MAGIC AND WONDER
recent and enlightened. Professor J. A. K. Thompson, in his Studies in the Odyssey, published in 1914, provides us with numerous examples. The Homeric epics are full of what are called "expurgations" of earlier legend. Those stories of bodily transformation which Ovid gathered up as fairy tales in his Metamorphoses, the primitive Greek took quite literally; but since the Homeric way of seeing life would not countenance this make-believe, the transformations were "expurgated" by being turned into similes. When we read in the Odyssey, "So spake she and departed, the grey-eyed Athena and like an eagle of the sea she flew away," we surmise that in an older story the goddess turned herself into the sea-eagle. The Homeric conscience is reluctant to transmit this account of the outer world; the most that can be conceded is a resemblance between Athena
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