These difficulties, these incongruities in tradition, would no doubt be easily solved did we fully know the origin of the cults of Poseidon and Athena. This at present is hidden from our eyes. Kekrops, Pandrosos, Erechtheus, are obviously local. Their worship never spread beyond the hill of Athens, but Poseidon and Athena were worshipped over the whole of Hellas, and whether in Athens they were indigenous or imported cannot at present be certainly said. Herodotus[143] emphatically states that Poseidon originated in Libya, ‘for none except the Libyans originally possessed the name of Poseidon and they have always worshipped him.’ It is in Libya also that this same Herodotus[144] notes that the dwellers round lake Tritonis sacrifice principally to Athena and next to Triton and Poseidon, and from the Libyan women the Greeks obtained the dress and the aegis of the statues of Athena. If we may hazard a glimpse into things remote or dark, it may be conjectured that the worship of Poseidon and Athena came from Libya to Attica from a people geographically remote, but with racial affinities[145]. That in Libya Athena was, as Herodotus notes, the more important of the two. An old matriarchal goddess, transplanted to Athens in the days of king Erechtheus, she fell when social conditions were patriarchal rather than matriarchal to a subordinate place. Poseidon rather than Athena stood at the head of the Athenian family trees. He headed the conservative aristocratic party. But at some time of political upheaval, possibly even as late as the time of Peisistratos[146], the tide turned, and the ancient matriarchal goddess, as patron of the tyrants and the democracy, reasserted herself. It is Athena not Poseidon who brings Peisistratos back in her chariot to Athens. All this, the prior supremacy of Poseidon, the resurgence of Athena, is reflected in the myth of the _Eris_, the rivalry, the contest of the two divinities for the land, in the aetiological myth of the planting of the olive-tree and the smiting of the rock with the trident. * * * * *