CHAPTER II. _MYTHOLOGY._ The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.--Homer and Hesiod.--Mythology before Homer.--Supposed Conditions of the Mythopoeic Age.--Vico.--The Childhood of the World.--Goethe's Boyhood.--Mythology is a Body of Rudimentary Thought, Penetrated with the Spirit of the Nation.--Different Views of the Greek Myths.--Grote.--Relics of a Primitive Revelation.--The Symbolic Hypothesis.--Rationalism and Euhemerus.--Fetichism.--Poetic Theory.--The Linguistic Theory.--Comparative Philology.--Solar Theory.--The Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation--its Ethical Significance.--Summary of the Points Suggested with Regard to Mythology.--Mediæval Myths.--The Action of the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art--in Philosophy.--Persistence of the National Polytheism.--Homer Allegorized at Alexandria.--Triumph of Christianity.--The Greek Pantheon in the Middle Ages.--Greek Mythology Recovers Poetic and Artistic Value in the Renaissance. It has been remarked with justice that, when we use the word mythology, we are too apt to think of a Pantheon, of a well-defined hierarchy of gods and demigods and heroes, all fabulous indeed, but all arranged in one coherent system. This conception of Greek mythology arises partly from the fact that we learn to know it in dictionaries, compiled from the works of authors who lived long after the age in which myths were produced, and partly from the fact that the conditions under which myth-making was a possibility are so far removed from us as to be almost unintelligible. Yet there is some truth in what, upon the whole, is an erroneous view. Although the Greek myths, in their origin, were not a well-digested system, still they formed a complete body of national thought, on which the intelligence of the Greek race, in its art and its religion, was continually working, until it took the final form in which we have it in our dictionaries. What remained in the Pantheon of Apollodorus and Hyginus, remained there by no freak of accident. What was omitted by Homer and by Hesiod was omitted by no operation of blind chance. The spirit of the Greeks was concerned in the purification and the preservation of their myths, and the unity of that spirit constitutes the unity of their mythology.