Many explanations have been sought to account in a rational manner for these strange tales; writers have striven to discover what can have given rise to such ridiculous inventions; some have asserted that it was the intention of the authors of mythology to convey to the people a knowledge of certain facts of nature, and certain moral truths whilst clothing them in allegorical form, and by endowing the divinities with certain virtues which it would become men to imitate and acquire; and that the worship of these divinities was instituted that man might be more fully impressed, that the likeness of the virtues upheld might be more deeply engraved in the heart of the pious worshipper. Zeus, was mind; Athene, art; Hercules, energy and perseverance in labours of great difficulty; whilst the Homeric heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector represented physical activities. According to another theory the object with which the myths were composed was political, the laws of government were supposed to emanate from the gods; and whoso refused to recognise the excellence of the institutions of the country was held to be in revolt against the gods themselves. The philosopher Euhemerus was the author of a third theory, called the historical; he represented the mythological personages not as gods, but as kings, heroes, and philosophers, who, after their death, had received divine honours among their fellow men; in this system Eolus, the god of the winds, became a skilful mariner who could foretell atmospheric changes; Atlas, supporting the sky and earth on his wide shoulders, had been formerly a great astronomer; Jupiter, a ruler of Crete; Hercules, a knight-errant. Although these ancient writers interpreted the fables in so many different ways, they all agreed in denying that an atom of truth is found in these stories concerning the gods, and they insisted that no myth must be taken _au pied de la lettre_. At a later period it was thought that reminiscences of a barbaric age could be found in which the ancestors of the Greeks apparently occupied themselves by stealing, killing, deceiving, and eating their offspring. “Lactantius, St Augustine, and the first missionaries, in their attacks on the religious belief of the Greeks, and Romans availed themselves of these arguments of Euhemerus, and taunted them with worshipping gods that were no gods, but known and admitted to have been merely deified mortals.”[48] In later times the same theory was revived; certain theologians, rather lacking in penetration, looked to Greek mythology for traces of sacred personages, they imagined that they could recognise in Saturn and his three sons, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the features of Noah and his sons, Ham, Japhet, and Shem; and in a recently published book the author suggests that when Hesiod describes the garden of the Hesperides, we have a tradition of the garden of Eden.