ose days,
always preceded great undertakings of this kind. There was a great
ceremony in honor of Jupiter and the nine Muses, which had long been
celebrated in Macedon as a sort of annual national festival. Alexander
now caused great preparations for this festival.

In the days of the Greeks, public worship and public amusement were
combined in one and the same series of spectacles and ceremonies. All
worship was a theatrical show, and almost all shows were forms of
worship. The religious instincts of the human heart demand some sort
of sympathy and aid, real or imaginary, from the invisible world, in
great and solemn undertakings, and in every momentous crisis in its
history. It is true that Alexander's soldiers, about to leave their
homes to go to another quarter of the globe, and into scenes of danger
and death from which it was very improbable that many of them would
ever return, had no other celestial protection to look up to than the
spirits of ancient heroes, who, they imagined, had, somehow or other,
found their final home in a sort of heaven among the summits of the
mountains, where they reigned, in some sense, over human affairs; but
this, small as it seems to us, was a great deal to them. They felt,
when sacrificing to these gods, that they were invoking their presence
and sympathy. These deities having been engaged in the same
enterprises themselves, and animated with the same hopes and fears,
the soldiers imagined that the semi-human divinities invoked by them
would take an interest in their dangers, and rejoice is their success.

The Muses, in honor of whom, as well as Jupiter, this great
Macedonian festival was held, were nine singing and dancing maidens,
beautiful in countenance and form, and enchantingly graceful in all
their movements. They came, the ancients imagined, from Thrace, in the
north, and went first to Jupiter upon Mount Olympus, who made them
goddesses. Afterward they went southward, and spread over Greece,
making their residence, at last, in a palace upon Mount Parnassus,
which will be found upon the map just north of the Gulf of Corinth and
west of Boeotia. They were worshiped all over Greece and Italy as
the goddesses of music and dancing. In later times particular sciences
and arts were assigned to them respectively, as history, astronomy,
tragedy, &c., though there was no distinction of this kind in early
days.

The festivities in honor of Jupiter and the Muses were continued in
Ma