Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

WHEN CHRIST APPEARED.and the^public hearth of the city were^_ ^_in Hestia's*charge. O Marriage O was secure under Here's care.bDemeter was entrusted with legislation ; the painsof childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, orArtemis. Music, archery, divination, were Apollo'sattributes ; the art of healing claimed him ison J^sculapius as patrons. Athene and Areswaved the issue of war; the chase was themain of Artemis ; smiths and all workers in firesaw in Hephaestus their patron ; whilst Athene theWorker protected the gentler trades, and Hecatewatched over the roads.6Yet Kome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiterclaimed a certain superiority over all these gods,would scarcely have yielded to any Grecian city,even were it Athens, in the number or variety ofher deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the costliness of victims offered toher gods, and in the strictness of her ceremonies, *she probably far surpassed that and all other cities.Her sterner worship of originally shapeless gods,presiding over the labours of a simple agriculturallife, had long yielded to the seductions of her dangerousGrecian captive. The rude block Terminus,and Jupiter the Stone, ceased to satisfy those whohad beheld the majesty of the father of gods andmen embodied by the genius of a Phidias ; andshe had ended by going farther in breaking upthe conception of one god, and in the personifi-6 HeidentJium und Judentlium^ p. 107.