, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as
natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory.

Sokrates, it is well known, looked upon such attempts at explaining all
fables allegorically as too arduous and unprofitable: yet he, too, as well
as Plato, pointed frequently to what they called the _hyponoia_, the
under-current, or, if I may say so, the under-meaning of ancient
mythology.

Aristotle speaks more explicitly:--

"It has been handed down," he says, "by early and very ancient people, and
left to those who came after, in the form of myths, that these (the first
principles of the world) are the gods, and that the divine embraces the
whole of nature. The rest has been added mythically, in order to persuade
the many, and in order to be used in support of laws and other interests.
Thus they say that the gods have a human form, and that they are like to
some of the other living beings, and other things consequent on this, and
similar to what has been said. If one separated out of these fables, and
took only that first point, namely, that they believed the first essences
to be gods, one would think that it had been divinely said, and that while
every art and every philosophy was probably invented ever so many times
and lost again, these opinions had, like fragments of them, been preserved
until now. So far only is the opinion of our fathers, and that received
from our first ancestors, clear to us."

I have quoted the opinions of these Greek philosophers, to which many more
might have been added, partly in order to show how many of the most
distinguished minds of ancient Greece agreed in demanding an
interpretation, whether physical or metaphysical, of Greek mythology,
partly in order to satisfy those classical scholars, who, forgetful of
their own classics, forgetful of their own Plato and Aristotle, seem to
imagine that the idea of seeing in the gods and heroes of Greece anything
beyond what they appear to be in the songs of Homer, was a mere fancy and
invention of the students of Comparative Mythology.

There were, no doubt, Greeks, and eminent Greeks too, who took the legends
of their gods and heroes in their literal sense. But what do these say of
Homer and Hesiod? Xenophanes, the contemporary of Pythagoras, holds Homer
and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. In this he
agrees with Herodotus, when he declares that these two poets made the
theogony for the Greeks, and gave to the go