Diogenes Laertius mentions that Pythagoras feigned to have seen the soul of Hesiod in the infernal regions, bound to a brazen pillar, and howling in torture for his false representations of the Deities: and that of Homer environed with serpents for the same reason. Plato, in a similar feeling, excluded both these poets from his ideal republic. It seems strange that the philosophers should have failed to perceive that Hesiod and Homer repeated merely the popular legends of their age; as is abundantly evident from the style and manner of narration and allusion throughout their poems. The following passage of Herodotus has been construed to mean that they were the absolute inventors of the Grecian theology; “Whence each of the Gods came; whether all have continually existed, or what figures they severally had, was known but lately; or, if I may so speak, only yesterday; for I am of opinion that Hesiod and Homer were older than myself by four hundred years, and not more; these are they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, and gave titles to the gods; distinguishing their honours and functions, and describing their forms.” Against such an hypothesis several reasons obviously present themselves: 1st, A plurality of gods could scarcely be the production of a single age, much less of one or two individuals: 2dly, It is not likely that Greece, which was visited by Ægyptian and Phœnician colonists at an æra long antecedent to the age of Homer, should have been destitute of a religious system: 3dly, It is not credible that a whole nation, at the suggestion of one or two bards, should have abandoned this received system in order to adopt a whole hierarchy of divinities, of whom they had never before heard. But the doubt of Herodotus, “whether they have continually existed,” shows that he merely considered Hesiod and Homer in the light of collectors and illustrators of the ancient religion of their country; and Wesseling accordingly interprets ποιησαντες as referring to arrangement and description, not invention. This stupid inference could in fact never have been drawn, had Herodotus been compared with himself: as in a preceding passage he says, “Nearly all the names of the gods have come into Greece from Ægypt; for I have ascertained it to be a fact that they are of barbaric extraction.” Herodotus, however, seems to have been in error, even as to this position of Hesiod and Homer having first digested the mythology of Greece into a system: and as he could not be ignorant that theogonies were ascribed to poets reputed their elders, such as Musæus and Orpheus, he was reduced to the alternative of making these poets their juniors. “Those poets,” he observes, “who were said to be before them, were in my opinion after them.”