A large proportion of these myths are due to men’s observations of
Nature, and her various active and creative forces, which appeared to
their lively Southern fancy as manifestations of single supernatural
beings. These were regarded now as friendly, now as hostile, to man; and
men therefore strove as eagerly to gain their favor as to appease their
wrath. Of the appearance of the deities who thus manifested themselves
in the workings of nature, men necessarily formed at first very crude
and fantastic ideas. But later, when men emerged from the simple
conditions of the early patriarchal epoch, and began to dwell in regular
political communities, they gradually ceased to regard the gods as mere
personifications of natural forces. They began to regard them as beings
acting in accordance with unchangeable moral laws, and endowed with
forms similar to those of men. They brought the gods into connection
with each other by means of genealogies in a great measure artificial,
and built up a vast political system, which has its center in Zeus, or
Jupiter, the “father of gods and men.” (See Chart on following pages.)