ance with his
own taste and prejudices, and above all, and like all other and later
speculators, in harmony with the general tendency of his own studies.
If he lived when physical speculation was coming into fashion, as in
the age of Empedocles, he thought that the Homeric poems must contain a
veiled account of physical philosophy. This was the opinion of Theagenes
of Rhegium, who wrote at a period when a crude physicism was disengaging
itself from the earlier religious and mythical cosmogonic systems of
Greece. Theagenes was shocked by the Homeric description of the battle
in which the gods fought as allies of the Achaeans and Trojans. He
therefore explained away the affair as a veiled account of the strife
of the elements. Such "strife" was familiar to readers of the physical
speculations of Empedocles and of Heraclitus, who blamed Homer for his
prayer against Strife.(1)

(1) Is. et Osir., 48.

It did not occur to Theagenes to ask whether any evidence existed
to show that the pre-Homeric Greeks were Empedoclean or Heraclitean
philosophers. He readily proved to himself that Apollo, Helios, and
Hephaestus were allegorical representations, like what such philosophers
would feign,--of fire, that Hera was air, Poseidon water, Artemis the
moon, and the rest he disposed of in the same fashion.(1)

(1) Scholia on Iliad, xx. 67. Dindorf (1877), vol. iv. p. 231. "This
manner of apologetics is as old as Theagenes of Rhegium. Homer offers
theological doctrine in the guise of physical allegory."

Metrodorus, again, turned not only the gods, but the Homeric heroes into
"elemental combinations and physical agencies"; for there is nothing new
in the mythological philosophy recently popular, which saw the sun, and
the cloud, and the wind in Achilles, Athene, and Hermes.(1)

(1) Grote, Hist, of Greece, ed. 1869, i. p. 404.

In the Bacchae (291-297), Euripides puts another of the mythological
systems of his own time into the mouth of Cadmus, the Theban king, who
advances a philological explanation of the story that Dionysus was sewn
up in the thigh of Zeus. The most famous of the later theories was that
of Euhemerus (316 B.C.). In a kind of philosophical romance, Euhemerus
declared that he had sailed to some No-man's-land, Panchaea, where he
found the verity about mythical times engraved on pillars of bronze.
This truth he published in the Sacra Historia, where he rationalised
the fables, averring that the gods had bee