Nor is this the only fraternization of Apollo with the older gods of Greece, which is on record.
In Arcadia there was, on one side of the hill of Cyllene, an old temple of Mercury; and, on the other side of the same hill, the Dorians afterwards erected a temple to Apollo. In the Homeric hymn to Mercury, mentioned above, we have a mythical story, whose meaning seems to be a commemoration of the reconciliation of the two worships. This hymn is a masterpiece of characterization and humor, and evidently of Dorian origin; for the Dorian god is represented altogether as the most divine. Apollo's majestic honesty and simplicity are finely contrasted with Mercury's subtlety and frisky cunning. It was just the contrast of the Dorian and the Arcadian character. But Mercury supplies the instrument by which the great Apollo may express himself; and this gift becomes the bond of union. So the Peloponnesians were the plastic material which supplied to the Dorian intellectual power the means of manifesting itself.
The Dorians may be considered the masculine principle of Greece, and the other Greeks the feminine. K. O. Müller demonstrates, that the germ of comedy, the germ of tragedy, the germ of architecture and of art generally, always came from the intellectual Dorians; but the seed was thrown into the rich soil of Ionian sensibility, Pelasgian liveliness of apprehension, Achæan subtlety of application; and hence the rich harvest of art in all its kinds. Either race, disconnected with the other, would have been comparatively sterile. In Sparta, where there was most isolation, most repugnance to social union with the other states, there was least flowering out. There, however, was most strength in the root, though the least luxuriance in the branches. In Sparta the race vies with the Hebrew, in that self-springing power which keeps a people individual, and makes it more forcible to give than to receive influences. Like the Hebrew race, it has never been lost. To use the eloquent words of John Müller, in the close of his chapter on Lacedemon, in his "Universal History," vol. i.:—"What an ascendency must that lawgiver have possessed who knew how to persuade the opulent of his country to an equal division of their lands, and to the abolition of
