I have tried to sketch in outline the main forms of belief to which Hellenistic philosophy moved or drifted. Let me dwell for a few pages more upon the characteristic method by which it reached them. It may be summed up in one word, Allegory. All Hellenistic philosophy from the first Stoics onward is permeated by allegory. It is applied to Homer, to the religious traditions, to the ancient rituals, to the whole world. To Sallustius after the end of our period the whole material world is only a great myth, a thing whose value lies not in itself but in the spiritual meaning which it hides and reveals. To Cleanthes at the beginning of it the Universe was a mystic pageant, in which the immortal stars were the dancers and the Sun the priestly torch-bearer.[165:2] Chrysippus reduced the Homeric gods to physical or ethical principles; and Crates, the great critic, applied allegory in detail to his interpretation of the all-wise poet.[166:1] We possess two small but complete treatises which illustrate well the results of this tendency, Cornutus +peri theôn+ and the _Homeric Allegories_ of Heraclitus, a brilliant little work of the first century B. C. I will not dwell upon details: they are abundantly accessible and individually often ridiculous. A by-product of the same activity is the mystic treatment of language: a certain Titan in Hesiod is named Koios. Why? Because the Titans are the elements and one of them is naturally the element of +Koiotês+, the Ionic Greek for 'Quality'. The Egyptian Isis is derived from the root of the Greek +eidenai+, Knowledge, and the Egyptian Osiris from the Greek +hosios+ and +hiros+ ('holy' and 'sacred', or perhaps more exactly 'lawful' and '_tabu_'). Is this totally absurd? I think not. If all human language is, as most of these thinkers believed, a divine institution, a cap filled to the brim with divine meaning, so that by reflecting deeply upon a word a pious philosopher can reach the secret that it holds, then there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that the special secret held by an Egyptian word may be found in Greek, or the secret of a Greek word in Babylonian. Language is One. The Gods who made all these languages equally could use them all, and wind them all intricately in and out, for the building up of their divine enigma.