Mr. Zobel Wenatchee High School Student Name Per.

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1 Mr. Zobel Wenatchee High School Student Name Per. 2 When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the and the. The was vividly alive and not checked by. 3 Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man peoples his world with bright fancies and lovely visions. lurked in the primeval forest not nymphs and naiads. lived there, with its close attendants: magic, and its most common defense,. Mankind s chief hope of escaping the wrath of whatever divinities were then abroad lay in some, senseless but powerful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief. 4 We do not know when these stories were first told in their present shape; but primitive life had been left far behind. The tales of Greek mythology do not throw any clear light upon what early mankind was like. They do throw an abundance of light upon what early Greeks were like. 5 became the center of the. The Greeks made their gods in their. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. 6 In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in the stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made inhuman; or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat s head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty; or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives.

2 7 In Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs of bestial shapes unlike any beast ever known, men with birds heads and lions with bulls heads and both with eagle s wings, creations of artists who were intent upon producing something never seen except in their own minds, the very consummation of unreality. 8 The Greek statue of a god, so normal and natural with all its beauty, demonstrates what a new idea had come into the world. With its coming, the universe became rational. statues reflect the perfect athlete. appears as if he were a young man walking through the market. 9 Of course the divine were to be ; they were very powerful and very when angry. Still, with proper care a man could be quite fairly at ease with them. He was even perfectly free to at them., trying to hide his love affairs from his wife was a capital figure of fun. was that stock character of comedy, the typical jealous wife, and her ingenious tricks to discomfit her husband and punish her rival. 10, whose life was one of long combat against preposterous monsters, is always said to have had his home in the city of. The exact spot where was born of the foam could be visited by ancient tourists; it was offshore from the island of. The winged steed, after skimming the air all day, went every night to a comfortable stable in. A familiar local habitation gave reality to all the mythical beings. 11 The has no place in classical mythology., so powerful in the world before and after Greece is almost nonexistent. (?) T Demonic wizards and the hideous old witches play no part at all in the stories. and are the only witches and they are and of surpassing, not horrible. 12 The world of Greek mythology was not a place of terror for the human spirit. is what the Greek mind made out of the stars, not. 13 Other dark spots too stand out. There are traces of a time when there were -. The are goat-men and the are half man, half horse. is often called -, as she often changes from a divine cow to the very human queen of heaven. 14 Of course the mythical monster is present in any number of shapes, and and dire. But they are only to give the his need of.

3 15 A real myth has nothing to do with. It is an explanation of something in ; how, for instance, any and everything in the came into : men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens. 16 Thunder and lightening are caused when hurls his thunderbolt. 17 A volcano erupts because a terrible creature is imprisoned in the mountain and every now and then struggles to get free. 18 The Dipper, the constellation also called the Great Bear, does not set below the horizon because a goddess once was angry at it and decreed that it should never sink into the sea. 19 the was once a rain-god. He has a standard of and. It is not very high, certainly, and seems chiefly applicable to, not ; but he does punish men who and break their ; he is angered by any of the dead; he and helps old Priam when he goes as a suppliant to Achilles; he who fails to the needy and strangers against Zeus himself. Then became Zeus s companion (a moral ideal, not a personage). 20,21 The Greek Poets Homer, 1000 B.C. Hesiod, 900 B.C. Pindar, 400 B.C. Aeschylus, 400 B.C. Sophocles, 300 B.C.? Euripides, 300 B.C.? Herodotus, 300 B.C.?, the first historian of Europe Alexandrian poets, 250 B.C. Apollonius of Rhodes Theocritus Bion Moschus Ovid Apuleius, a Latin, 200 A.D. Lucian, a Greek, 200 A.D. Apollodorus, A.D.? Pausanias, 200 A.D. Roman Poets Virgil Catullus Horace

4 22 Chapter 1: THE GODS The Greeks did not believe that the gods the universe. It was the other way about: the created the. Before there were gods heaven ( ) and earth ( ) had been formed. They, heaven and earth, were the first. The were their children, and the were their grandchildren. 23 The, often called the Elder Gods, were for untold ages supreme in the universe. They were of and of. There were many of them, but only a few appear in the stories of mythology. The most important was, in Latin. He ruled over the other Titans until his son dethroned him and seized the power for himself. 24 Parents Uranus, heaven Gaea, earth Titans Cronus, the ruler Ocean, the river that was supposed to encircle the earth; Tethys, Ocean s wife: Hyperion, the father of the sun, the moon, and the dawn; Mnemosyne, which means memory; Themis usually translated by Justice; and Iapetus, important because of his sons, Prometheus, who was the savior of mankind. Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders, and 25 The Twelve Great Olympians Zeus (Jupiter), the chief; his two brothers next, Poseidon (Neptune), and Hades, also called Pluto; Hestia (Vesta), their sister; Hera (Juno), Zeus s wife, and Ares (Mars), their son; Zeus s children: Athena (Minerva), Apollo, Aphrodite (Venus), Hermes (Mercury), and Artemis (Diana); and Hera s son Hephaestus (Vulcan), sometimes said to be the son of Zeus too.

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