It is the very image of the old luxurious life of the princes of the
heroic age, as Homer describes it, with the arts in service to its
kingly pride. Among the other costly objects was one representing
the head of a cow, grandly designed in gold with horns of silver,
like the horns of the moon, supposed to be symbolical of Here, the
great object of worship at Argos. One of the interests of the study
of mythology is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of the
people who conceived it; and this religion of Here, the special
religion of Argos, is congruous with what has been here said as to
the place of art in the civilisation of the Argives; it is a
reflexion of that splendid and wanton old feudal life. For Here is,
in her original essence and meaning, equivalent to Demeter--the one
living spirit of the earth, divined behind the veil of all its
manifold visible energies. But in the development of a common
mythological motive the various peoples are subject to the general
limitations of their life and thought; they can but work outward what
is within them; and the religious conceptions and usages, ultimately
derivable from one and the same rudimentary instinct, are sometimes
most diverse.
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