Alcæus,(1154) in a hymn to Apollo, related how “Zeus adorned the new-born god with a golden fillet and lyre, and sent him, in a chariot drawn by swans, to Delphi, in order to introduce justice and law amongst the Greeks. Apollo, however, ordered the swans first to fly to the Hyperboreans. The Delphians, missing the god, instituted a pæan and song, ranged choruses of young men around the tripod, and invoked him to come from the Hyperboreans. The god remained an entire year with that nation, and at the appointed time, when the tripods of Delphi were destined to sound, he ordered the swans to resume their flight. The return of Apollo takes place exactly in the middle of summer; nightingales, swallows, and grasshoppers sing in honour of the god; and even Castalia and Cephisus(1155) heave their waves to salute him.” If Alcæus consecrated this pæan, as Pindar did his pæan, to the worship of the Delphian god, he would hardly have dared to do more than embellish the local traditions. Supposing, however, that this was not the case, he would still have taken the principal event (viz., the arrival of Apollo from the Hyperboreans) rather from a fable universally acknowledged, than the unauthorized fictions of poetry. The whole account, and even the time, are clearly drawn from the mysteries of the worship. According to the tradition of Delphi, Apollo, at the expiration of the great period, visited the beloved nation of the Hyperboreans, and danced and played with them from the vernal equinox to the early setting of the Pleiades; and when the first corn was cut in Greece, he returned to Delphi, as I suppose, with the full ripe ears, the offerings of the Hyperboreans.(1156) Even the story of the swans was no addition of Alcæus; for the painted vases in the south of Italy (the extremity of the Grecian world) represent the same fiction as the Lesbian poet; nay, so exactly do they correspond, that we do not indeed recognise Alcæus, but the traditions upon which the account was founded, as they were perhaps related at Metapontum and Croton. The boy Apollo, the sceptre and goblet in one hand, and full ears of barley in the other (which allude to the offerings of the Hyperboreans, and the “golden summer”), is seated, with a mild aspect, on a car, the axles of which are bound with swans’ feathers. Hyperborean women, with torches, and pitchers for sacred libations, conduct him.(1157) The swans, with which Apollo here comes, occur elsewhere in the legends of Delphi, which refer to the Hyperboreans. The most ancient temple of Delphi, according to the assertion of the priests, was merely a low hut, built with branches of the sacred laurel of Tempe; the second was a tent, which either the Hyperboreans or Pteras of Crete formed of swans’ feathers and wax.(1158) The Peneus flowed by the altar of Tempe; the notes of the swans on the banks of this river are mentioned in a short hymn attributed to Homer.(1159) And allowing that these birds were here particularly