Note 11 — PART II CHAPTER VIII ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS

At any rate the people whom Thuc., Ephoros, and others call Thracians and regarded as having been once settled in Phokis, Boeotia, etc., are undoubtedly to be considered Thracians—and not the impossibly honest and exemplary people, a creation of the fancy, the “Thracians of the Muses”, alleged to be quite distinct from the real Thracian peoples, of whom we have heard so much since K. O. Müller (Orchom. 379 ff.) introduced the idea. Antiquity only knew of one kind of Thracian. In the Homeric poems they are not so different from the Greeks in civilization as they were in later times, when we know them from the accounts of Herod. and Xen. For all that they are the same people. They seem in the course of time to have degenerated, or rather they have not shared in the progress made by others and so have remained backward (even behind their Phrygian relatives who wandered to Asia Minor and achieved a higher culture under Semitic influence). In fact, like the Keltoi, they were never able to get beyond a condition of semi-civilization.