[29] If Onca, or Onga, was the name of the Phoenician goddess!--In the "Seven against Thebes," the chorus invoke Minerva under the name of Onca--and there can be no doubt that the Grecian Minerva is sometimes called Onca; but it is not clear to me that the Phoenicians had a deity of that name--nor can I agree with those who insist upon reading Onca for Siga in Pausanias (lib. ix., chap. 12), where he says Siga was the name of the Phoenician Minerva. The Phoenicians evidently had a deity correspondent with the Greek Minerva; but that it was named Onca, or Onga, is by no means satisfactorily proved; and the Scholiast, on Pindar, derives the epithet as applies to Minerva from a Boeotian village. [30] De Mundo, c. 7. [31] The Egyptians supposed three principles: 1st. One benevolent and universal Spirit. 2d. Matter coeval with eternity. 3d. Nature opposing the good of the universal Spirit. We find these principles in a variety of shapes typified through their deities. Besides their types of nature, as the Egyptians adopted hero gods, typical fables were invented to conceal their humanity, to excuse their errors, or to dignify their achievements. [32] See Heeren's Political History of Greece, in which this point is luminously argued. [33] Besides, it is not the character of emigrants from a people accustomed to castes, to propagate those castes superior to then own, of which they have exported no representatives. Suppose none of that privileged and noble order, called the priests, to have accompanied the Egyptian migrators, those migrators would never have dreamed of instituting that order in their new settlement any more than a colony of the warrior caste in India would establish out of their own order a spurious and fictitious caste of Bramins. [34] When, in a later age, Karmath, the impostor of the East, sough to undermine Mahometanism, his most successful policy was in declaring its commands to be allegories. [35] Herodotus (b. ii, c. 53) observes, that it is to Hesiod and Homer the Greeks owe their theogony; that they gave the gods their titles, fixed their ranks, and described their shapes. And although this cannot be believed literally, in some respects it may metaphorically. Doubtless the poets took their descriptions from popular traditions; but they made those traditions immortal. Jupiter could never become symbolical to a people who had once pictured to themselves the nod and curls of the Jupiter of Homer. [36] Cicero de Natura Deorum, b. ii.--Most of the philosophical interpretations of the Greek mythology were the offspring of the Alexandrine schools. It is to the honour of Aristarchus that he combated a theory that very much resembles the philosophy that would convert the youthful readers of Mother Bunch into the inventors of allegorical morality. [37] But the worship can be traced to a much earlier date than that the most plausibly ascribed to the Persian Zoroaster.