The fable of Time devouring his children, and then reproducing them, evidently means the vicissitudes of customs and the departure and return of fashions.  Whatever is born must die; but what has been will be again.  That Eros, Love, should be at the origin of things from chaos, indicates the primeval attraction with which the order of the universe begins.  The mutilation of Uranos, Heaven, so that he ceased to produce children, suggests the change of the system of emanation, by which the gods descend from the infinite, into that of evolution, by which they arise out of the finite.  It is, in fact, the end of Asia, and the beginning of Europe; for emanation is the law of the theologies of Asia, evolution that of Europe.  Aphrodite, Beauty, was the last child of the Heavens, and yet born from the Ocean.  Beauty is not the daughter of the Heavens and the Earth, but of the Heavens and the Ocean.  The lights and shadows of the sky, the tints of dawn, the tenderness of clouds, unite with the toss and curve of the wave in creating Beauty.  The beauty of outline appears in the sea, that of light and color in the sky.[227]

Sec. 4.  The Gods of the Poets.

Herodotus says (II. 53), “I am of opinion that Hesiod and Homer lived four hundred years before my time, and not more, and these were they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to them honors and arts, and declared their several forms.  But the poets, said to be before them, in my opinion, were after them.”

That two poets should create a theology and a worship for a great people, and so unite its separate tribes into a commonwealth of united states, seems to modern minds an absurdity.  But the poets of Greece were its prophets.  They received, intensified, concentrated, the tendencies of thought already in the air.  All the drift was toward Pan-Hellenic worship and to a humanized theology, when the Homeric writers sang their song.

The Greeks must be conceived of as a nation of poets; hence all their mythology was poetry.  Poetry was their life and joy, written or unwritten, sung or spoken.  They were poets in the deeper sense of the word; not by writing verses, but by looking at all nature and all life from its poetic side.  Their exquisite mythology arose out of these spontaneous instincts.  The tendency of the Greek mind was to vitalize and harmonize nature.[228]

All the phenomena of nature, all the powers of the human soul, and all the events of life, became a marvellous tissue of divine story.  They walked the earth, surrounded and overshadowed by heavenly attendants and supernatural powers.  But a striking peculiarity of this immense spiritualism was that it was almost without superstition.  Their gods were not their terror, but their delight.  Even the great gods of Olympus were around them as invisible companions.  Fate itself, the dark Moira, supreme power, mistress of gods and men, was met manfully and not timorously.  So strong was the human element, the sense of personal dignity and freedom, that the Greek lived in the midst of a supernatural world on equal terms.