The one is from Sallust, a writer of the fourth century of our era. He thus explains the story of the judgment of Paris. The banquet of the gods is a picture of the vast supra-mundane Powers, who are always in each other’s society. The apple is the world, which is thrown from the banquet by Discord, because the world itself is the play of opposing forces; and different qualities are given to the world by different Powers, each trying to win the world for itself; and Paris is the soul in its sensuous life, which sees not the other Powers in the world, but only Beauty, and says that the world is the property of Love.[98] The other is from a writer of a late but uncertain age. He deals only with the Odyssey. Its hero is the picture of a man who is tossed upon the sea of life, drifted this way and that by adverse winds of fortune and of passion: the companions who were lost among the Lotophagi are pictures of men who are caught by the baits of pleasure and do not return to reason as their guide: the Sirens are the pleasures that tempt and allure all men who pass over the sea of life, and against which the only counter-charm is to fill one’s senses and powers of mind full of divine words and actions, as Odysseus filled his ears with wax, that, no part of them being left empty, pleasure may knock at their doors in vain.[99] The method survived as a literary habit long after its original purpose failed. The mythology which it had been designed to vindicate passed from the sphere of religion into that of literature; but in so passing, it took with it the method to which it had given rise. The habit of trying to find an _arrière pensée_ beneath a man’s actual words had become so inveterate, that all great writers without distinction were treated as writers of riddles. The literary class insisted that their functions were needed as interpreters, and that a plain man could not know what a great writer meant. “The use of symbolical speech,” said Didymus, the great grammarian of the Augustan age, “is characteristic of the wise man, and the explanation of its meaning.”[100] Even Thucydides is said by his biographer to have purposely made his style obscure that he might not be accessible except to the truly wise.[101] It tended to become a fixed idea in the minds of many men that religious truth especially must be wrapped up in symbol, and that symbol must contain religious truth. The idea has so far descended to the present day, that there are, even now, persons who think that a truth which is obscurely stated is more worthy of respect, and more likely to be divine, than a truth which “he that runs may read.” * * * * *