Van Dale’s books are learned works written in Latin, full of quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and moreover confused and obscure in exposition, as is often the case with Dutch writings of that time. But a clever Frenchman, Fontenelle, took upon himself the task of rendering his work on the oracles into French in a popular and attractive form. His book called forth an answering pamphlet from a Jesuit advocating the traditional view; the little controversy seems to have made some stir in France about the year 1700. At any rate Banier, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, treated ancient mythology from a Euhemeristic point of view, gave some consideration to it. His own conclusion is—in 1738!—that demonology cannot be dispensed with for the explanation of the oracles. He gives his grounds for this in a very sensible criticism of van Dale’s priestly fraud theory, the absurdity of which he exposes with sound arguments.
Banier is the last author to whom I can point for the demon-theory applied as an explanation of a phenomenon in ancient religion; I have not found it in any other mythologist of the eighteenth century, and even in Banier, with the exception of this single point, everything is explained quite naturally according to the best Euhemeristic models. But in the positive understanding of the nature of ancient paganism no very considerable advance had actually been made withal. A characteristic example of this is the treatment of ancient religion by such an eminent intellect as Giambattista Vico. In his _Scienza Nuova_, which appeared in 1725, as the foundation of his exposition of the religion of antiquity he gives a characterisation of the mode of thought of primitive mankind, which is so pertinent and psychologically so correct that it anticipates the results of more than a hundred years of research. Of any supernatural explanation no trace is found in him, though otherwise he speaks as a good Catholic. But when he proceeds to explain the nature of the ancient ideas of the gods in detail, all that it comes to is a series of allegories, among which the politico-social play a main part. Vico sees the earliest history of mankind in the light of the traditions about Rome; the Graeco-Roman gods, then, and the myths about them, become to him largely an expression of struggles between the “patricians and plebeians” of remote antiquity.