It will hereafter be shewn, that, like Latona and Apollo in particular, Minerva in Pagan fiction represents a disguised and solitary fragment of the true primeval tradition[216]. All such deities we may expect to find, and we do find, transmitted from the old Pelasgians into the mythologies both of Greece and Rome, or those common to Pelasgian and Hellene. We expect to find, and we do find, them worshipped both among the Greeks and among the Trojans as gods, not of this or that nation, but of the great human family. In theory, exclusive regard to the one side or the other comports far better with the idea of such deities as represent unruly passions or propensities of our nature like Mars and Venus, or Mercury; or chief physical forces like Neptune; or such as, like Juno, are the sheer product of human imagination reflected upon the world above, and have no relation to any element or part of a true theology. But the Homeric Jupiter, in so far as he is a representative of supreme power and unity, and the Pallas and Apollo of the poems by a certain moral elevation, and by various incidents of their birth or attributes, show a nobler parentage[217]. In the capacity of a traditive deity, Minerva is with perfect consistency worshipped alike among Trojans and Greeks, Hellenic and Pelasgian tribes. There is nothing strange, then, in our finding her the patroness of a Pelasgian people. The only strangeness is her being (if so she was) more specially their patroness than of any other people. The very fact that, for the purposes of the war, Homer gives her to the Greeks, might perhaps have prepared us to expect that we should find her special domicile among the Hellic portions of that nation: but it supplies no absolute and conclusive reason for such a domicile. But I close the discussion with these observations. In the first place, the Pelasgian character of the Athenians in early times is established by evidence too strong to be countervailed by any such inference as we should be warranted in drawing to a contrary effect from the special connection with Minerva. Again, it may be that the connection of both with Hercules may contain a solution of the difficulty. But lastly, if, as we shall find reason to believe, the traditive deities were the principal gods of ancient Greece, and if the entrance of the Hellic tribes brought in many new claimants upon the divine honours, it may after all seem not unreasonable that we should find, in one of the most purely Pelasgian States, the worship of this great traditive deity less obscured than elsewhere by competition with that of the invaders, and consequently in more peculiar and conspicuous honour. An examination of the etymology of certain names in Homer will hereafter, I trust, confirm these reasonings on the Athens of the heroic age: with this exception, we may now bid adieu to the investigation of the Homeric evidence of Pelasgianism in Attica. _Post-Homeric evidence._