in his honour in the spring as a sort of prelude to the greater festival. At the Eleusinia itself, the sacred procession, in which the picture of the youthful god was borne from Athens to Eleusis, formed the link between the part of the festival already performed at Athens and that still to take place at Eleusis. The introduction of Iakchos into the festival of Eleusis did not merely make an external addition to the group of divinities that already shared in it; it added {221} an act[12\6] to the sacred story, the representation of which was the goal and summit of the festival; and thereby in all probability enriched it internally in meaning and substance. It is, indeed, quite impossible for us even to hazard a guess as to the exact meaning and essence of the change which came over the festival thus enlarged in the course of time. We can, however, be sure of this much; there is no ground at all for entertaining the commonly held view that it was the private mysteries of Orphic conventicles which exercised such a transforming influence on the public mysteries of the Athenian state. Those who are not content with solemn and mysterious jargon about "Orphics" and the like, but keep clearly in mind the well-known and quite distinctive features of the Orphic doctrine about gods and the souls of men, will easily recognize that everything points to the unlikelihood of even a single one of these having entered the circle of ideas current at Eleusis.[13\6] They could only have shattered such ideas to pieces.