Of nearly all this scientific post-Aristotelian literature only isolated fragments survive in quotations by later writers, lexicographers, and scholiasts, who were no doubt more deeply indebted to it than they always acknowledged; but it is some compensation for our loss that the work last mentioned, the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros, has been preserved, a rich storehouse of myth and folklore with some infusion of actual cult-record. Among the later literature our subject is indebted to the geographer, Strabo, for many incidental observations of local cults and ritual; still more to the philosophic moralist and _littérateur_, Plutarch, a man of earnest religious interest and some power of original thought, who knew the religion of his country at first hand and at a time when it was yet alive, and who devoted to it much attention and literary industry; hence we must rank high among our ancient authorities his _Quæstiones Græcæ_ and his {12} treatises ‘on the Pythian Oracle’ and on ‘the cessation of oracles.’ Again, much desultory but varied information is afforded by the compilers Athenæus, in his _Deipnosophistæ_, and Stobæus, in his _Florilegium_. But of higher value than all these, or in fact than any work that has been bequeathed to us from antiquity, is the _Descriptio Græciæ_, by Pausanias, composed about 180 A.D.; for he travelled somewhat as a modern anthropologist, relying partly on earlier literature, yet using his own eyes and ears and his own notes; and his ruling passion was the study of the folk-religion and the religious monuments; so that it is due mainly to him that we know something of the village-religion of Hellas as distinct from that of the great cities, and can frame working theories of the evolution through immemorial ages of various growths of the polytheism. The lexicographers Harpokration, Hesychios and Suidas contribute facts of value, especially in their citation of cult-appellatives, which owing to the magic value of the special name or title whereby the deity was invoked throw a revealing light on the significance and power of many a worship, and help to frame our conception of the complex character of many a divinity. Again, the various collections of ‘Scholia’ on the classical texts are a rich quarry for our reconstruction of the fabric of Hellenic religion; and of chief value among these are the Scholia on Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Theocritus, while Servius’ _Commentary on Vergil_ tells us even more about Greek cult and mythology than about Roman; and high in this class of our authorities we must rank a work of late Byzantine {13} learning, the _Commentary of Tzetzes_ on Lykophron’s poem, ‘Kassandra,’ for his scholia are charged with remote antiquarian lore derived from good sources.