that, if here he had a glimpse of a higher truth, it was only a flash-light that went out leaving him in darkness. [Sidenote: His change of view as to myths.] In a later passage he makes a confession of his faith in matters of mythology. After telling the barbarous tale how the cannibal Cronus, intending to devour his infant son Poseidon, had been cozened by Rhea into swallowing a foal, he goes on: “When I began this work I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronus is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition.” This seems to be practically a recantation of earlier, perhaps youthful scepticism. The tales which he had once ridiculed as absurd he now finds to be full of deep, if hidden, wisdom. Meditation and perhaps still more the creeping paralysis of age, which brings so many men to a dull acquiescence in beliefs and practices which they had spurned in youth, appear to have wrought a mental revolution in Pausanias. The scoffer had become devout. [Sidenote: His treatment of discrepant traditions.] Yet to a pious believer the discrepancy between Greek traditions must have been a sore stumbling-block. Pausanias tripped over it again and again. “Greek traditions,” says he, “are generally discrepant.” “The legends of the Greeks differ from each other on most points, especially in the genealogies.” “The old legends, being unencumbered by genealogies, left free scope for fiction, especially in the pedigrees of heroes.” “Most things in Greece are subjects of dispute.” In face of such differences Pausanias, when he does not content himself with simply enumerating the various traditions, chooses to follow either the most generally received version or the one which on any ground appears to him the most probable. With his sober unimaginative temperament and bias to rationalism, it was natural that between conflicting versions of the same tradition he should choose the one which clashed least with experience. Thus he relates the two stories told of the way in which the people of Tanagra acquired the Triton whose stuffed carcase was the glory of the town. One story ran that the creature had been slain by Dionysus himself in single combat; according to the other, a common mortal had found the Triton lying drunk on the beach and had chopped off his head with an axe. The latter version of the tale is described by Pausanias as “less dignified but more probable.” Tritons, it is true, whether drunk or sober, are not common objects of the sea-shore; but there was no need to heighten the marvel by lugging in Dionysus. Again, the death of Aristodemus, the ancestor of the two royal houses of Sparta, was variously narrated.