In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of the national gods, became also the tribal or home god of Lacedaemon. That common Greek worship of Apollo they made especially their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents, and which resulted [228] sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service. He remains youthful and unmarried. In congruity with this, it is observed that, in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract qualities and relationships, ideals, become subsidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even. Nay, other gods also are, so to speak, Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence; Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart thence. Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the Lacedaemonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intellectual condition, a form of right knowledge. Such assertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based originally on a preoccupation with the unconscious forces of nature, was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedaemon. As a spectator of the Hyacinthia, our Platonic student would have found himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from Lacedaemon and its dependent towns and villages, within the ancient precincts of Amyclae, at the season between spring and summer when under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers, [229] you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal king who had reigned in this very place; in either case, greatly beloved of the god, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow. That Boreas (the north-wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circumstance we hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Adonis, and the like. But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind its really tragic analogue in human life, behind the figure of the dying youth. We know little of the details of the feast; incidentally,