Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some account. As will be seen hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt both claimed a divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws. Plutarch expressly defends the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and others. Pan was in love with Pindar, and Æsculapius conversed with Sophocles: if such divine diversions were allowed, how much more should these greater {45} attempts for human welfare be prompted from heaven! Numa had been enabled through Camena Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law as priest-king, and pontiffs, augurs, flamens, virgins, received their duties from him with supernatural sanctions. Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon different lines. A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a mere instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable. The diversity of religions seemed to support this view. Plato's Athenian, in one of his latest works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists who averred that the gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the laws of States which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them. In a fragment of a drama on Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged that in the primeval age of disorder and violence laws might strike crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret sins, hidden in the gloomy depths of conscience. A sage advised that to moralise men they must be made afraid. Let them invent gods who could see and hear all things, cognisant not only of all human actions but also of men's inmost thoughts and purposes. They were accordingly connected with the source of the most terrifying and the most beneficent phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder and lightning, of the shining sun and fertilising {46} rain, seat of divine powers helpful and hurtful to mankind. In the discussion on "the Nature of the Gods" (by Cicero), Cotta, of the Academic school, inquires of his Epicurean opponent Velleius, "What think you of those who have asserted that the whole doctrine concerning the immortal gods was the invention of politicians, whose notion was to govern that part of the community which reason could not influence, by religion?"