Then there appears, from the fourth century onwards, the strange statement, perhaps started by Euhemeros and eagerly taken up in later ages by scoffers like Lucian or Christian opponents of the old religion, that Zeus lay _buried_ on Ida.[27\3] What is here called the _grave_ of the god is nothing in reality but the _cave_ which was generally regarded as his permanent abode.[28\3] The idea--always strange to the Greeks[29\3]--that a god could lie buried anywhere on the earth, deprived of life for ever or even for a limited period of time, is often met with in the tradition of Semitic and other non-Greek peoples.[30\3] We need not inquire what deeper or perhaps allegorical sense such legends may have had in the beliefs of those nations; there is no reason to suppose that such foreign legends had any influence in the formation of Greek myth. Nor does the {97} tradition in Greek lands give the slightest support to the view current among modern mythologists that the death and burial of gods is intended to symbolize the "death of Nature". It is, in fact, plain that in the legend of the Cretan Zeus' grave, the "grave" has simply taken the place of the cave as the everlasting abode of the undying god, and that it is a paradoxical expression intended to signify his perpetual confinement to that place. We are immediately reminded of a no less paradoxical notice of a god's grave at Delphi. Under the navel stone (Omphalos) of the Earth-goddess (which was a vaulted piece of masonry in the Temple of Apollo recalling in its shape the ancient vaulted tombs),[31\3] there lay buried a divine being. Our learned authorities call this being Python, the enemy of Apollo; one and only one quite untrustworthy witness says it was Dionysos.[32\3] Here we have a case of one god setting up his temple and abode over the grave of another god. Apollo, the god of prophecy, thrones it over the Earth-spirit Python, the son of the Earth-goddess Gaia. Now, we have ancient and in the highest degree trustworthy traditions to the effect that there was originally at Delphi an ancient Earth-Oracle into whose place Apollo and his mantic art came later as an intruder. We are therefore justified in believing that this circumstance in the history of religion has found expression in the legend that Apollo's temple and oracular seat stood over the place where an ancient and superseded oracle-daimon lay "buried".[33\3] In the days when the primeval Earth-Oracle was still powerful its guardian would not lie dead and buried under the Omphalos of the Earth-goddess, but would have dwelt there alive underground, like Amphiaraos or Trophonios or Zeus on Ida. § 3