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Jupiter.

of Latin

there is as close an affinity of names as between the latter XII.The Latin and the Dyaus-pitar of the Rig Veda; but pracCharacteristics tically the mythology of the Latin tribes intromythology. duces us almost into a new world. We are, indeed, apt to confuse under the term two wholly distinct things. We read, in the Æneid of Virgil, for instance, a story which may be fairly regarded as a pendant to the Iliad. We find Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and other deities described much as Zeus, Hêrê, and Aphroditê would be described by Greek poets, and in the odes of Horace we have expressions of thought and feeling such as the idea of these gods would naturally evoke in the minds of the Hellenic worshipper. We also come across notices of strange beings, as, for instance, Consus, Anna Perenna, Muttunus, Mana, Semo Sancus, which for us at least are associated with no very definite images; and we include both these beings and the deities spoken of by Virgil or Horace under the one head of Latin gods, and treat what is said about them as Latin mythology. No two things could well be more entirely distinct. The great poets of the Augustan age simply borrowed at will from the vast storehouse of Greek tradition, and set before their countrymen a mythology towards which they had no natural attraction, and for which they never acquired any genuine liking. The Greek myths thus bodily imported became fashionable at Rome. and perhaps in the great cities of the empire generally ; but on the people of the country far removed from town influences they seem never to have made any deep or permanent impression. It would be almost nearer the truth to say that they failed to make on them any impression at all.

The gods of the country population, which had at one time been the only gods worshipped by the Latin tribes, were practically nothing more than natural powers deities. and processes called by the names which naturally expressed them. The seed time, the harvest, the changes of

The Latin

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the seasons, the periods of human and other life, the garnering and grinding of grain, all these, with other incidents in the history of the revolving year, were marked by a particular name; and this name passed for that of the god by whom these processes were supposed to be wrought. But so thin was the disguise, that the growth of a Latin mythology, strictly so called, became almost impossible. We might as well imagine the growth of the infinitely complex mythology of the Greeks, if their minds had had to work only on such beings as Helios, Selênê, Astraios, Eos, Hersê, and others of a like transparent sort. For the Latins, their gods, although their name was legion, remained mysterious beings without human forms, feelings, or passions; and they influenced human affairs without sharing or having any sympathy with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had they, like the Greek deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no Olympos where they might gather to take counsel with the father of gods and men. They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring. They thus became a mere crowd of oppressive beings, living beyond the circle of human interests, yet constantly interfering within it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any under which the world has yet suffered. Not being associated with any definite bodily shapes, they could not, like the beautiful creations of the Greek mind, promote the growth of the highest art of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet. A spear or a stone might serve as the sign or emblem of their majesty or their presence; an inclosed space with an altar would be all that they would need as a temple. Thus, between them and their worshippers there was no real and direct connexion. Of the Eupatrid families among the Greeks the greater number, perhaps, traced their descent from Zeus himself or from some other god; no Roman patrician ever thought of proclaiming himself as the offspring of the cold and colourless beings who in solitary state presided over the processes and

working of the visible world. Nay, even in Rome itself the Greek deities remained only a fashion, and were honoured with an exotic worship. The true Roman ritual was that which had for its object the worshipping of the household gods; and these were practically the spirits of the founder of the house, and of those who had followed him in true hereditary succession. The religion of Roman life was influenced by the worship, not of the bright and joyous Phoebus, or of the virgin daughter of Zeus, but of the Lares and the Penates before that altar of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, which was the common heritage of the whole Aryan race. But in the literature of Rome the genuine deities of the country are so strangely confused or even jumbled up with the importations from the East, that it becomes difficult sometimes to assign each portion of material to its proper place. In some cases the characteristics of a Greek god have been fitted on to a Latin god with whose character they are inconsistent; but it is probable that even in the days of Ovid or Horace this confusion never troubled the country folk of Samnium or Calabria.'

Juno.

For these the omnipotent Jupiter remained, what he had always been, the god of the heaven or sky; 2 but of the vast mass of mythology which had grown up Jupiter and round his name elsewhere, the Latin peoples of the Italian peninsula knew nothing. His Oscan name Lucerius or Lucesius (corresponding to the Greek Lykios and Lykeios, as epithets of Phoebus) marks the bright shining firmament as his habitation. But the Latin tribes had, like the Greeks, a great aptitude for the multiplication of names; and thus in calling down lightning Jupiter was invoked under the name of Elicius; as giving rain, he was Jupiter Pluvius; as protecting boundaries, he was Jupiter Terminus, the Zeus Horios of the Greeks. In Latin literature he has for a wife Juno, with whose name (which answers to a Greek form Zenon) was coupled that of See note, p. 38.

1 1 See further, Ihne's History of Rome, book i. ch. xiii.

MYTHS OF THE DAWN.

53

Regina, as marking her sovereignty. As Juno Jugalis she presided over marriage; as the guardian of money and treasure, she was Juno Moneta, a name which gives us our money and mint, and which probably contains the same root with Minerva. The mythology for Juno in Virgil is not Italian; but her name is akin to that of Diana, which again is only the feminine form of Dianus or Janus. When the fashion for fitting all Greek mythology to Latin names came in, the little that is told of Artemis was transferred to Diana, with thus much of justification in this case that both are, like Janus or Dianus, the gods of the clear bright heaven. The name of the latter was mistakenly connected with the words dis, duo, two; and thus he was represented as having two faces which looked opposite ways.1

Dawn and the

It is more than possible that the idea of the Dawn as the herald of the sun before his rising, and as the bride who remains in the heaven mourning his early death,2 Myths of the took definite shape before that of the glistening Sun. firmament of day or of the nightly sky which descends upon the earth which it loves. The phenomena of the Dawn and the Evening Twilight soon suggested the thought of the great tragedy of nature. The Dawn appears, full of light, life, and love. For a few moments she seems to rejoice in the love of the newly-risen sun; but his splendour then becomes fatal to her, and she is seen no more, while he goes on his weary way, mourning for the love which he has lost, toiling for the benefit of weak and worthless men, and hurrying on to his home in the west where he knows that he shall behold the face of the radiant maiden whom he had deserted or driven away at the beginning of his career. She too has had her troubles. Her love has been sought

The gate of Janus at Rome (and it should be remembered that it was a gate, not a temple) was kept open in time of war, and shut in time of peace, and it is said to have been closed only six times in eight hundred years.

2 In the Iliad Eos ends as well as begins the day. Eos is the shining and burning goddess (see note, p. 29); and the word Dawn has precisely the same meaning. It belongs to the same family with the Sanskrit Dahanâ, the Greek Daphne, and Daïs, Lat. tæda, a torch.

by those who would make her faithless to her husband; but she comes forth scatheless from the ordeal, only to see the being to whom her heart is given smitten down by the blackness of death almost as soon as she is reunited to him. There seems to be little but woe everywhere. The glance of both the Dawn and the Sun is fatal. The latter looks upon the dew, and the sparkling drops vanish away. The former gazes on him after his day's journey is ended, and he is snatched away from her sight.

Framework

and materials

We have here an outline which might be filled in with a marvellous variety of forms and details, and it is more than possible that the framework of many of of these myths. the stories which have grown up from them may have been shaped before any clear ideas of the sky, the heaven, and the sun, as gods, presented themselves to the human mind. The separation of the Sun from the Dawn and his reunion with her would probably be marked by primitive men, before they reached any notion of the deity whose abode is the blue vault of the sky. The imagination might work the materials thus presented into a thousand shapes. The bride of the sun was seen with him at the end of his journey: she was seen again before he rose in the east. The union had therefore lasted during the hours of the night; but as his glance was fatal to her in the morning, it could have so lasted only because he was disguised or because he had assumed some other form. Hence would spring up the notion that the Dawn-maiden had been given in marriage to some unsightly monster; or that she had. been frightened by her kindred into the belief that she had been wedded to a loathsome being. A fact being given, a cause must be found for it; and the explanation might be that the mother of the Dawn-maiden was dead, and that her father's new wife shared the jealousy felt by her elder sisters for the good fortune of the youngest and the loveliest. The attempt to verify their suspicions would reveal to her the majesty and the beauty of her husband; but she would

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