The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer--Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features--The hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals--Are there other examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions?--Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage--Illustrations of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries--Conclusion: that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths.
The Greeks, when we first make their acquaintance in the Homeric poems, were a cultivated people, dwelling, under the government of royal families, in small city states. This social condition they must have attained by 1000 B.C., and probably much earlier. They had already a long settled past behind them, and had no recollection of any national migration from the "cradle of the Aryan race". On the other hand, many tribes thought themselves earth-born from the soil of the place where they were settled. The Maori traditions prove that memories of a national migration may persist for several hundred years among men ignorant of writing.
Greek legend, among a far more civilised race, only spoke of occasional foreign settlers from Sidon, Lydia, or Egypt. The Homeric Greeks were well acquainted with almost all the arts of life, though it is not absolutely certain that they could write, and certainly they were not addicted to reading. In war they fought from chariots, like the Egyptians and Assyrians; they were bold seafarers, being accustomed to harry the shores even of Egypt, and they had large commercial dealings with the people of Tyre and Sidon. In the matter of religion they were comparatively free and unrestrained. Their deities, though, in myth, capricious in character, might be regarded in many ways as "making for righteousness". They protected the stranger and the suppliant;they sanctioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned arrows; marriage and domestic life were guarded by their good-will;they dispensed good and evil fortune, to be accepted with humility and resignation among mortals.
The patriarchal head of each family performed the sacrifices for his household, the king for the state, the ruler of Mycenae, Agamemnon, for the whole Achaean host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable influence, due partly to an hereditary gift of second-sight, as in the case of Theoclymenus, partly to acquired professional skill in observing omens, partly to the direct inspiration of the gods. The oracle at Delphi, or, as it is called by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, and religion recognised, in various degrees, all the gods familiar to the later cult of Hellas.
In a people so advanced, so much in contact with foreign races and foreign ideas, and so wonderfully gifted by nature with keen intellect and perfect taste, it is natural to expect, if anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive elements, and almost purged of all that we regard as survivals from the condition of savagery.
But while Greek mythology is richer far than any other in beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and majestic forms of gods and goddesses, nymphs and oreads ideally fair, none the less a very large proportion of its legends is practically on a level with the myths of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen.
Odyssey, xx. 354.
This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all times excited most curiosity, and has been made the subject of many systems of interpretation. The Greeks themselves, from almost the earliest historical ages, were deeply concerned either to veil or explain away the blasphemous horrors of their own "sacred chapters," poetic traditions and temple legends. We endeavour to account for these as relics of an age of barbarism lying very far behind the time of Homer--an age when the ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or more probably developed for themselves, the kind of myths by which savage peoples endeavour to explain the nature and origin of the world and all phenomena.