Except for the proximity of Eleusis to Athens there was nothing in the physical qualities of the town to make the Eleusinian mysteries greater than any others. Its loveliness befitted rather than promoted the worship of the Earth Goddesses. Their story clung also to the seaward looking ledges of “steep Cnidos,” where was found the noble statue of Demeter that is now in the British Museum, and to the blossoming fields of Sicilian Enna. The Corn-Mother had her shrines on Bœotian farms and in the mountain caverns of Arcadia, and in more than one locality her worship was as mysterious and secret as the processes of nature. And yet the religious genius of Athens could have had no more exquisite stage than Eleusis for its larger operations. Sheltered by hills, washed by the sea and commanding a goodly plain, it is still, even in its poverty, one of the fairest places in Greece. The Thriasian plain, in the southwestern portion of which, on a low hill, lies the town, is separated from the plain of Athens by the long ridge of Mount Ægaleus and from the plain of Megara by the chain of hills that ends in the twin peaks of the Kerata, or “Horns,” familiar objects in the westward view from the Acropolis of Athens. The mountains of Salamis also seem to contribute to the girdling of Eleusis, so near do they rise across the curving and almost landlocked bay. Empurpled by shadows, the mountains and the sea are like the deep blue robe of the mourning Demeter. Subdued to the delicate and luminous tint of the sky they seem like the veil within whose folds gleamed the cornlike yellow of her hair. Near the sea, close around Eleusis, there are still fertile grain fields to recall that— “Here first the fruitful corn upreared its bristling ears.” The historical development of the Eleusinian mysteries naturally followed the general development of Greek religious thought. To the primitive duality of Demeter and Persephone was added Dionysus, lord of the elements, when he had once been accepted by the Athens of Pisistratus. At Eleusis he appeared as the child Iacchus. Later, under the influences of the strange school of thought known as “Orphic,” at once mystical and gross, this multiple god became Zagreus, through whose savage death man, otherwise destined to be forever brute, came to partake of the divine nature. But in all periods the mysteries “were founded on the adoration of nature, its forces and phenomena, conceived rather than observed, interpreted by the imagination and not by reason, transformed into divine figures and histories by a kind of theological poetry which went off into pantheism on the one side and into anthropomorphism on the other.”