aglow with colour, so does the funeral pyre of Heracles send out its light over the Ægean, from its _western_ shore. [Sidenote: Ares.] I believe Ares to have been once likewise a sun-god. The special home of his worship was warlike Macedon and Thrace. There can be no question, however, that in pre-historic times his worship was much more widely extended than we should suppose from reading Homer or the poets subsequent to Homer. Traces of his worship are to be found in the Zeus Areios at Elis, and in the Athenian Areopagus. But his natural home was in the North. He was the national divinity of the Thracians. And I have no doubt, as I have said, that he was once the sun-god of these Northern people, and only in later times became an abstraction, a god of war and valour. [Sidenote: Dêmêtêr.] Another deity who was distinctly of Aryan origin was Dêmêtêr (Ceres), a name which is, as we have said, probably, none other than Gêmêtêr, ‘mother earth.’ She is the Greek equivalent of the Prithvi of the Vedas. But whereas Prithvi has sunk into obscurity, Dêmêtêr was associated with some of the most important rites of Greek religion. The association of ideas which, face to face with the masculine godhead, the sun or sky, placed the fruitful all-nourishing earth, is so natural as to find a place in almost every system. We have seen how the two formed a part of the Egyptian and Chaldæan mythologies. And we have seen that each branch of the Aryan folk carried away along with their sky-and sun-worship this earth-worship also. But among none of the different branches was the great nature-myth which always gathers round the earth-goddess, woven into a more pathetic story than by the Greeks. The story is that of the winter death or sleep of earth, or of all that makes earth beautiful and glad. And it was thus the Greeks told that world-old legend. Persephone (Proserpina), or Corê, is the green earth, or the green verdure which may be thought the daughter of earth and sky. She is, indeed, almost the reduplication of Dêmêtêr herself; and in art it is not always easy to distinguish a representation as of one or of the other. At spring-time Persephone, a maiden, with her maidens, is wandering careless in the Nysian plain, plucking the flowers of spring, ‘crocuses and roses and fair violets,’[72] when in a moment all is changed. Hades, regent of Hell, rises in his black-horsed golden chariot; unheeding her cries, he carries her off to share his infernal throne and rule in the kingdoms of the dead. In other words, the awful shadow of death falls across the path of youth and spring, and Hades appears to proclaim the fateful truth that all spring-time, all youth and verdure, are alike with hoary age candidates for service in his Shadowy Kingdom. The sudden contrast between spring flowers and maidenhood and death gives a dramatic intensity to the scene and represents the quiet course of decay in one tremendous moment.[73] To lengthen out the picture and show the slow