They (ii. 735) begin by pointing out Artemis’s connection with Apollo and the moon.  So do I!  ’If Apollo soon disengages himself from the sun . . . Artemis retains as few traces of any connection with the moon.’ {143e} ‘If Apollo was of solar origin,’ asks the author (ii. 735), ’what could his sister Artemis have been, from the very beginning, if not some goddess connected with the moon?’ Very likely; quis negavit?  Then our author, like myself (loc. cit.), dilates on Artemis as ’sister of Apollo.’  ‘Her chapels,’ I say, ’are in the wild wood; she is the abbess of the forest nymphs,’ ‘chaste and fair, the maiden of the precise life.’  How odd!  The classical scholar and I both say the same things; and I add a sonnet to Artemis in this aspect, rendered by me from the Hippolytus of Euripides.  Could a classical scholar do more?  Our author then says that the Greek sportsman ‘surprised the beasts in their lairs’ by night.  Not very sportsmanlike!  I don’t find it in Homer or in Xenophon.  Oh for exact references!  The moon, the nocturnal sportswoman, is Artemis:  here we have also the authority of Theodore de Banville (Diane court dans la noire foret).  And the nocturnal hunt is Dian’s; so she is protectress of the chase.  Exactly what I said! {144a}

All this being granted by me beforehand (though possibly that might not be guessed from my critic), our author will explain Artemis’s human sacrifice of a girl in a fawn-skin—­bloodshed, bear and all—­with no aid from Kamilarois, Cahrocs, and Samoans.

Mr. Max Muller’s Explanation

Greek races traced to Zeus—­usually disguised, for amorous purposes, as a brute.  The Arcadians had an eponymous heroic ancestor, ‘Areas;’ they also worshipped Artemis.  Artemis, as a virgin, could not become a mother of Areas by Zeus, or by anybody.  Callisto was also Artemis.  Callisto was the mother of Areas.  But, to save the character of Artemis, Callisto was now represented as one of her nymphs.  Then, Areas reminding the Arcadians of [Greek] (a bear), while they knew the Bear constellation, ’what was more natural than that Callisto should be changed into an arktos, a she-bear . . . placed by Zeus, her lover, in the sky’ as the Bear?

Nothing could be more natural to a savage; they all do it. {144b} But that an Aryan, a Greek, should talk such nonsense as to say that he was the descendant of a bear who was changed into a star, and all merely because ‘Areas reminded the Arcadians of arktos,’ seems to me an extreme test of belief, and a very unlikely thing to occur.

Wider Application of the Theory