When I was invited a few months ago to give this F.R. Scott Lecture at McGill, I was already deep in preparation for a paper or an essay on the subject of myth, which I thought would be too shocking to be published in any Canadian quarterly or magazine. It would have to be published as part of a small book, through a small press. But the invitation to give the F. R. Scott Lecture this year has suggested to me that something shocking would be just suitable for F. R. Scott—and that the more shocking it was the better it would honour his memory.

Frank Scott, after all, is one half of my mind and heart. A great deal of him has rubbed off on me over the years; and if I look at a current book just coming off the press, probably my last book of poetry—I won’t even mention the title—I see the echoes of Scott’s manner, satire, even subject matter, almost on every page. In fact, the book is dedicated “To the memory of F. R. Scott” —

            who saw with rational clarity

            the monopolists, financiers, speculators

            puddle our national wealth

                                    into one private pile.

“Rational clarity” is also one-half of the thesis which I have to present to you tonight. The other half is irrational myth.

Louis Dudek in Europe, street artist drawing

The word myth itself should give us pause for a minute. It seems to mean so much, and yet so little. Simply mouthing; I believe it is cognate with the English word mouth, which in Anglo-Saxon was simply muth. Joseph T. Shipley, in The Origins of English Words, says that “the origin of Gr. muthos, myth, is lost in the mists of prehistory.”[2] But Skeat’s Etymologycal Dictionary says that Gr. muthos is from “mu, a muttered sound”: Indo-European root MEU, “to mutter with closed lips  . . . cf. Gr. Muein, to close,” which clearly has to do with mouth and mouthing. And Anglo-Saxon muth, mouth, goes back to the Indo-European root menth. This, the dictionary of Indo-European roots tells us, is related to math-ya, from which we have the Greek masasthai, to chew. From muthos we have the forms mutheomai, mutheai,  muthesomai. There is muzo, “to murmur with closed lips, to mutter”; and mutheomai, “to say over to oneself.”

So merely to mouth, probably. Now, the best Greek dictionary, Liddell and Scott’s, gives the following ten definitions of the word myth, muthos, not one of which contains or implies the large philosophic meanings imported into it by modern theorists. MUTHOS: I1. “anything delivered by word of mouth, word, speech”; 2. “a speech in a public assembly”; 3. “counsel, advice, a command”; 4. “the subject of speech”; 5. “a resolve, purpose, design”; 6. “a saying, proverb”; 7. “the talk of men, rumour”; II. 8. “a tale, story, narrative”; 9. “a tale, legend, myth, opposed to logos, the historic tale”; 10. “a fable, such as those of Aesop”. And that is all.

Now, in the Harper Handbook to Literature (1985) the article on myth, written by Northrop Frye, defines the word quite differently, in modern terms. True, it is first “plot” or “narrative”; but then it becomes “stories illustrating the society’s religion, history, class structure, or the origin of peculiar features of the natural environment.” It “verbalizes a society’s major concerns in religion and history particularly;” and it is “a means of symbolizing the ideals and aims of an established spiritual or temporal hierarchy.”[3]

This larger conception of myth is entirely a product of modern thought, since the romantic movement,  that is, after the Age of Reason had virtually put the quietus on mythical thinking. It is our way of trying to give meaning to that vast array of nightmarish projection, cruelty, and absurd childish fantasy which constituted the earliest thought of mankind. I say cruelty, because cruelty constituted an essential part of all early mythology, and human sacrifices were usually a part of primitive myth and ritual.

Let me remind you of the myth of Iphigenia. The priest Calchas declared that Agamemnon must sacrifice his own daughter to the goddess Artemis. In one version of the story, Artemis renounces the sacrifice and Iphigenia is taken off to the land of the Tauri. As a priestess among the Tauri she supervises at the altar where all strangers who come to the island are sacrificed to the goddess. Her own brother Orestes and his friend Pylades turn up, and Orestes is about to be sacrificed; but she recognizes him, and manages his escape, taking the image of the goddess away with her. In this story we probably see human sacrifice being replaced with a more humane and bloodless form of worship.

In the beginning, children, youths and women died on the altar. According to Arnold Toynbee, “child sacrifice was a custom that several kings of Israel and Judah practiced in common with other peoples in Canaan.”[4] You can read in Leviticus 18:21: “You shall not surrender any of your children to …” that is, the god to whom children were sacrificed.[5] The prohibition reveals that children must have been sacrificed at some time. And in I Kings 11:7 we read more fully, “Thus Solomon did what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord . . . He built a hill-shrine for Chemosh, the loathsome god of Moab, on the height to the east of Jerusalem, and for Molech, the loathsome god of the Ammonites. Thus he did for the gods to which all his foreign wives burnt offerings and made sacrifices.”[6]

Before the seventh century B.C., worship in the temple of Jerusalem must in fact have been polytheistic—the term “Elohim”, the gods, as a name for Yahveh, indicates as much. The kings Ahaz and Manasseh “burned their sons alive,” to foreign gods.[7] You read of Ahaz in 2 Chronicles 28:3 that “he even burnt his sons in the fire according to the abominable practice of the nations whom the Lord had dispossessed” etc. And Manasseh, In 2 Kings 21:3-6, that “he erected altars to the Baal . . . he made his sons pass through the fire.”[8] “Passing the children through the fires of Moloch” [sic] meant sacrificing them to the god.

As for other peoples, “King Mesha of Moab had sacrificed his son to the national god Chemosh”; and the Carthagenians, who were a colony of the Phoenicians, from Tyre, “sacrificed their children to Baal-Hammon throughout their history.”[9] Of course, the Aztecs of Mexico also sacrificed children to their god Tlaloc, and believed the god liked to receive children screaming in terror as his favourite offering.

Originally, human sacrifices were widespread. Adolf E. Jensen writing on Myth and Cult testifies to the “world-wide diffusion” of the cultures in which ritual killing and blood-sacrifice formerly occurred.[10] It is in fact possible that animal sacrifices ran at some distance tandem with human sacrifices. In any case, the Greeks sacrificed oxen by the hundred, which they called hecatombé, and the Romans sacrificed horses to Mars, swine to Bacchus, dogs to Robigus and goats to Juno. Among the Hebrews also, animal sacrifice was a normal part of religion; when the temple was rebuilt after the captivity, the dedication was celebrated by the sacrifice of “one hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs…and twelve he-goats.” (Ezra 6:17) But that is exactly how the Aztecs sacrificed human beings in great numbers on great occasions.

These horrors were the products or accompaniments of myth, those bad dreams of the human psyche, which are simply the concrete expression of profound visceral emotions, of guilt, fear, anxiety, hostility and sadistic rage: or as modern writers are apt to water things down, products of “the wholly bizarre and dream-like sequences found in so many of the world’s traditional tales.”[11] To give one example, the supreme god El of the Canaanites is described as “a brutal, bloody tyrant, whose acts caused all the gods to be terrified.… He dethroned his own father, and castrated him; he slew his own favourite son . . . with the latter’s iron weapon; he cut off his daughter’s head; he offered up his ‘only begotten son’ as a sacrifice to Heaven.”[12] But the theory of myth needs a better explanation than this obvious relation to unconscious sources. Yes, it is a dream; it is often a nightmare. But why is it a story at all? Why mythos?

Primarily, of course, mythologies are the instruments of political power. They control a childlike people through superstitious fear and terror. Only later, in their decadent stage, do they become entertaining stories—and possibly allegories for philosophy. This should be obvious to anyone who has studied ancient history.

But the larger theory upon which I base my analysis is that myth, or story, must have preceded rational thinking or conceptual thinking, and that in fact it was the only way that early man could have expressed or conceived or communicated his sense of things, his attitude to life, in primitive times.

In the beginning was the story, and later came the idea: first muthos, then logos. (Remember definition 8, “myth, opposed to logos, the historic tale.”)

“The language of animals,” writes Hannah Arendt, “—sounds, signs, gestures—would be amply sufficient to serve all immediate needs, not only for self-preservation and the preservation of the species, but also for making evident the moods and emotions of the soul.”[13]

“The moods and emotions of the soul,” as they are conveyed through the images of sensation and perception, must have been the original language of the psyche, developed through aeons of time, and applied widely through the millennia of prehistorical time. The evolution of the human mind, as rudimentary thinking process, begins with a language of remembered sensations and perceptions, for there was no other “vocabulary” with which an internal language could begin. This is our first language, the language of dreams, of strong stories, of myths, and it still is the primary vehicle for the moods and emotions of the soul. It is also the original language of art.

That is why interpretation, or criticism, is secondary, and unstable, in all study of literature. The story—the work of art—speaks for itself at the level long established by the inner language, the level of inter­connected image and emotion; and any interpretation can only be one possible translation into another language, the language of abstraction and conceptualization, which came much later in the history of culture.

It is also remarkable that this dream language of narrative, as it tried to comprehend the larger questions of life and death, the cycle of the seasons, the revolution of the heavens, acquired a great depth of consoli­dating meaning, comprising all the fears and terrors of tribal man, his hopes and anxieties, as well as his sense of larger powers and their domination over man’s fate.

So, writing of the Eastern civilizations before the coming of Greek rationality, the historian Herbert J. Muller says, “They all tended to settle into the same invariable pattern. They were ruled by gods and god-kings who were alike despots. They lived in a profoundly irrational world, haunted by fear, controlled by magic, framed by inviolable custom. Their basic principle was absolute obedience to customs and institutions that were not reasoned about because not regarded as man-made.”[14]

“The Egyptians,” as the Jewish historian Josephus wrote in the first century A. D., “appear never in all their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.”[15]

But gradually, among the Greeks and Romans, this form of primitive religion, the religion of mythologies, was watered down to routine civic custom, and something else began to take its place. Gibbon summarizes the state of Roman religion before the coming of Christianity with superb style: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The superstition of the people was not embittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth.”[16]

The Greeks, of course, are a turning-point in this history, a shift from mythological thinking about the ultimate realities, and the discovery of conceptual analytical thought. “At least as early as Homer,” says Muller, “the Greeks were already a free people, standing on their own feet, living their own lives in an ordered world in which monsters, demons, and other irrational horrors had largely been tamed or exterminated.”[17]

The Greeks from the very beginning were inclined to the life of reason. “The cure for human grief,” says Menander, 300 B.C., “is reason.” But this turning-point had become an entire civilization by the time we reach the Augustan stage of the Graeco-Roman synthesis. The mythologies of the Greeks and Romans had been thoroughly neutralized, that is to say “de-mythologized”, by the time we come to the classical age of Roman literature—Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid—in the first century B.C. And the religion of the Greeks and Romans, about the time of the birth of Christ, was extraordinarily benign, tolerant, and one can only say civilized. So too were the philosophy and thought of the Greek and Roman people of that time, at the end of the Hellenistic age.

Unfortunately, this is a subject on which it has been hard to get a fair hearing for some two thousand years now. The piety of honouring many gods, as a civic duty, even though one may not entirely believe in them, at least not in a literal way, is a virtue little recognized in retrospect. But it was there, and it had its humanity and charm.

Among the Greeks, “there was… no religious organization that could spread moral teaching, develop doctrine, or impose an orthodoxy.” “There were no heretics because there was no church.” “Recognizing the gods,” writes one authority, “was principally a matter of observing their cult. Piety was expressed in behaviour, in acts of respect towards the gods.” “Religion reflected and supported the general ethos of Greek culture. It discouraged individualism, a preoccupation with inner states, and the belief that intentions matter more than actions; it emphasized the sense of belonging to a community and the need for due observance of social forms.”[18]

The Romans were similar in their social and conventional sense of religious propriety. “When travelling,” Apuleius says, “a pious man stops when he passes a chapel or sacred wood and composes a vow, places a piece of fruit on the altar, and sits for a moment with the gods.”[19] “The gift and the vow, the exchange of divine protection for man’s gift,” explains Paul Veyne in his excellent History of Private Life in Rome, “are as important as prayer. If God is a father, there is little to do but pray to him. But if the gods are patrons, one can offer them gifts and receive gifts in return, symbolizing a friendship between unequal partners, each with a life of his own.”

I am tempted to quote a bit from Paul Veyne, an enlightened and liberal modern historian, on this subject:  “…Religious rites were performed with great care in a meditative spirit. Innumerable bas-reliefs depict worshippers, both male and female, making offerings to the gods. If we knew nothing of the pleasure that pagans took in performing these rites, we could no more understand these sculptures than an asexual being can understand an erotic film.”[20]

To enlarge your perspective on polytheism, let me read you just a few lines from one of the very oldest texts we have from Mesopotamian literature. This passage is attested in Sumerian, as before 2500 B.C., that is, six hundred years before Abraham began his trek northward from Ur of the Chaldees, near the Persian Gulf, toward the kingdom of Mari and Canaan, and 2500 years before Jesus Christ spoke similar words. The passage reads:

Do not return evil to your adversary;

Requite with kindness the one who does evil to you,

Maintain justice for your enemy,

Be friendly to your enemy.

Give food to eat, and a potation to drink

[to your god],

Grant what is requested, provide for and treat

            with honour.

At this one’s god takes pleasure.

It is pleasing to Shamash, who will repay

with favour.

Do good things, be kind all your days.[21]

Also, a page further, we read of Marduk, the god “whose heart is merciful, whose mind is forgiving.”

“Irreligion,” says Veyne, “was unknown among the Roman populace.”[22] But what did the cultivated minority, the political men, the orators, and the literary men in their private thoughts, think of the gods? Veyne answers categorically that they “did not believe in them at all.” And a reading of Latin literature will show that although, in all propriety, most affirmed a proper regard for the gods, many also frankly expressed complete scepticism and doubt.

A few of their opinions are interesting to look at for their own sake, both for their trenchant manner and their solid pith. Here is Ennius, 185 B. C.: “I have always said and will go on saying, there is a race of gods in heaven, but I do not believe that they concern themselves with what the human race is doing; for if they did, good men would fare well and bad men ill, which is not the case now.” He ridicules soothsayers: “Superstitious prophets, shameless haruspices, lazy, mad, driven by poverty . . . cannot find their own way yet show it to others . . . promise riches to the very men they ask for a drachma . . .”

Or Lucilius, 150 B.C., said to be the first writer of Roman satires:

Like little children who believe that bronze statues are living men, so these people take dreams and fictions for real and suppose that bronze images possess a heart. Picture galleries, no truth, all fiction.

Or Livy, about 25 B.C., writing about one of the founders of Rome:

Before anything else he decided that he must instill in his subjects the fear of the gods, this being the most effective measure with an ignorant, and at that time uncultured, people. And since he could not influence their minds without inventing some fairy tale, he pretended that he had conversations with the goddess Egeria at night.[23]

Or here is a poem, written by Ovid in 10 A.D., as I have just translated it again in 1991 A.D.:

When evil fate takes dear ones from us—

            forgive me if I speak it—

I am moved to say there are no gods.

Live piously— you too will die. Honor the sacred altars,

even as you do, black death drags you from the temple

            into the hollow tomb;

believe in immortal song—and look,

            Tibullus lies dead.

There's hardly enough of him left, to fill a tiny urn.

Elsewhere, Ovid says: “It is expedient there should be gods, and as it is expedient, let us deem that gods exist.”

And from Seneca you hear: “Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where thou ridest, that there are no gods” [nullos esse deos]. This is in the first century A.D., in the time of Nero, and from the great moralist Seneca.

So also from Petronius: “It was fear first created gods in the world.” “There is nothing more insincere than people’s silly convictions, or more silly than their sham morality.”

We today may be inclined to think that this scepticism, or hard rationality, is deplorable. But it is admirable and enlightened. It expresses the truth of the human condition, with great common sense and wisdom. Listen for a moment to Marcus Aurelius, who is both pious and sceptical: “To go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence?”[24] (I do not see any hysteria, any terrible hunger for Eastern religions in this—no vacuum that needs to be filled with sudden faith and salvation.)

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were completed in the second century A.D., about the year 180, when he ruled as Emperor; yet there is only one reference in them to the Christians, and that without rancour.[25] They did not know how to die gracefully, wisely. The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and of Epictetus, like the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius, which expresses a great scorn for religion and superstition, are the end-product of a long history of philosophical scepticism whose full story, I think, has never yet been properly told.

Both Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy arise from a profound disturbance in Greek religion and scepticism about the nature of the gods. This tension leads to drama, and explains the rise of tragedy, because in tragedy a belief in the gods is tested, and then somewhat modified. We follow this through Aeschylus and Sophocles, until the issue is temporarily resolved (or perhaps dissolved) in Euripides and Aristophanes[26] In philosophy, the allegorizing of mythological tales, and ultimately their transformation into conceptual thought is clearly apparent, from the sixth century to the time of Socrates, who was charged and condemned to death, among other things, for “not believing in the gods of the state.”[27] “Both history and philosophy,” says Jasper Griffin, writing on Greek Myth and Hesiod, “emerge from mythical thought.” Regarding “the fate of myth in Greece” after the rise of philosophy and history, in the fifth century, he observes that “the mythical genealogies gave place to a con­ception of history which tried to exclude the supernatural….”  And “the cosmic speculations of myth gave place to philosophy.”[28]

Now, if myths are an attempt to represent cosmic and supernatural realities in story form, then it must follow that the philosophers, from Parmenides and Democritus in the fifth century B.C. to Zeno and Epicurus in the third, represent the knowable and the unknowable in conceptual and rational form. And if dream-like myth is a first stage in human mental process, then rational enquiry, abstract thought, must be called a second stage, derived or evolved from the first.

From a very early time the Greeks were already conceptualizing their mythology and their view of the world. In the sixth century the poet Theognis can write that—

“Hope is man’s one good deity.”

Hope is a purely abstract word. How astonishing that he calls it our only friendly god—moúne theòs esthlè”—esthlè meaning the same as agathós, good—personifying the abstraction as a god.[29] This is truly the direction of Greek thought.

“Thales and his followers,” says Herbert J. Muller, “sought to explain the world in wholly natural, rational terms instead of supernatural mythical ones.”[30] This direction of thinking was an important aspect of the earliest Greek philosophy. “They sought to eliminate the arbitrary events characte­ristic of mythical narratives,” says Martin West, writing on the early Greek philosophers. “They preferred to depersonalize their gods and identify them with the unchanging forces that govern the working of the universe.”[31]

Already in the sixth century B.C., near and around the famous city of Miletus in Asia Minor, Xenophanes “attacked the polytheism and anthropomorphism of the traditional Greek religion and asserted that God is single and eternal.”[32] His contemporaries, Anaximander and Aximenes, both from Miletus, continued his highly speculative but brilliant stabs at what we would now call a scientific explanation of natural phenomena.

I would say that there are two great branches of Greek philosophy stemming from these thinkers. One, beginning with Parmenides, the philosopher of the One and the All, proceeds to the transcendentalism of Plato and the view of two worlds in the theory of knowledge; then to the theism of Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, and finally to the mysticism of Plotinus in the third century A.D. The other, beginning with Leucippus and Democritus, the atomists, proceeds via Epicurus, in the early third century B.C., to Lucretius, his disciple, in the first century B.C. Two branches—Parmenides to Plato, Democritus to Lucretius — and it is the last that mainly concerns us.

Lucretius is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is a wonder that he has survived at all, in a single copy of an ancient text, as I understand. He was an admirer of Epicurus, and probably merely restated his philosophy in Latin poetry, but we only have fragments of the writings of Epicurus. The reason is plain. They were not required reading in the monasteries. Like his master, Lucretius has a passionate hatred of religion and superstition, which he claims are founded on ignorance and fear; and he is a thoroughly modern scientific thinker.

“When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion . . . it was a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her…. Him neither the stories of the gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of nature.”

Lucretius anticipates the entire position of modern science in his poem On the Nature of Things, written some time around 60 B.C.

Nothing comes out of nothing. Cause and effect are constant, he says—“since all things are produced from fixed seeds.”

Matter is indestructible: it is made of atoms, the “everlasting seeds.” “Nature suffers not the destruction of anything to be seen.”

Within matter there is a great deal of empty space: “there is a void in things . . . mere space untouchable and empty.” [How strange, that we are repeating this here at McGill, while Rutherford worked to prove precisely the same point—the empty space within the atoms—by physical experi­ment, early in this century, and began his work at McGill.]

Time has no independent existence, says Lucretius. As Einstein later put it, “Time is a construct.” “Time exists not by itself,” to quote Lucretius. “No man feels time by itself apart from the motion or quiet rest of things.”

Then, the atoms: “There are . . . the seeds of things and their first beginnings, out of which the whole sum of things now stands created.”

Different substances are made of the same atoms: “the seeds common to many things lie mingled and hidden in things in many ways.” They are combined in different ways,  he says, just as the letters of a book are combined to make different words and meanings.

The universe is infinite: “the whole universe then is bounded in no direction of its ways.”

Creation occurs by chance: “For in very truth, not by design did the first-beginnings of things [the atoms] place themselves each in their order with foreseeing mind . . . but buffeted by blows from limitless time, by trying movements and unions of every kind, at last they fall into such dispositions as those, whereby our world of things is created and holds together.”

Indeterminism in the very small—called a “tiny swerve”—explains freedom of will: “the very mind feels not some necessity within in doing all things, and is not constrained like a conquered thing.” (This “tiny swerve” is very much like the principle of indeterminism in modern physics.)

The atoms are not of equal mass or structure. To quote him exactly, “they are not of equal bulk nor possessed of the same shape.”

Like Galileo a bit later, Lucretius points out that there are primary and secondary qualities; he says, “the bodies of matter have no colour at all.”

Life is made out of the inanimate: “living things are begotten of insensible things.”

And finally, there are other worlds, infinite in number: “There are here and there other gatherings of matter, such as this is. . . There are other worlds in other regions. . . sky and earth and sun, moon, sea, and all else that exists, are not unique, but rather of number numberless….”[33]

So much for the infinite worlds of Lucretius, similar to those later discovered by Giordano Bruno, for which he suffered and died at the hands of the Inquisition. But that is another story.

Lucretius points in the direction of natural science. He reminds me of a wonderful thought from Seneca, who was an exact contemporary of Jesus, but in a different universe: “The day will yet come when the progress of research through long ages will bring to light the mysteries of nature that are now concealed…. The day will yet come when posterity will be amazed that we remained ignorant of things that will to them seem so plain.”[34]

Now, the one important meaning of atomism, whether in the ancient world or today, is that it frees us from mythological conceptions of nature, from the idea of some God or gods pulling the strings with a hidden purpose. Everything is contained in the atoms. In the same way, such a simplistic theory as the Darwinian machine, whereby random variations and selection for survival produce everything under creation, even phenomena like the human mind and brain, by pure accident— a hypothesis which is utterly unbelievable, and impossible on mere mathematical grounds—is accepted and enshrined in the biological sciences, because it frees us from the myth of divine intervention. Until we have discovered better concepts, for the structure of matter and the evolution of life—or for the divine in the universe—we will have to live with these peculiar theories.

Monotheism is not the last word. It is only a point in human thinking at which we have been arrested. We must think beyond that metaphor, to the nature of being, for which there is as no myth and no concept. And in this, all science, religion, and art have a part in the task.

Anyhow, unlike the hemi-semi-demi-religious and rather melancholy school of the Stoics, that of Epicurus and Lucretius was bouncy and cheerful. “Nothing hinders us from living a life worthy of the gods,” Lucretius says.[35] (His gods are somewhere far above and beyond this world, and have nothing to do with the affairs of men.) He imagines the discovery of music and describes a delightful picnic with music and dance:

So often, lying in friendly groups on the soft grass near some stream of water under the branches of a tall tree, at no great cost they would give pleasure to their bodies, above all when the weather smiled and the season of the year painted the green grass with flowers. Then were there wont to be jests, and talk, and merry laughter. For then the rustic muse was at its best; then glad mirth would prompt to wreathe head and shoulders with garlands twined of flowers and foliage, and to dance all out of step, among their limbs heavily, and with heavy foot to strike mother earth; whence arose smiles and merry laughter, for all these things then were strong in freshness and wonder.[36]

Yes, there is something about shucking off the old gods that leaves the mind light and limber. Democritus, founding father of the atomists, was known as “the laughing philosopher”; Juvenal describes him as forever laughing at the pomposities and pretensions of mankind, shaking in his lungs with perpetual laughter—perpetuo risu pulmone agitare solebat. This kind of humour was carried on by Menippus, a writer of satires in Greece, a member of the Cynic school, closely akin to Stoicism and Epicureanism in its scepticism and its ethics. We have no remains of Menippus, but my final exhibit from the classical world—an example of demythification with a vengeance—is taken from an admirer and imitator of Menippus, who happens also to be my own namesake. This is Lucian, writing in Greek, in the second century A. D. I was christened Lucian, you know, so that I feel a certain affinity with and affection for him. In fact we are blood-brothers. In this page from one of Lucian’s sketches, Poseidon is trying to see Father Zeus, but Hermes the messenger will not admit him.