All the Germanic races looked upon themselves as descended from gods. The Saxon, Anglian, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish kings were traced back either to Woden or to some of his companions or sons.[1] It was the same with the Greeks, to whom the Celts bear so close a similitude. Their Herakleids, Asklepiads, Æakids, Neleids, and Daedalids, are a close counterpart to our Eremonians, Eberians, Ithians, and Irians, and in each case all the importance was attached to the primitive eponymous hero or god from whom they sprang. Without him the whole pedigree became uninteresting, unfinished, headless. These beliefs exercised full power even upon the ablest and most cultured Greeks. Aristotle and Hippocratês, for instance, considered themselves descended from Asklêpius, Thucidydes from Æakus, and Socrates from Daedalus; just as O'Neill and O'Donnell did from Eremon, O'Brien from Eber, and Magennis from Ir. It was to the divine or heroic fountain heads of the race, not so much as to the long and mostly barren list of names which led up to it, that the real importance was attached. It is not in Ireland alone that we see mythology condensing into a dated genealogy. The same thing has happened in Persian history, and the history of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus affords many such instances. In Greece the Neleid family of Pylus traced their origin to Neptune, the Lacedæmonian kings traced theirs to Cadmus and Danaüs, and Hekatæus of Miletus was the fifteenth descendant of a god. Again we meet with in Teutonic and Hellenic mythology the same difficulty that meets us in our own--that of distinguishing gods from heroes and heroes from men. The legends of the Dagda and of Angus of the Boyne and the Tuatha De Danann, of Tighearnmas and the Fomorians, of Lugh the Long-handed and the children of Tuireann--all evidently mythologic--were treated in the same manner, recited by the same tongues, and regarded with the same unwavering belief, as the history of Conor mac Nessa and Déirdre, of Cuchulain and Mève, or that of Conn of the Hundred Battles, Owen Mór, Finn mac Cool, and the Fenians. The early Greek, in the same way, treated the stories of Apollo and Artemis, of Arês and Aphroditê, just as he did those of Diomede and Helen, Meleager and Althæa, Achilles, or the voyage of the _Argo_. All were in a primitive and uncritical age received with the same unsuspicious credulity, and there was no hard-and-fast line drawn between gods and men. Just as the Mórrígan, the war-goddess, has her eye dashed out by Cuchulain, so do we find in Homer gods wounded by heroes. Thus, too, Apollo is condemned to serve Admetus, and Hercules is sold as a slave to Omphalê. Herodotus himself confesses that he is unable to determine whether a certain Thracian god Zalmoxis, was a god or a man,[2] and he finds the same difficulty regarding Dionysus and Pan; while Plutarch refuses to determine whether Janus was a god or a king;[3] and Herakleitus the philosopher, confronted by the same