best life pays this tribute, and thus acknowledges a certain equality before God with its opposite; for even a bad life has divine right, inasmuch as it is. "To be is respectable." The expiation, indeed, is measured, and comes to an end; and Apollo is interpreter of God for evermore, and king, giving a death which does not wound or pain its recipient,—euthanasia, if not immortality. Here, indeed, the symbol falls, both in form and meaning, below the Christian symbol; which makes the Resurrection swallow up, and annihilate with its glory, the Crucifixion. Yet it is something, that the ancient story intimates the cheering truth. The whole thing is fainter in the Grecian form, because addressed to a nation, and not to humanity,—to a nation at a peculiar stage of culture, and not to humanity through countless ages. Apollo may be held as the Word of God to a tribe of ideal Greeks, whose life can be counted by centuries. Christ is the Word of God to humanity, thinking and Buffering all over the globe and through all time, and whose influences take hold of eternity.
But we should not omit to speak here of the fable of Apollo's rescuing Alcestis from Pluto, on his return from Tempe towards Delphi, after his purification. A later fable, which Euripides has immortalized (perhaps originated), makes Hercules the rescuer of Alcestis. This may have been one of the many interchanges of names which took place with respect to Hercules, and that tribe of the Dorians called Heracleides; and which led to the misapprehension, very early in Grecian history, that the children of Hercules were a component part of the Dorian nation, and that the Dorian invasion of Southern Greece was the return of these children to the land of their fathers. K. O. Müller has entirely cleared up this subject. But the point of interest for us is, that this rescue of Alcestis from death was, in either form, a Dorian fable. Müller says there is also trace of a fable of the death of Apollo.
That the fable of Apollo's killing the Pythoness, and expiating it, and becoming purified, was the heart and marrow of the religion of the Dorians, is evident from the fact, that a dramatic representation of it, on a theatre stretching from
