The explanation of the snake as merely an attribute is indeed impossible to any unbiassed critic who looks at the relief in fig. 2. Here clearly the snake is the object worshipped by the woman and two men who approach with gestures of adoration. The colossal size of the beast as it towers above its human adorers is the _Magnificat_ of the artist echoed by the worshippers. When we confront the relief in fig. 3, also found at the Peiraeus, with those in figs. 1 and 2, the secret is out at last. In fig. 3 a man followed by a woman and child approaches an altar, behind which is seated a bearded god holding a sceptre and patera for libation. Above is clearly inscribed ‘Aristarche to Zeus Meilichios’ (Ἀριστάρχη Διὶ Μειλιχίῳ). And the truth is nothing more or less than this. The human-shaped Zeus has slipped himself quietly into the place of the old snake-god. Art sets plainly forth what has been dimly shadowed in ritual and mythology. It is not that Zeus the Olympian has ‘an underworld aspect’; it is the cruder fact that he of the upper air, of the thunder and lightning, extrudes an ancient serpent-demon of the lower world, Meilichios. Meilichios is no foreign Moloch, he is home-grown, autochthonous before the formulation of Zeus. [Illustration: FIG. 3.] [Illustration: FIG. 4.] How the shift may have been effected art again helps us to conjecture. In the same sanctuary at the Peiraeus that yielded the reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 was found the inscribed relief[38] in fig. 4. We have a similar bearded snake and above is inscribed ‘Heracleides to the god.’ The worshipper is not fencing, uncertain whether he means Meilichios or Zeus; he brings his offering to the local precinct where the god is a snake and dedicates it to _the_ god, the god of that precinct. It is not monotheism, rather it is parochialism, but it is a conception tending towards a later monotheism. When and where the snake is simply ‘the god,’ the fusion with Zeus is made easy. [Illustration: FIG. 5.]