PUBLISHED FOR THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY AT

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

12 LIME GROVE, Oxford Road, Manchester

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

LONDON: 39 Paternoster Row

NEW YORK: 443-449 FOURTH AVENUE AND THIRTIETH STREET BOMBAY: 8 HORNBY ROAD

CALCUTTA: 303 BowBAZAR Street

MADRAS: 167 MOUNT STREET

BERNARD QUARITCH

II GRAFTON STREET, NEW BOND STREET, LONDON, W.

THE

ASCENT OF OLYMPUS

BY

RENDEL HARRIS

MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME
GROVE, OXFORD ROAD. LONGMANS, green and CO., 39
PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C., NEW YORK, BOMBAY,
CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD QUARITCH, II
GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W.

MCMXVII

224972 MAY -1 19!9 BTC +424

PREFACE.
H

HIS volume contains four lectures which were delivered in the

TH

John Rylands Library, Manchester, during the years 1915 and 1916, and which appeared at intervals in the Library Bulletins. They are reproduced as nearly as possible in their original form, with a few necessary corrections and expansions and justifications. It would have been easy to spread them over a much larger area; but perhaps they may suffice for the presentation of ideas which are to some extent novel, and, almost as certainly, to some persons distasteful.

On the one hand, I have to meet the criticism of my wise friend, and inspiring leader, who is priest of the mythological Nemi and guardian of its Golden Bough, until someone catches him unawares and dispossesses him. He tells me that he despairs of the solution of the riddle of the Greek Mythology, he who does not despair (and with better right than Haeckel) of the solution of the riddle of the Universe!

On the other hand, there are those who, having unfortunately been familiar with the Greek gods from their earliest years, and never really detached from traditional faith in them, cannot avoid contemplating the author of these lectures as an Iconoclast, and put upon him the task, under which Socrates as well as the early Christians alike laboured, of proving to a suspicious bench of magistrates that they were really not atheists. So far from this being the case, it may be hoped that when one succeeds, if one does succeed, in evolving Artemis out of a wayside weed, or Aphrodite out of a cabbage, and, in general, all things lovely out of things that are not at first sight beautiful, one may claim to belong to the brotherhood, whatever its name may be, that has the vision of

That far-off divine event

To which the whole creation moves.

RENDEL HARRIS