Herodotus[857] in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes the following significant statement: ‘The Pelasgians formerly made all sorts of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, as I know from what I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none of them either name or eponym, for such they had not yet heard: they addressed them as gods because they had set all things in order and ruled over all things. Then after a long lapse of time they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they inquired of the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the oracle there is held to be the most ancient of all the oracles in Greece and was at that time the only one. When therefore the Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they should adopt the names that came to them from the barbarians, the oracle ordained that they should use them. And from that time on they sacrificed to the gods making use of their names.’ If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, some sort of name, some mode of address they must have had. Is it not at least possible that the advance noted by Herodotus is the shift from mere cultus-title, appropriate to any and every divinity, to actual _proper_ name which defined and crystallized the god addressed? Any and every hero or divinity might rightly be addressed as _Meilichios_, but a single individual personality is caught and crystallized in the proper name _Zeus_. When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case with Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual god. Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself, may have been adjectival to begin with, mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost they have become proper and personal. It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place owing to an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridgeway’s[858] theory, was the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus and his shadow-wife Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother with her dove-priestesses; there surely the Pelasgians with their ‘nameless’ gods, their heroes and heroines addressed by cultus epithets, met and mingled with the worshippers of Zeus the Father and Apollo the Son and Artemis his sister, and learnt to fix the personalities of their formless shifting divinities, learnt the lesson not from the ancient civilized Egyptians but from the northern ‘barbarians.’