A question more important perhaps than any topographical issue remains. Do we know anything of the nature of the god worshipped in the ancient sanctuary, or of the character of his ritual? The question may seem to some superfluous. Zeus is surely Zeus everywhere and for all time, his cloud-compelling nature and his splendid sacrificial feasts familiar from Homer downwards. But then what of Deucalion? Deucalion is a figure manifestly Oriental, a feeble copy of the archetypal Noah. Why does he institute the worship of our immemorial Indo-European Zeus? Are there two Zeuses? There were, at least at Athens, two festivals of Zeus. Thucydides[173] himself is witness. He tells us of the trap laid for Kylon in characteristic fashion by the Delphic oracle. Kylon was to seize the Acropolis ‘on the greatest festival of Zeus.’ But this ‘greatest festival’ was alas for him! not of the Zeus he, as an Olympian victor, remembered, but of ‘Zeus Meilichios,’ and—significant fact for us—it, the familiar Diasia, was celebrated ‘outside the city.’ This ‘outside the city’ cannot fail, used as the words are by Thucydides himself, to remind us of our sanctuary, also ‘outside.’ What may be dimly discerned, though certainly no-wise demonstrated, is this. The name _Zeus_ is one of the few divine titles as to which philologists agree that it is Indo-European. But the name Zeus was attached to persons and conceptions many and diverse, and here in Athens it was attached to a divinity of Oriental nature and origin. Meilichios[174] is but the Graecized form of Melek, the ‘King’ best known to us as Moloch, a deity who like the Greek Meilichios loved holocausts, a deity harsh and stern, who could only by a helpless and hopelessly mistaken etymology be called Meilichios the Gentle One. His worship prevailed in the Peiraeus, brought thither probably by Phenician sailors, from his sanctuary there came the familiar reliefs with the great snake as the impersonation of the god. It was this Semitic Melek whom Deucalion brought in his ark. When this Semitic immigration took place it is hard to say. Tradition, as evidenced by the _Parian Chronicle_[175], placed it in the reign of the shadowy Attic king Kranaos, about 1528 B.C. * * * * * The sanctuaries of both Zeus and Apollo are alike outside the ancient city. Zeus had altars on the Acropolis itself; Apollo, great though he was, never forced an entrance there. The fact is surely significant. Herodotus[176], it will be remembered, marks the successive stages of the development of Athens: under Kekrops they were Kekropidai, under Erechtheus they were Athenians, and last, ‘when Ion, son of Xuthos, became their leader, from him they were called Ionians.’ Ion was the first Athenian polemarch[177].