But public opinion was still fiercely attached to the old deities, as the incident of the Hermai and the condemnation of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Sokrates showed. The deities could not be sacrificed: consequently it was the myths that had to go. The myths said that Zeus dethroned his own father and committed adultery: if the myth is true, since Zeus is Supreme God, these crimes are justifiable.[664] Therefore the myth must be untrue. Homer and Hesiod lied: their works are mainly a blasphemous fiction.[665] Isokrates[666] sums up this new attitude. “The poets,” he declares, “blasphemously represented the sons of the Immortals as having done and suffered worse deeds than the most impious of men: they spoke such things about the gods as no one would venture to allege of his worst enemy; not only do they make them steal, commit adultery, and fall into slavery to mortals, but even represent them as eating their children, mutilating their fathers, and binding their mothers in chains.… For this the poets did not go unpunished, but some of them were wanderers and begged their bread, some became blind, another was an exile all his life long, and Orpheus, who devoted himself especially to such stories, was torn in pieces.”[667] The greatest objection to these immoral legends was that they were taught in the nursery and the elementary school, at the most impressionable age.[668] Hence Plato wishes to lay down strict canons for the myths, legends, and fables which are to be taught to children. “For the beginning of everything is half the battle, especially in the case of what is young and tender. Young children are like soft wax, ready to take a clear and deep impression of any seal which is laid upon them. Hence the immense importance of the earliest stages of education, the myths and stories taught in the nursery and at school.… The compositions of Homer and Hesiod are fiction, and unlovely fiction at that; even if true, they had better not be told to the young and undiscerning.… The myths must be improving on the surface, not by allegory.”[669] Plato is not prepared to rewrite the Hellenic Bible: he will only draw up the canons which the poets must follow. It is to be noticed that these canons are peculiar, and would exclude not merely most of Homer and Hesiod, but a large part of the Old and some of the New Testament. The first canon is that God, being good, cannot be the cause or originator of any harm or evil to mankind; for these things some other cause must be discovered. The greater part of the human lot is evil: so God is not the cause of the majority of human events. This excludes Homer’s lines: Two butts of human fortunes by the gates of Heaven stood, One full of all things evil, and one of all things good. To whom God gives a mixture, his life is weal and woe, But to whom He gives of the evil alone, he lives as a beggar below. And Zeus is the world’s housekeeper, who serves out weal and woe. And Aeschylus’