They had three dialects: the Doric, distinguished by a broader pronunciation; the Ionic, possessed of softness and a melodious richness; and the Æolic, a kind of mixture without a special character. The Dorians came southwards from the hoary mountains of Thessaly, and gained step by step an influence and dominion over the other tribes of Greece. The Ionians occupied the east, and were considered the connecting link between Hellas and Asia; but whatever the Hellenes took from Byblos, Sidon, Tyros or the Libanon, assumed a really Hellenic form, after it had passed through the purifying element of Doric correctness. The south gave _ideas_, and the north brought them into _form_. Whatever the Hellenes touched they beautified. The powerful giant Bhîma of the Mahâbhârata is the prototype of Herakles; but in the myths concerning Herakles we recognise the mere personification of commercial daring and enterprise. Accompanied by his dog, he finds the cochineal; the goblet in which he sails to Erytheia is but the Phœnician merchantman; the Phœnicians are referred to, when it is recorded of him that he had broken the devastating horn of the mountain-streams. Moloch, to whom Assyrians, Indians and Hebrews sacrificed, without ever being capable of investing the fire-spitting monster with anything like poetry, was destroyed by Herakles. The gods of Asia became with the Hellenes demons, from whom they learned some useful trades. Poseidon, the god of the sea, is, like the element over which he rules and in which he dwells, of a sinister, implacable character; he requires human sacrifices, annihilates horses (meaning ships), in fact does, as incarnate divinity, what the sea does in our own times. The Titans are acquainted with astronomy, and are personifications of a certain knowledge in maritime matters. Proteus, the Egyptian Pharaoh, is with them the keeper of the seas, and Atlas the father of nautical astronomy, and both were companions of the Tyrean Herkules. In all the myths and legends of the Greeks we can trace some facts. The divinity they could only comprehend in the well-proportioned form of a human being, and a hero or benefactor of humanity became with them a divinity. This blending into one of the divine and human is the most important feature in Greek thought. Vishnu and Osiris also became incarnate--but their deeds were supernatural; the principal feature of their ‘man-godhead,’ or ‘divine manhood,’ is an incomprehensible mysticism. Their anthropomorphism had in it something gloomy. When the divine Apollo uttered the memorable words: ‘_Man, know thyself_,’ the Greeks became suddenly conscious of the inborn spark of the divine intellect in man; the gods were intelligible to them, and the Asiatic world of abstractions emerged in a thousand different human forms of divine conceptions.