We may, I apprehend, view that case in either of two aspects. We may consider what was historically the progress of the traditions concerning the Sun from their source to their maturity, when they were incorporated into the comprehensive deity of Apollo: or we may examine the moral affinities, which determined the direction and conclusion of their career.
Historically, I presume that the Homeric tradition of the Sun represents a separate and recent importation from a foreign country, which had not as yet been fitted into a place of its own in the Greek mythology. It therefore wanders as it were unappropriated, and hangs in temporary suspense.
The Apollo had already undergone a formative process, and the ornaments of fancy had been embroidered upon the tissue of an ancient tradition. After Homer’s time, the function of animating and governing the Sun was added to the multifarious offices of that deity. As respects himself, this is a proof that his receptiveness was not yet exhausted; that he was independent and disengaged. As respects the Ἠέλιος, this result shows that there was some sympathy or moral gravitation, which led to the absorption of this Homeric divinity in Apollo.
The oscillating condition of that conception in the Homeric poems, and the indeterminate state of its affinities, will be considered in the next Section.
Wide range of their functions.
In Homer the deities of invention are, without an exception, limited either to a single function (and this in the great majority of cases), or to functions which are connected, as in the case of Mercury, with one common and central idea, itself such as may belong to a mythological formation. But there is no such idea on which, as on a string, we can possibly hang all the various attributes of Homer’s Apollo: and the case becomes stronger when we find that it is this very god, already (if he be mythological only) quite overstocked, who shows a yet further capacity to absorb into his own person new powers of divinity, which in Homer’s time as yet stood apart from him.
As respects mere multiplicity and diversity of function, the case of Minerva is somewhat less marked than that of Apollo: for it may be practicable to associate together all her offices as they are described in Homer, around one grand combination of Power with Wisdom, as their central point. But even then, when we consider that she supremely administers political society, personal conduct, war, and skilled industry, in fact that the whole intelligence of the world, individual and collective, appears to be under her paramount guidance, besides all the power she exercises over inanimate and animate nature, and even in the innermost sphere of personal action, we perceive that, apart from the elevation and glory of her position, the range of her gifts goes to an extent which, simply as such, could never have been assigned by mere human invention to any deity but the supreme one. The idea of the goddess of Wisdom, conceived as largely as it must be in order to cover all Minerva’s Homeric attributes, leaves no room for the other conceptions necessary to fit out a mythology.
For what a range do these attributes include!
Minerva is in heaven armed with such power that to none of the gods, except Jove only, and to him scarcely, does she succumb. She is supreme in war, supreme in policy, supreme in art; supreme in prudence and the practical business of life; supreme in manual skill; supreme in or over all contests of force: while at the same time the lower and executory parts of each of these functions, where she drops them, are taken up, as we have seen, by deities far inferior to her, though still of the first or Olympian order. Even physical strength, if combined with skill, is under her supreme management: for it is through her aid that Tydeus wins in the games at Thebes[233], as well as Mecisteus on another occasion, and that Nestor conquers Ereuthalion[234].