air, Poseiden water, Artemis the moon, and the rest he disposed of in the same fashion.[1]
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 at present popular, which sees the sun, and the cloud, and the wind in Achilles, Athene, and Hermes.[2]
In the Bacchæ, 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.[3] The most famous of the later theories was that of Euemerus (316 B.C.). In a kind of philosophical romance, Euemerus declared that he had sailed to some No—man's-land, Panchæa, 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 been men, and that the myths were exaggerated and distorted records of facts. (See Eusebius, Prœp. E., ii. 55.) The Abbé Banier (La Mythologie expliquée par l'Histoire, Paris, 1738, vol. ii. p. 218) attempts the defence of Euemerus, whom most of the ancients regarded as an atheist. There was an element of truth in his romantic hypethesis.[4]
- ↑ 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."
- ↑ Grote, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1869, i. p. 404.
- ↑ Postea.
- ↑ See Block, Euhémère et sa Doctrine, Mons, 1876.
