Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and Girls — John Shaqi
Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and GirlsBailey, Carolyn Sherwin
General
Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and Girls
Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin
Mythology, Classical -- Juvenile literature
Long ago, when our earth was more than two thousand years younger, there
was a wonderful place called Mount Olympus at the top of the world that
the ancients could see quite clearly with the eyes of hope and faith. It
did not matter that the Greek and Roman people had never set foot on
this mountain in the clouds. They knew it in story and reverenced the
gods and goddesses who inhabited it.
In the days when the myths were told, Greece was a more beautiful
country than any that is the result of civilization to-day, because the
national ideal of the Greeks was beauty and they expressed it in
whatever they thought, or wrote, or made with their hands. No matter how
far away from home the Greeks journeyed they remembered with pride and
love their blue bays and seacoast, the fertile valleys and sheep
pastures of Arcadia, the sacred grove of Delphi, those great days when
their athletes met for games and races at Athens, and the wide plains of
Olympia covered and rich with the most perfect temples and statues that
the world has ever known. When the Greeks returned the most beloved
sight that met their eyes was the flag of their nation flying at
Corinth, or the towers of the old citadel that Cadmus had founded at
Thebes.
It was the youth time of men, and there were no geographies or histories
or books of science to explain to the ancients those things about life
that everyone wants to know sooner or later. There was this same longing
for truth among the Roman people as well as among the Greeks. The
Romans, also, loved their country, and built temples as the Greeks did,
every stone of which they carved and fitted as a stepping stone on the
way to the abode of the gods.
But who were these gods, and what did a belief in their existence mean
to the Greek and Roman people?
There have been certain changes in two thousand years on our earth. We
have automobiles instead of chariots, our ships are propelled by steam
instead of by a favorable wind, and we have books that attempt to tell
us why spring always follows winter and that courage is a better part
than cowardice. But we still have hard winters and times when it is most
difficult to be brave. We still experience war and famine and crime,
and peace and plenty and love in just about the same measure that they
were to be found in Greece and Rome. The only difference is that we are
a little closer to understanding life than the ancients were. They tried
to find a means of knowing life facts and of explaining the miracles of
outdoors and of ruling their conduct by their daily intercourse with
this higher race of beings, the gods, on Mount Olympus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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