Note 42 — Chapter XIII · THE RELATION OF THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION.

(1) Allegorical interpretation of myths. longer recognised. The process required a regular code of interpretation by means of which a philosophic mind could see its own thoughts in the utterances of commonplace thinkers. By the Stoics, as by their Jewish and Christian followers, this code of interpretation was found in the method of allegorical interpretation—a method which received a most extended application, in order to bridge over the gulf between the older and the more modern types of culture.42 Zeno, and still more Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and their successors, sought to discover natural principles and moral ideas—the λόγοι φυσικοὶ, or physicæ rationes,—in the Gods of popular belief and the stories of these Gods,43 and supposed that such principles and ideas were represented in these stories in a sensuous form.44 In this attempt, they clung to the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the Bible of the Greeks,45 without, however, excluding other mythology from the sphere of their investigation. One chief instrument which they, and modern lovers of the symbolical following in their footsteps, employed was a capricious playing with etymologies of which so many instances are on record.46 Like most allegorisers, they also laid down certain principles of interpretation sensible enough theoretically,47 but proving, by the use which was made of them, that their scientific appearance was only a blind to conceal the most capricious vagaries. Approaching in some of their explanations to the original bases of mythological formation, they were still unable to shake off the curious notion that the originators of myths, fully conscious of all their latent meanings, had framed them as pictures to appeal to the senses;48 and, in innumerable cases, they resorted to explanations so entirely without foundation that they would have been impossible to anyone possessing a sound view of nature and the origin of legends. To make theory tally with practice, the founder of the School—following Antisthenes, and setting an example afterwards repeated by both Jews and Christians—maintained that Homer only in some places expressed himself according to truth, in others according to popular opinion.49 Thus did Stoicism surround itself with the necessary instruments for the most extended allegorical and dogmatic interpretation.