in order to secure a draught of the precious drink. Nor does the parallel end there, or with the fact that in all three cases the benefactor of man had to undergo dire punishment for what he had done. It extends to details; for Prometheus, like Woden and Gwydion, created human beings, and it was only with the friendly aid of Athene that he got access to heaven to steal the fire he conferred on them. And in spite of the highly respectable character usually ascribed to the grey-eyed goddess, the scandal found its way into Greek literature, that Prometheus' relations with her were somewhat like those of Woden with Gundfled, and that it was for his amours with the divine spinster that he was so terribly punished by her father Zeus.[1] Here, however, the similarity is somewhat more concentrated than between Gwydion, Woden and Ulysses, where it is found to extend to the general character of the chief figures in the stories and to some of the incidents associated with them, as, for example, the tale of Ulysses visiting the island of Polyphemus and his journey to the nether world. But in all probability the parallel appeared still more striking to the pagans of Italy and Greece in the first and second centuries; this, at any rate, is the inference I should draw from a passage in the third chapter of the Germania of Tacitus, in which he states that the Germans had traditions about a Hercules of their own, whom they hymned above all other mighty men of valour in the songs which they used to sing when about to engage in battle, and that it was the notion of some, that Ulysses, borne, in the course of the wanderings ascribed to him in story,
- ↑ See the Scholiast on Apollonius' Arg. ij. 1249; Servius, Com. in Vergil. Ecl. vi. 42.
