Professor Kortüm also affirms that the mythes contain “real matter of fact along with mere conceptions:” which affirmation is the same as that of the Quarterly Reviewer, when he says that the mythopœic faculty is not creative. Taking the mythes in the mass, I doubt not that this is true, nor have I anywhere denied it. Taking them one by one, I neither affirm nor deny it. My position is, that, whether there be matter of fact or not, we have no test whereby it can be singled out, identified, and severed from the accompanying fiction. And it lies upon those, who proclaim the practicability of such severance, to exhibit some means of verification better than any which has been yet pointed out. If Thucydidês has failed in doing this, it is certain that none of the many authors who have made the same attempt after him have been more successful.
It cannot surely be denied that the mythopœic faculty is creative, when we have before us so many divine legends, not merely in Greece, but in other countries also. To suppose that these religious legends are mere exaggerations, etc. of some basis of actual fact—that the gods of polytheism were merely divinized men, with qualities distorted or feigned—would be to embrace in substance the theory of Euêmerus.
[947] Diodôr. xv. 89. He was a contemporary of Alexander the Great.
[948] Diodôr. iv. 1. Strabo, ix. p. 422, ἐπιτιμήσας τοῖς φιλομυθοῦσιν ἐν τῇ τῆς ἱστωρίας γραφῇ.
[949] Ephorus recounted the principal adventures of Hêraklês (Fragm. 8, 9, ed. Marx.), the tales of Kadmus and Harmonia (Fragm. 12), the banishment of Ætôlus from Elis (Fragm. 15; Strabo, viii. p. 357); he drew inferences from the chronology of the Trojan and Theban wars (Fragm. 28); he related the coming of Dædalus to the Sikan king Kokalus, and the expedition of the Amazons (Fragm. 99-103).
He was particularly copious in his information about κτίσεις, ἀποικίαι and συγγενείαι (Polyb. ix. 1).
[950] Strabo, i. p. 74.
[951] Dionys. Halic. De Vett. Scriptt. Judic. p. 428, Reisk; Ælian, V. H. iii. 18, Θεόπομπος ... δεινὸς μυθόλογος.
Theopompus affirmed, that the bodies of those who went into the forbidden precinct (τὸ ἄβατον) of Zeus, in Arcadia, gave no shadow (Polyb. xvi. 12). He recounted the story of Midas and Silênus (Fragm. 74, 75, 76, ed. Wichers); he said a good deal about the heroes of Troy; and he seems to have assigned the misfortunes of the Νόστοι to an historical cause—the rottenness of the Grecian ships, from the length of the siege, while the genuine epic ascribes it to the anger of Athênê (Fragm. 112, 113, 114; Schol. Homer. Iliad, ii. 135); he narrated an alleged expulsion of Kinyras from Cyprus by Agamemnôn (Fragm. 111); he gave the genealogy of the Macedonian queen Olympias up to Achilles and Æakus (Fragm. 232).
[952] Cicero, Epist. ad Familiar. v. 12; Xenophôn de Venation. c. 1.