n men, and that the myths were
exaggerated and distorted records of facts. (See Eusebius, Praep. E.,
ii 55.) The Abbe Banier (La Mythologie expliquee par l'Histoire, Paris,
1738, vol. ii. p. 218) attempts the defence of Euhemerus, whom most of
the ancients regarded as an atheist. There was an element of truth in
his romantic hypothesis.(1)

(1) See Block, Euhemere et sa Doctrine, Mons, 1876.

Sometimes the old stories were said to conceal a moral, sometimes a
physical, sometimes a mystical or Neo-platonic sort of meaning. As
every apologist interpreted the legends in his own fashion, the
interpretations usually disagreed and killed each other. Just as one
modern mythologist sees the wind in Aeetes and the dawn in Medea, while
another of the same school believes, on equally good evidence, that both
Aeetes and Medea are the moon, so writers like Porphyry (270 A. D.)
and Plutarch (60 A. D.) made the ancient deities types of their own
favourite doctrines, whatever these might happen to be.

When Christianity became powerful, the Christian writers naturally
attacked heathen religion where it was most vulnerable, on the side of
the myths, and of the mysteries which were dramatic representations
of the myths. "Pretty gods you worship," said the Fathers, in effect,
"homicides, adulterers, bulls, bears, mice, ants, and what not." The
heathen apologists for the old religion were thus driven in the early
ages of Christianity to various methods of explaining away the myths of
their discredited religion.

The early Christian writers very easily, and with considerable
argumentative power, disposed of the apologies for the myths advanced by
Porphyry and Plutarch. Thus Eusebius in the Praeparatio Evangelica
first attacks the Egyptian interpretations of their own bestial or
semi-bestial gods. He shows that the various interpretations destroy
each other, and goes on to point out that Greek myth is in essence only
a veneered and varnished version of the faith of Egypt. He ridicules,
with a good deal of humour, the old theories which resolved so many
mythical heroes into the sun; he shows that while one system is
contented to regard Zeus as mere fire and air, another system recognises
in him the higher reason, while Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and
Asclepius, father and child, are all indifferently the sun.

Granting that the myth-makers were only constructing physical
allegories, why did they wrap them up, asks Eusebius, in what W