In Greece it would seem that the chief religious influences came from Zeus (Jupiter[69]) and Apollo, and belonged, as appears, to two separate branches of the same race who came together to form the Hellenic people. The ancestors of the Greeks had, we know, travelled from the Aryan home by a road which took them south of the Black Sea, and on to the table-land of Asia Minor. So far a comparison of names and traditions shows them advancing in a compact body. Here they separated; and, after a stay of some centuries, during which a part had time to mingle with the Semitic people of the land, they pushed forward, some across the Hellespont and round that way by land through Thrace and Thessaly, spreading as they went down to the extremity of the peninsula; others to the western coast of Asia Minor, and then, when through the lapse of years they had learnt their art from the Phœnician navigators who frequented all that land, onward from island to island, as over stepping-stones, across the Ægean. [Sidenote: Zeus.] The Pelasgic Zeus, however, is not quite the same being as is the Zeus whom we are to fancy as the supreme god of the Hellenic race. This last, we know, is called the Olympic Zeus. The Pelasgic god is a being who loves solitary mountain heights or dark groves of trees. In this aspect of his character he is very like the chief divinity of the Northmen, Odin. And there can be no doubt that in his nature he is a god of storms and wind. He is not the clear sky, as is the Vedic Dyâus (from the root _div_, shining), and as had once been the supreme god of the Aryan race. From that condition to the condition of a god of storms, Zeus had already passed before we catch any sight of him under this name Zeus--in other words, before we catch any sight of _him_ at all. These Pelasgi were before all things the worshippers of pure nature. Theirs were all those primitive elements in the Greek religion which were caught up into the more developed creed, and, though they were softened in the process of amalgamation with it, still showed above its surface as masses of rock show upon a hillside, albeit they are covered over by a thin covering of green. Those strange half-human beings like Pan, the Arcadian god, like the Thessalian centaurs,--these belong to the primitive creed of the Greeks. So long as they were confounded with the phenomena of nature in which they took their rise, they were, in every sense, natural enough. But when art took possession of them, and tried to body them forth in visible shapes, they became monsters, unformed, neither man nor beast.