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. The most famous of
the later theories was that of Euhemerus (316 B.C.). In a kind of
philosophical romance, Euhemerus declared that he had sailed to
some No-man's-land, Panchaea, 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, 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.