When we read Pausanias, who has described Greece and her religious monuments, we find everywhere traces of the worship of nature. We see temples, altars, and statues, consecrated to the sun, to the moon, to the earth, to the Pleiades, to the celestial auriga, to the goat, to the bear, or Calisto, to the night, to rivers, etc. The inhabitants of Megalopolis sacrificed to the wind Boreas, and had planted a grove in his honor. The Macedonians adored Estia, or fire, and prayed to Bedy, or water. Alexander, king of Macedonia, sacrificed to the sun, to the moon, and to the earth. The oracle of Dodone, in all its answers, ordered sacrifices to the Achelous river. Homer gave the epithet of sacred to the waters of the Alpheus. Nestor and the Pylians sacrificed a bull to the same river. Achilles let his hair grow in honor of Sphercius; he also invoked the wind Boreas and the Zephyrus. Rivers were reputed as being sacred and divine, because of their utility to vegetation, to animals, and to commerce; and because nations considered water as one of the first principles of nature, and one of the most efficacious agents of the universal life of the Great-Being in which they believed. In Thessalia a sacred crow was fed in honor of the sun. This bird is seen yet on the monuments of Mithra, in Persia. The temples of old Byzantium were consecrated to the sun, to the moon, and to Venus. Their idols represented them; also the star Arcture, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Rome and Italy had also a vast number of monuments of worship addressed to nature, and to its principal agents. Tatius, coming to Rome to share the sceptre of Romulus, erected altars and temples to the sun, to the moon, to Saturn, to light, and to fire. The undying fire, or Vesta, was the most ancient object of worship of the Romans; virgins had the care to perpetuate it in the temple of this Goddess, as the wizards did in their Pyrees. "It was," Jornandes said, "an image of the eternal lights which shine in the heavens." In Rome there was a famous temple called Tellus, or of the earth, in which the senate often met. The earth was called mother, because it was considered as a deity as well as the manes. There was in the Latium a fountain of the sun, and, near it, two altars upon which Æneas, when landing in Italy, sacrificed. Romulus established the games of the circus to honor both the sun, who in his course measures the year, and the four elements which he modifies by his mighty influence. Aurelian built at Rome the temple of the sun, and decked it with gold and precious stones. Augustus, before Aurelian, had ordered the images of the sun and of the moon to be brought from Egypt, in order to adorn his triumph over Anthony and Cleopatra. The moon had a temple on the mount Aventine.