5. From Sparta the worship of Hercules spread to her colonies, particularly Tarentum(1836) and Croton. In the latter city Hercules enjoyed the honours of a founder,(1837) being reported to have established it on his return from Erythea.(1838) Afterwards the tradition of his purification and atonement was transferred from Amyclæ in Laconia to Croton, an event to which the high reputation enjoyed by the worship of Apollo in the latter town greatly contributed. Hence we perceive on the coins of this place the youthful hero sitting with a bow, quiver, and arrows before a blazing altar, on which he scorches a branch of laurel.(1839) Connected with the above is the tradition of Philoctetes having deposited the arrows of Hercules in the temple of Apollo Alæus at Croton, from whence they were said to have been brought by the Crotoniats into the temple of Apollo within the precincts of their town.(1840) On the coins of that city Hercules is frequently seen with a goblet in his hand, either in a recumbent or erect posture. The allusion is explained by the following story: Hercules, who was always thirsty, had asked for some wine at Croton; but the woman of the house dissuaded her husband from tapping the cask for a stranger; on which account the women of that country never drank wine.(1841) 6. Our readers are, we take for granted, well acquainted with the fable of Hercules in the island of Cos, as related by Homer.(1842) The events which contributed to its formation are, in the first place, the existence of several noble families of Heraclide descent, whose origin, according to ancient traditions, was connected with the conquest of Ephyra, though they were afterwards said to have sprung from the supposed residence of Hercules in the island itself, where the ancestor of these families sprang from his connexion with a daughter of the king of the Meropians. This fiction of his abode in Cos took its rise in a mistaken view of certain ceremonies there practised: for the peculiarity of the worship in question, in which the priest at the festival ἀντιμαχία, celebrated in the spring, put on a female dress (as Hercules is said to have disguised himself in woman’s clothes,)(1843) betrays an Asiatic origin; which induced the poets of ancient times to consider Hercules of Cos as identified with the Idæan Dactyli.(1844) This dress was also probably worn in the Lydian worship of Sandon(1845) (who was called Hercules by the Greeks); for Omphale is said to have attired the effeminate hero in a transparent garment dyed with sandyx, a custom which evidently originated in the practice of some festival. The man described as the slave of a lascivious woman was a symbolical representation of a soft and voluptuous elementary religion; while the same allegory was by the Greeks referred to the servitude of Hercules in the house of Eurystheus. This legend is first mentioned by Pherecydes, then by Hellanicus of Lesbos (who refers to the