympian Zeus waged with Cronos and the
Titans. The origin and development of the various elements and powers of