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172 Memnon. of the case. It is as if one should say: Saint-worship, or divine honours paid to men deceased^ is a practice of which we find no mention in the writings of the Apostles. A Greek theologian would not only have denied that hero- worship was the same thing with divine honours paid to men deceased, but would have been able to point out a broad visible distinction between the honours paid to heroes and those paid to the gods, which must have prevented even the vulgar from confounding them. Hero-worship consisted in the repetition of certain funeral ceremonies, and may be said to have existed as soon as such repetitions began to be practised. At what period this practice arose is certainly a disputable question. Homer does not expressly mention it; nor does the word hero with him signify a person who was the object of it. But since his poems exhibit the feelings and opinions on which the practice was grounded in full force, there is strong reason, independent of those which might be deduced from the old Italian religion, to believe that it existed in the age they refer to, though it undoubtedly underwent many modifications both as to its form and its objects, before it became the hero-worship which we find prevailing in the historical period. But to return to the subi/jct. I find all the leading; fea- tures in the Greek legend of Memnon intimately connected together, and all springing naturally out of a single cause, the tradition of the presence of a great eastern warrior and conqueror in the west of Asia. If I should have succeeded in establishing this point, my inquiry would be here properly at an end. For this conclusion cannot be at all affected by the aspect which the legend presents among a different people, and least of all by the allusions made by ancient writers to the honours which Memnon received in Syria. In the first place considering the proximity of Egypt and Syria, and the early and frequent intercourse between the two countries, we might admit the probability of the supposition that the Egyptian Memnon was really worshipped in the places of which Jose- phus and Simonides spoke, and to which Oppian alludes, without being led to any further conclusion about the Mem- nonium on the ^Esepus. But on the other hand as we do not know what was the Syrian name of the person whose