In time, however, the higher morality of the leading Hellenic thinkers revolted against the low morality, to say nothing more, of much of the mythology embodied in the poets. Xenophanes began the attack. “Homer and Hesiod,” he cries, “ascribed to the gods all that is considered disgraceful among men.” Herakleitos declared that Homer deserved a thrashing. Even the pious Pindar tried to alter some of the myths to suit his own morality, and Aeschylus fights hard for an underlying monotheism. In the next generation the storm broke: awakening intelligence, fostered by the Sophists and the philosophers, shrank away from the horrors of the _Theogony_. Tragedy, by bringing mythology before the eyes, had made its impossibility more apparent. The researches of the earlier historians in comparative mythology had undermined the bases of belief. Herodotos had found that a god named Herakles had been recognised in Egypt 17,000 years before his time; consequently the Hellenic Herakles, only six centuries before the historian’s age, must be only a man of the same name.[661] Rationalism began to master the mythology: Thucydides tried to apply scientific methods to the Trojan War, making, for example, its duration due to the difficulty of obtaining supplies for so large a force. The rationalism of Euripides is well known. Metrodoros, a pupil of Anaxagoras, made the gods natural forces and varieties of matter――a device already employed by Empedokles for poetical convenience. In this way Sokrates rationalises the Boreas-myth in the _Phaidros_,[662] where Plato states that the wise disbelieve such tales; but Sokrates was too busy studying his own personality to raise all these numerous questions, so he accepts the customary belief. The defenders of Homer, led by Metrodoros and Stesimbrotos,[663] tried to allegorise him, declaring that the worst myths had a moral meaning in the background. The allegories were often ludicrous: Plato rejects them wholly for educational purposes, as children always take the literal interpretation.
But public opinion was still fiercely attached to the old deities, as the incident of the Hermai and the condemnation of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Sokrates showed. The deities could not be sacrificed: consequently it was the myths that had to go. The myths said that Zeus dethroned his own father and committed adultery: if the myth is true, since Zeus is Supreme God, these crimes are justifiable.[664] Therefore the myth must be untrue. Homer and Hesiod lied: their works are mainly a blasphemous fiction.[665] Isokrates[666] sums up this new attitude. “The poets,” he declares, “blasphemously represented the sons of the Immortals as having done and suffered worse deeds than the most impious of men: they spoke such things about the gods as no one would venture to allege of his worst enemy; not only do they make them steal, commit adultery, and fall into slavery to mortals, but even represent them as eating their children, mutilating their fathers, and binding their mothers in chains.… For this the poets did not go unpunished, but some of them were wanderers and begged their bread, some became blind, another was an exile all his life long, and Orpheus, who devoted himself especially to such stories, was torn in pieces.”[667]