His success was not encouraging. In the first place he had a difficulty in making himself understood. The pure Attic Greek on which he prided himself was strange to the ears of his new audience, and he could not bring himself to descend to the barbarous dialect to which they were accustomed. And when he was seriously called to account in the matter of his belief he found himself involved in difficulties from which he saw no way of escape. At Athens religion was politely ignored. The common people must, of course, have their gods and goddesses; and the wise man, if he were prudent, would say nothing—anyhow in public—to disturb their belief; but within the privileged walls of the schools the names of Zeus and Athené and Apollo were never so much as mentioned, except, perhaps, in the course of some antiquarian discussion.
Among his new disciples, as he would fain have reckoned them, Athenæus found a very different temper. They were terribly in earnest; abstractions and phrases did not satisfy them; they pushed their questions home in a very perplexing way.
One day at the conclusion of a lecture, the customary invitation to the audience to put any questions that might occur to them was accepted by a young man who sat on one of the front benches.
“I would ask you, venerable sir,” he said, “some questions about the gods of your religion.”
“Speak on,” replied Athenæus, with his usual courtesy; “I shall be delighted to satisfy you to the best of my power.”
“Are we to believe the stories that are told us in this book?” and he held up, as he spoke, a little volume of popular mythology, filled from beginning to end with tales that, to say the least, were not edifying. “For, if these be true, these divine beings were such as would be banished from the society of all honest men and women. They are thieves, adulterers, murderers. It would be a thousand times better to have no gods at all than such as these.”
“You are right, sir,” said the lecturer; “these stories are for the ignorant only, at least in their outward meaning, though they have an inner meaning also, which I will take some fitting occasion to expound. But not such are the gods whom we worship.”
“Will you tell us something of them?” continued the questioner.