Epicharmos, for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, declared that the gods of Greece were not what, from the poems of Homer, we might suppose them to be—personal beings, endowed with superhuman powers, but liable to many of the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods were really the Wind, the Water, the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, and the Stars. Not long after his time, another philosopher, Empedokles, holding that the whole of nature consisted in the mixture and separation of the four elements, declared that Zeus was the element of Fire, Here the element of Air, Aidoneus or Pluton the element of Earth, and Nestis the element of Water. In fact, whatever the free thinkers of Greece discovered successively as the first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or Mind of Anaxagoras, was readily identified with Zeus and the other divine persons of Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the contemporary of Anaxagoras, went even farther. While Anaxagoras would have been satisfied with looking upon Zeus as but another name of his Nous, the highest intellect, the mover, the disposer, the governor of all things, Metrodoros resolved not only the persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but likewise those of human kings and heroes—such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor—into various combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory. Sokrates, it is well known, looked upon such attempts at explaining all fables allegorically as too arduous and unprofitable: yet he, too, as well as Plato, pointed frequently to what they called the _hypónoia_, the under-current, or, if I may say so, the under-meaning of ancient mythology. Aristotle speaks more explicitly:— “It has been handed down,” he says, “by early and very ancient people, and left to those who came after, in the form of myths, that these (the first principles of the world) are the gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The rest has been added mythically, in order to persuade the many, and in order to be used in support of laws and other interests. Thus they say that the gods have a human form, and that they are like to some of the other living beings, and other things consequent on this, and similar to what has been said. If one separated out of these fables, and took only that first point, namely, that they believed the first essences to be gods, one would think that it had been divinely said, and that while every art and every philosophy was probably invented ever so many times and lost again, these opinions had, like fragments of them, been preserved until now. So far only is the opinion of our fathers, and that received from our first ancestors, clear to us.”