Greek mythology had its source in the legends of a remote antiquity,—­probably among the Pelasgians, the early inhabitants of Greece, which they brought with them in their migration from their original settlement, or perhaps from Egypt and Phoenicia.  Herodotus—­and he is not often wrong—­ascribes a great part of the mythology which the Greek poets elaborated to a Phoenician or Egyptian source.  The legends have also some similarity to the poetic creations of the ancient Persians, who delighted in fairies and genii and extravagant exploits, like the labors of Hercules The faults and foibles of deified mortals were transmitted to posterity and incorporated with the attributes of the supreme divinity, and hence the mixture of the mighty and the mean which marks the characters of the Iliad and Odyssey.  The Greeks adopted Oriental fables, and accommodated them to those heroes who figured in their own country in the earliest times.  “The labors of Hercules originated in Egypt, and relate to the annual progress of the sun in the zodiac.  The rape of Proserpine, the wanderings of Ceres, the Eleusinian mysteries, and the orgies of Bacchus were all imported from Egypt or Phoenicia, while the wars between the gods and the giants were celebrated in the romantic annals of Persia.  The oracle of Dodona was copied from that of Ammon in Thebes, and the oracle of Apollo at Delphos has a similar source.”

Behind the Oriental legends which form the basis of Grecian mythology there was, in all probability, in those ancient times before the Pelasgians were known as Ionians and the Hellenes as Dorians, a mystical and indefinite idea of supreme power,—­as among the Persians, the Hindus, and the esoteric priests of Egypt.  In all the ancient religions the farther back we go the purer and loftier do we find the popular religion.  Belief in supreme deity underlies all the Eastern theogonies, which belief, however, was soon perverted or lost sight of.  There is great difference of opinion among philosophers as to the origin of myths,—­whether they began in fable and came to be regarded as history, or began as human history and were poetized into fable.  My belief is that in the earliest ages of the world there were no mythologies.  Fables were the creations of those who sought to amuse or control the people, who have ever delighted in the marvellous.  As the magnificent, the vast, the sublime, which was seen in Nature, impressed itself on the imagination of the Orientals and ended in legends, so did allegory in process of time multiply fictions and fables to an indefinite extent; and what were symbols among Eastern nations became impersonations in the poetry of Greece.  Grecian mythology was a vast system of impersonated forces, beginning with the legends of heroes and ending with the personification of the faculties of the mind and the manifestations of Nature, in deities who presided over festivals, cities, groves, and mountains, with all the infirmities of human nature,