The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

RISE OF CRITICISM

9

incredulity. This spirit is revealed, as Mr. Murray
has well shown, in some late parts of the Iliad,
especially in the episode of the Beguiling of Zeus;
it appears in the Odyssey in the lay of Demodocus,
which tells of the punishment of Ares and
Aphrodite by the injured husband Hephaestus.
Such tendencies to scepticism, evolved by the
Ionian temper, were reinforced by the rise of
Ionian science and philosophy. Science and
philosophy meant criticism, and it would not be
long before criticism which the early thinkers
applied to the material world would be systematically applied to human tradition also, and the
result would be, in some form or other, the
distinction of history from myth.
At the same time the mythopoeic instinct of
the Greeks was still potent and still felicitous in
its operation. But myth assumed a new shape.
Supernatural beings no longer appeared upon the
stage; and, with the exception of oracles, omens,
and visions, the supernatural mise en scene was
discarded. Fictions gathered round historical
persons, contemporary or recent, but all these
stories, such as the saving of Cypselus, the wooers
of Agarista, the ring of Polycrates, kept well
within the fence of the possibilities of human
experience. They are not in the crude sense
incredible, a'rrta-a 7rO rcaO' ieasx 3le1. This new order
of myths corresponds to a new interest, which we
might call the philosophy of life; it is reflected in
the gnomic poetry of the period. Sages have