[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