“Go thou to Attica, Fail not to see those great nights of Demeter, Mystical, holy. There thou shalt win thee a mind that is care-free Even while living, And when thou joinest that major assembly Light shall thy heart be.” CRINAGORAS, _Greek Anthology_. Eleusis, like Delphi, was a centre of Greek religious life, but its Panhellenism was of a later date and a direct consequence of the power of Athens within whose territory it lay. Although the worship of nature’s productivity, under the form of Demeter losing her daughter Persephone within the earth and recovering her again, was indigenous among the early Pelasgic dwellers in Eleusis, and although upon this native cult were grafted religious beliefs and practices imported from Thrace, it is yet true that the Eleusinian Mysteries waxed famous only as Athens waxed great. Once established by the most powerful city of Greece as its highest expression of religious feeling, they drew to their modest birthplace in the recurring Septembers of many centuries the pious and the curious from all Greek lands. The right of initiation, originally open only to citizens of Attica, was extended to all Greeks and later to their Roman conquerors. In this repudiation of “barbarians” Eleusis resembled Olympia rather than Delphi, where Persian or Scyth or African might consult Apollo. But these three centres of Panhellenic life alike present a history which begins in the dim age of mythology and ends, several centuries after the beginning of our era, in the final clash of Christianity with Paganism. Perhaps the history of Eleusis best deserves the name of “sacred.” Playing no appreciable part in secular events, the town was repeatedly the scene of religious events which were of unequalled spiritual importance. Here an early nature cult, sister to savage rites in many parts of the world, became not only a beautified worship of the physical universe but also an expression of a hope in immortality. “The fable of Kore (the Daughter) is as much the image of the destiny of man after death as it is that of the reproduction of vegetative life by means of the seed committed to the earth.”[20] Footnote 20: See articles by François Lenormant in the _Contemporary Review_, 1880.