Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/43

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CHAP. II. § 8.
INTRODUCTION.
29

but to instruct us the better often, and especially in the Odyssey, adds to the circumstances which have come under his actual observation, allegories, wise harangues, and enticing narrations. Concerning which, Eratosthenes is much mistaken when he says that both Homer and his commentators are a pack of fools. But this subject demands a little more of our attention.

8. To begin. The poets were by no means the first to avail themselves of myths. States and lawgivers had taken advantage of them long before, having observed the constitutional bias of mankind. Man is eager after knowledge, and the love of legend is but the prelude thereto. This is why children begin to listen [to fables], and are acquainted with them before any other kind of knowledge; the cause of this is that the myth introduces them to a new train of ideas, relating not to every-day occurrences, but something in addition to these.

A charm hangs round whatever is new and hitherto unkown, inspiring us with a desire to become acquainted with it, but when the wonderful and the marvellous are likewise present, our delight is increased until at last it becomes a philtre of study. To children we are obliged to hold out such enticements, in order that in riper years, when the mind is powerful, and no longer needs such stimulants, it may be prepared to enter on the study of actual realities.

Every illiterate and uninstructed man is yet a child, and takes delight in fable. With the partially informed it is much the same; reason is not all-powerful within him, and he still possesses the tastes of a child. But the marvellous, which is capable of exciting fear as well as pleasure, influences not childhood only, but age as well. As we relate to children pleasing tales to incite them [to any course] of action, and frightful ones to deter them, such as those of Lamia,[1] Gorgo,[2] Ephialtes,[3] and Mormolyca.[4] So numbers of our citizens are

  1. ↑ A female phantom said to devour children, used by nurses as a bugbear to intimidate their refractory charges.
  2. ↑ In later times there were three Gorgons, Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa, but Homer seems to have known but one.
  3. ↑ One of the giants, who in the war against the gods was deprived of his left eye by Apollo, and of the right by Hercules.
  4. ↑ The same phantom as Mormo, with which the Greeks used to frighten little children.
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