Chapter 1

Chapter I Introduction The literature of our time, as of all the centuries of
Christendom, is full of allusions to the gods and goddesses of
the Greeks and Romans. Occasionally, and, in modern days, more
often, it contains allusions to the worship and the superstitions
of the northern nations of Europe. The object of this book is to
teach readers who are not yet familiar with the writers of Greece
and Rome, or the ballads or legends of the Scandinavians, enough
of the stories which form what is called their mythology, to make
those allusions intelligible which one meets every day, even in
the authors of our own time. The Greeks and Romans both belong to the same race or stock. It
is generally known in our time as the Aryan family of mankind;
and so far as we know its history, the Greeks and Romans
descended from the tribes which emigrated from the high table-
lands of Northern India. Other tribes emigrated in different
directions from the same centre, so that traces of the Aryan
language are found in the islands of the Pacific ocean. The people of this race, who moved westward, seem to have had a
special fondness for open air nature, and a willingness to
personify the powers of nature. They were glad to live in the
open air, and they specially encouraged the virtues which an
open-air people prize. Thus no Roman was thought manly who could
not swim, and every Greek exercised in the athletic sports of the
palaestra. The Romans and Grecian and German divisions of this great race
are those with which we have most to do in history and in
literature. Our own English language is made up of the dialects
of different tribes, many of whom agreed in their use of words
which they had derived from our Aryan ancestry. Thus our
substantive verb I AM appears in the original Sanscrit of the
Aryans as ESMI, and m for ME (MOI), or the first person singular,
is found in all the verbal inflections. The Greek form of the
same verb was ESMI, which became ASMI, and in Latin the first
and last vowels have disappeared, the verb is SUM. Similar
relationships are traced in the numerals, and throughout all the
languages of these nations. The Romans, like the Etruscans who came before them, were neither
poetical nor imaginative in temperament. Their activity ran in
practical directions. They therefore invented few, if any
stories, of the gods whom they worshipped with fixed rites. Mr.
Macaulay speaks of these gods as "the sober abstractions of the
Roman pantheon." We owe most of the stories of the ancient
mythology to the wit and fancy of the Greeks, more playful and
imaginative, who seized from Egypt and from the East such
legends as pleased them, and adapted them in their own way. It
often happens that such stories,