In this connection it is interesting to remember that in Homer the men were regarded as the means of revealing ideas and characters, and not as mere natural objects in themselves.  The things among which they lived are described and known by their appearances; the men are known by their words and deeds.  “There is no inventory of the features of men, or of fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline or in modern novels.  Man is something different from a curious bit of workmanship that delights the eye.  He is a ‘speaker of words and a doer of deeds,’ and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought and emotion.”  Thus, from the first, ideas are the central and important element.  They spring from and cling to stories of individual human lives, and the finest of them become ideals handed down for the guidance of the future race.  The myths, with their stories of gods and men, and their implied or declared religious doctrines, are but the forms in which these ideals find expression.  The ideals remain, but the forms of their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture.  Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,—­dwelling, like Plato’s, in heaven,—­and there are always two alternatives for every man.  He may go back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints.  In the former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist.  In what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous Greek legends—­those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo—­in the light of what has just been stated.

Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had fought on the side of Zeus.  It is, however, through the medium of the later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the thought of men.  In this form of the legend he appears constantly living and striving for man’s sake as the foe of God.  We hear of him making men and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire, teaching them the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses of plants.  Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men—­the new divinity making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better material.  Zeus is the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and from the earth with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift of fire, leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness.  Then it is that Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane, and brings it down to earth again.  For this benefaction to the despised race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock in the Asian Caucasus, where, until Herakles comes to deliver him, the vulture preys upon his liver.