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MYTHOLOGY.

genealogies they belong to as traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such as Mantinêus, Phigalos, Tegeatês, who, according to the simply inverting legend, are called founders of Mantinêa, Phigalia, Tegea. The father of King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land, Ægina; the city of Mykênai had not only an ancestress Mykênê, but an eponymic ancestor as well, Mykêneus. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe, stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others, by claiming as founders of Paris and Tours the Trojans Paris and Turnus, and connecting France and Britain with the Trojan war through Francus, son of Hector, and Brutus, great grandson of Æneas. A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in 'Blackstone's Commentaries:' when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one Zinganeus, whence the Turks called them Zinganees, but, being at length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton's mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He mentions in the beginning of his 'History of Britain,' the 'outlandish figment' of the four kings, Magus, Saron, Druis, and Bardus; he has no approval for the giant Albion, son of Neptune, who