The matter just set forth is far from being new doctrine; but for the general reader it must be constantly re-emphasized, because it is constantly forgotten. We continually find the Greek myths discussed in terms that would be true only of the Gospel narratives, and we see the Greek gods described as though they possessed the sharpness of personal outline which the Deity has in the minds of believing Christians. It is no doubt the extant literature—a florilegium at best—that is at fault in the matter. This literature, it must be remembered, was not preserved altogether by accident. To a large extent it represents a conscious selection, made for pedagogic purposes. The relative coherence which Greek myths have for us is due to the fact that the surviving poems and dramas which contain them were selected, partially at least, by Hellenistic and Byzantine schoolmasters in order to fit into a set cycle or scheme. Even in what we have there is abundant evidence that the myths about the gods could pretend to no sanctity for anybody, devout or scoffer, for the simple reason that they negated themselves, that widely differing and hopelessly contradictory stories were told of the same event or person. In reality the Greek myths were not coherent. It is hard to discover in many of them a folkloristic kernel that had to be kept intact. Almost everywhere we are dealing with the free fantasies of highly imaginative poets. So fully was this understood that the stories most familiar to us are generally alluded to in serious Greek literature with an apologetic, ὡς oἱ ποιηταί φασι, “as the poets say,” or some similar phrase. And as these stories were largely unrelated, so also were the gods of whom they were told, even though they bore the same name. If mythographers had taken the trouble to collect all the stories known of any one god—Hermes, for example—there would be nothing except the common name to indicate that they referred to the same chief actor, and much that, except for the common name, would be referred to different gods. Not even a single prominent trait, not a physical feature, would be found to run through all the myths so collected. So far we have been dealing with extant literature. But if the more recondite notices of popular superstition are taken into account, as well as the archeological discoveries, we meet such figures as Demeter, Artemis, Apollo,[8] in various and curious forms and associations, so that one might be tempted to suppose that these highly individualized figures of poetry were, in the shrines in which they were worshiped, hardly more than divine appellatives of rather vague content. And on the islands of the Aegean, in Crete and Cyprus, where the continuity between Aegean, Mycenean, and Hellenic civilization[9] was perhaps less disturbed by convulsive upheavals, this seems especially to have been the case.