"Hail ye daughters of Jupiter! Grant a delightsome song. Tell of the race of immortal gods, always existing, Who are the offspring of the earth, of the starry sky, And of the gloomy night, whom also the ocean nourisheth. Tell how the gods and the earth at first were made, And the rivers, and the mighty deep, boiling with waves, And the glowing stars, and the broad heavens above, And the gods, givers of good, born of these." Where we see plainly that the generation of the gods is the generation of the earth, the heaven, the stars, the seas, the rivers, and other things produced by them. "But immediately after invocation of the Muses the poet begins with Chaos, and Tartara, and Love, as the first principles, and then proceeds to the production of the earth and of night out of chaos; of the ether and of day, from night; of the starry heavens, mountains, and seas. All which generation of gods is really nothing but a poetic description of the cosmogonia; as through the sequel of the poem all seems to be physiology veiled under fiction and allegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the world, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or abusively called gods and goddesses."[163] The same is true both of the Orphic and Homeric gods. "Their generation of the gods is the same with the generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all probability, derived it from the Mosaic cabala, or tradition."[164] But in spite of all this mythological obscuration, the belief in one Supreme God is here and there most clearly recognizable. "That Zeus was originally to the Greeks the Supreme God, the true God--nay, at some time their only God--can be perceived in spite of the haze which mythology has raised around his name."[165] True, they sometimes used the word "Zeus" in a physical sense to denote the deep expanse of heaven, and sometimes in a historic sense, to designate a hero or deified man said to have been born in Crete. It is also true that the Homeric Zeus is full of contradictions. He is "all-seeing," yet he is cheated; he is "omnipotent," yet he is defied; he is "eternal," yet he has a father; he is "just," yet he is guilty of crime. Now, as Müller very justly remarks, these contradictions may teach us a lesson. If all the conceptions of Zeus had sprung from one origin, these contradictions could not have existed. If Zeus had simply and only meant the Supreme God, he could not have been the son of Kronos (Time). If, on the other hand, Zeus had been a mere mythological personage, as Eos, the dawn, and Helios, the sun, he could never have been addressed as he is addressed in the famous prayer of Achilles (Iliad, bk. xxi.).[166] [Footnote 163: Cudworth, vol. i. pp. 321, 332.] [Footnote 164: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 478.] [Footnote 165: Max Müller, "Science of Language," p. 457.] [Footnote 166: Id., ib., p. 458.]