The exact details of the fate of Lycurgus, varying as they do from author to author, are not of real importance. The essential thing, the factor which recurs in story after story, is the rage against the dominance of a new god, the blind mad fury, the swift sudden helpless collapse at the touch of a real force. This is no symbol of the coming of the spring or the gathering of the vintage. It is the mirrored image of a human experience, of the passionate vain beating of man against what is not man and is more and less than man. The nature and essence of the new influence will be in part determined later. For the present the question that presses for solution is ‘whence did it come?’ ‘where was the primitive seat of the worship of Dionysos?’ * * * * * The testimony of historians, from Herodotus to Dion Cassius, is uniform, and confirms the witness of Homer and Sophocles. Herodotus[935] tells how Xerxes, when he marched through Thrace, compelled the sea tribes to furnish him with ships and those that dwelt inland to follow by land. Only one tribe, the Satrae, would suffer no compulsion, and then come the significant words: ‘The Satrae were subject to no man so far as we know, but down to our own day they alone of all the Thracians are free, for they dwell on high mountains covered with woods of all kinds and snow-clad, and they are keenly warlike. These are the people that possess an oracle shrine of Dionysos and this oracle is on the topmost range of their mountains. And those among the Satrae who interpret the oracle are called Bessi; it is a priestess who utters the oracles as it is at Delphi, and the oracles are nothing more extraordinary than that.’ Herodotus is not concerned with the religion of Dionysos; he does not even say that the religion of Dionysos spread southward into Greece, but he states the all-important fact that the Satrae were never conquered. They received no religion from without. Here among those splendid unconquerable savages in their mountain fastnesses was the real home of the god. Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of priestly caste among the Satrae, but Strabo[936] knows of them as the wildest and fiercest of the many brigand tribes that dwelt on and around Mt. Haemus. All the tribes about Mt. Haemus were, he says, ‘much addicted to brigandage, but the Bessi who possessed the greater part of Mt. Haemus were called brigands by brigands. They are the sort of people who live in huts in very miserable fashion, and they extend as far as Rhodope and the Paeonians.’ He mentions the Bessi again[937] as a tribe living high up on the Hebrus at the furthest point where the river is navigable, and again emphasizes their tendency to brigandage.