hessalians worshipped storks,
"IN ACCORDANCE WITH USE AND WONT".(3) Plato lays down the very "law
of least change" which has been described. "Whether the legislator is
establishing a new state or restoring an old and decayed one, in respect
of gods and temples,... if he be a man of sense, he will MAKE NO
CHANGE IN ANYTHING which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or Ammon has
sanctioned, in whatever manner." In this very passage Plato(4) speaks
of rites "derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus" as falling within the later
period of the Greek Wanderjahre. On the high religious value of things
antique, Porphyry wrote in a late age, and when the new religion of
Christ was victorious, "Comparing the new sacred images with the old, we
see that the old are more simply fashioned, yet are held divine, but
the new, admired for their elaborate execution, have less persuasion
of divinity,"--a remark anticipated by Pausanias, "The statues Daedalus
wrought are quainter to the outward view, yet there shows forth in them
somewhat supernatural".(5) So Athenaeus(6) reports of a visitor to the
shrine of Leto in Delos, that he expected the ancient statue of the
mother of Apollo to be something remarkable, but, unlike the pious
Porphyry, burst out laughing when he found it a shapeless wooden idol.
These idols were dressed out, fed and adorned as if they had life.(7)
It is natural that myths dating from an age when Greek gods resembled
Polynesian idols should be as rude as Polynesian myths. The tenacity of
LOCAL myth is demonstrated by Pausanias, who declares that even in the
highly civilised Attica the Demes retained legends different from those
of the central city--the legends, probably, which were current before
the villages were "Synoecised" into Athens.(8)

(1) Zweiter Theil, 1858.

(2) Areop., 30.

(3) Clem. Alex., Oxford, 1715, i. 34.

(4) Laws, v. 738.

(5) De. Abst., ii. 18; Paus., ii. 4, 5.

(6) xiv. 2.

(7) Hermann, op. cit., p. 94, note 10.

(8) Pausanias, i. 14, 6.

It appears, then, that Greek ritual necessarily preserves matter of the
highest antiquity, and that the oldest rites and myths will probably be
found, not in the Panhellenic temples, like that in Olympia, not in
the NATIONAL poets, like Homer and Sophocles, but in the LOCAL fanes of
early tribal gods, and in the LOCAL mysteries, and the myths which came
late, if they came at all, into literary circulation. This opinion
is strengthened and illustrated by that