The ancient classical schools of mythological interpretation,
though unscientific and unsuccessful, are not without interest. We
find philosophers and grammarians looking, just as we ourselves are
looking, for some condition of the human intellect out of which the
absurd element in myths might conceivably have sprung. Very
naturally the philosophers supposed that the human beings in whose
brain and speech myths had their origin must have been philosophers
like themselves--intelligent, educated persons. But such persons,
they argued, could never have meant to tell stories about the gods
so full of nonsense and blasphemy.

Therefore the nonsense and blasphemy must originally have had some
harmless, or even praiseworthy, sense. What could that sense have
been? This question each ancient mythologist answered in
accordance 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]