Their capacity to attract new ones.
4. In conformity with the last-named indication is another, which I have next to notice. The traditive god is capable of receiving new functions; apparently because he is not the servant of the old ones: but the deity who is a mere personal expression for a certain idea, can, as a general rule, have no duty or prerogative beyond its bounds, more than can a counter beyond the thing which it has been chosen to signify. Hence Vulcan, Venus, Mars, Ceres, Bacchus, even Mercury, the god of gain, continue, after as well as in Homer, to be devoted to and identified with their several functions. Only in the case of Mercury, as traffic involves motion from place to place, and the acts of both honest and dishonest persuasion, he is in Homer, and he afterwards continues to be more generally, a messenger and conductor, a negotiator and a rhetorician, as well as a thief. But even Juno, elevated as she is in station, yet, having been called into Olympus as a vehicle for conveying the idea of maternity, continues to be charged with that office, and is not specifically invested with any other. Such attributions as are implied in the Venus Victrix, or other like dedications, are indeed at variance with these propositions; but they belong to a later and greatly altered state of the old mythology, when it had reached to an immeasurable distance from its source, and had lost the traces even of its own early features. But in the cases of Apollo and Minerva, we perceive that the traditive deity was not thus ‘cabined, cribbed, confined.’
We find the Apollo of Homer the deity of the following particular functions:
1. The lyre and poetry, Il. i. 603.
2. Divination, Il. i. 72.
3. Healing, Il. xvi. 517.
4. The bow, Il. i. 49. ii. 827.
5. Death, either gentle and painless, or not referable to any known cause, such as ordinary disease or wounds.
Besides all this, he may be called, with Pallas, the god of Help in general; and, even within the range of single attributes, he shews an immense diversity. He was the god at once of the severe and simple music of the Dorians[232], and of the rabid ecstasy of the Pythoness.
It is hardly possible that he could have begun his career in the Greek mythology with such an assemblage of functions, not only not united by any obvious tie, but some of them in apparent contradiction with one another. Probably the constitutive ideas of the tradition he represented were fitted out by a gradual process with this outward apparatus of prerogatives; each of which, when taken singly, was in harmony with them. Nor was the operation completed even in the time of Homer, as we see from the curious case of the Sun.