POETS AND LOGOGBAPHERS. 377 enslaved. Taken as a whole the mythea aad acquired prescript tire and ineffaceable possession: to attack, call in question, or repudiate them, was a task painful even to undertake, and far beyond the power of any one to accomplish. For these reasons the anti-mythic vein of criticism was of no effect as a destroying force, but nevertheless its dissolving de- composing and transforming influence was very considerable. To accommodate the ancient mythes to an improved tone of sentiment and a newly created canon of credibility, was a function which even the wisest Greeks did not disdain, and which occupied no small proportion of the whole intellectual activity of the nation. The mythes were looked at from a point of view completely foreign to the reverential curiosity and literal imaginative faith of the Homeric man ; they were broken up and recast in order to force them into new moulds such as their authors had never conceived. We may distinguish four distinct classes of minds, in the literary age now under examination, as having taken them in hand the poets, the logographers, the philosophers, and the historians. With the poets and logographers, the mythical persons are real predecessors, and the mythical world an antecedent fact ; but it is divine and heroic reality, not human ; the present is only half- brother of the past (to borrow 1 an illustration from Pindar in his allusion to gods and men), remotely and generically, but not closely and specifically, analogous to it. As a general habit, the old feelings and the old unconscious faith, apart from all proof or evidence, still remain in their minds ; but recent feelings have grown up which compel them to omit, to alter, sometimes even to reject and condemn, particular narratives. Pindar repudiates some stories and transforms others, because they are inconsistent with his conceptions of the gods. Thus he formally protests against the tale that Pelops had been killed and served up at table by his father, for the immortal gods to eat ; he shrinks from the idea of imputing to them so horrid an appe- Bnce to the use of the poets in education : see also his treatise De I-egg. viL p. 810-811- Some teachers made their pupils learn -whole poets by heArt (6Aot>f rrotriTaf iKuav&avuv], others preferred extracts and selections. 1 Piuuar,Ne:n. vi. 1. Compare Simonides, Fragm. 1 (Gaisford).
