356 On the Early Kings of Attica. Lydiau history probably owed their origin to the connexion of her name with the mythology of these countries. Niobe appears also in Theban history, as the wife of Amphion. A story so widely diffused cannot have had its origin in the fantastic resemblance of the rocks of Sipylus to a weeping mother (Pans. 1. 21); the legend must have attached itself to the natural appearance. The high antiquity of the religion to which the legend belonged is shewn by the cir- cumstance that Niobe was said to be the first mortal by whom Jupiter had children (Apollod. ii. 1) and mother of Argos and Pelasgus; that is, she was a connecting link between the Antehellenic and Hellenic mythologies. If the opinion of Payne Knight, Voss and others were well founded, and all the mystical religions had been intro- duced into Greece subsequently to the time of Homer, these conjectures and assimilations must fall to the ground. But I cannot believe that such a change as the introduction of this remarkable class of rites could have taken place after the Homeric age, and that every kind of historic evidence respecting it should have disappeared, and their whole insti- stitution have been referred to the times before Homer, and generally to the very earliest times. That Bacchus and Ceres, the chief deities of these mystical religions, were known to Homer, appears from passages in his writings of which the authenticity cannot be reasonably questioned. The symbo- lical and semibarbarous character which belonged to them made them unfit to bear a part among the agents in the Iliad, and it may be true that a great proportion of the fables by which the two religions were interwoven originated after the Homeric age. It is probable too that the growing prevalence of the Hellenic mythology gave in great measure to these rites of an earlier and ruder religion their mystical character; the orgies with which some of them were accom- panied led the worshippers to withdraw themselves from the observation of the magistrate, and the secret solemnity with which others were performed impressed the imagination with a profound religious awe, which neither the poetry of Homer nor the statuary of Phidias could equal. But it is time to return to the series of Attic kings, the second of whom is Cccrops. I regard him as being in genuine Attic fable the
