times,—a difference which our means of information do not enable us satisfactorily to explain. Besides the Delphian temple, Apollo had numerous temples throughout Greece, and oracles at Abæ in Phôkis, on the Mount Ptôon, and at Tegyra in Bœotia, where he was said to have been born,[110] at Branchidæ near Milêtus, at Klarus in Asia Minor, and at Patara in Lykia. He was not the only oracular god: Zeus at Dodona and at Olympia gave responses also: the gods or heroes Trophônius, Amphiaraus, Amphilochus, Mopsus, etc., each at his own sanctuary and in his own prescribed manner, rendered the same service. [106] Harpocration v. Ἀπόλλων πατρῶος and Ἑρκεῖος Ζεύς. Apollo Delphinios also belongs to the Ionic Greeks generally. Strabo, iv. 179. [107] Thucydid. vi. 3; Kallimach. Hymn. Apoll. 56.— Φοῖβος γὰρ ἀεὶ πολίεσσι φιληδεῖ Κτιζομέναις, αὐτὸς δὲ θεμείλια Φοῖβος ὑφαίνει. [108] Iliad, iv. 30-46. [109] Iliad, i. 38, 451; Stephan. Byz. Ἵλιον, Τένεδος. See also Klausen, Æneas und die Penaten, b. i. p. 69. The worship of Apollo Sminthios and the festival of the Sminthia at Alexandria Troas lasted down to the time of Menander the rhêtôr, at the close of the third century after Christ. [110] Plutarch. Defect. Oracul. c. 5, p. 412; c. 8, p. 414; Steph. Byz. v. Τεγύρα. The temple of the Ptôan Apollo had acquired celebrity before the days of the poet Asius. Pausan. ix. 23, 3. The two legends of Delphi and Dêlos, above noticed, form of course a very insignificant fraction of the narratives which once existed respecting the great and venerated Apollo. They serve only as specimens, and as very early specimens,[111] to illustrate what these divine mythes were, and what was the turn of Grecian faith and imagination. The constantly recurring festivals of the gods caused an incessant demand for new mythes respecting them, or at least for varieties and reproductions of the old mythes. Even during the third century of the Christian æra, in the time of the rhêtôr Menander, when the old forms of Paganism were waning and when the stock of mythes in existence was extremely abundant, we see this demand in great force; but it was incomparably more operative in those earlier times when the creative vein of the Grecian mind yet retained its pristine and unfaded richness. Each god had many different surnames, temples, groves, and solemnities; with each of which was connected more or less of mythical narrative, originally hatched in the prolific and spontaneous fancy of a believing neighborhood, to be afterwards expanded, adorned and diffused by the song of the poet. The earliest subject of competition[112] at the great Pythian festival was the singing of a hymn in honor of Apollo: other _agones_ were subsequently added, but the ode or hymn constituted the fundamental attribute of the solemnity: the Pythia at Sikyôn and elsewhere were probably framed on a similar footing. So too at the ancient and celebrated Charitêsia,