INTRODUCTION
as they already existed in the mind of an Athenian citizen, when he took his seat in the theatre twenty-three centuries ago.
The ideas of the Greeks as to what happened in the marvellous childhood of the world were derived from two sources. One was the mythology which had taken form, had become canonical as it were, in the poets from Homer and Hesiod onwards. The other source was the local myths attached to the various shrines. It was from this chaos of local legend that the poets had in the first instance drawn, combining elements of diverse origin into more or less harmonious systems. These systems, it is true, influenced in their turn the local myths, so that an action and re-action between the two sorts of mythological tradition was continually going on. But there remained many local myths which had not been taken up into literature, many which were inconsistent with the systems of Homer or Hesiod or any other of the recognised literary authorities. Aeschylus in the Prometheus has regard to both lines of tradition.
For the first beginnings of things, the time in
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