Some Stoics and Platonists, such as Plutarch, endeavoured to render myths more intelligible by explaining them 'pragmatically,' and this system too saw in the gods of Greece kings or merely men. Another system, the 'Psychic,' believed myth to be explanatory of the various stages through which the soul must pass. Other Stoics, again, saw in myths reference to natural phenomena. Thus the first school, the 'Pragmatic,' would see in the figure of Pallas Athene a transfigured mortal queen; the second, the 'Psychic,' would explain her as the 'understanding,' and the third, the 'Stoic,' as the thicker air between moon and earth.
Driven to the wall by Christianity, the remaining believers in Greek myth attempted to justify it by the allegorical system of interpretation. The early Christian fathers like St Augustine (A.D. 354-430) applauded the system of Euhemerus, in which they beheld the abhorred mythology abandoned by one himself a pagan. Porphyry (A.D. 233-304), however, considered that there might be a moral meaning in myth, and others thought it possible that it concealed a germ of religious truth.
The Middle Ages produced no criticism of myth worthy of attention. Popular belief in medieval times regarded the gods and goddesses of antiquity as of diabolic origin, or at least as 'pagans' who had been relegated to Hell on the advent of Christianity. This view was, of course, sedulously supported by the priesthood, as may be seen in the medieval legend of Tannhäuser. Prior to the Renaissance period, with its revival of classical studies, the gods of Greece and Rome were frequently confused or identified with other pagan deities and even with religious leaders like Mohammed, as, for instance, in the phrase 'Mahound and Termagent,' which alludes to the pairing of Mohammed and Tyr, or Tyr Magus, a Scandinavian divinity. In _The King of Tars_, an English romance, probably of the fourteenth century, we read how the Sultan of Damascus destroyed his idols, "with sterne strokes and with grete, on Jovyn and Plotoun, on Astrot and sire Jovyn." Here Roman and Semitic deities are mingled in "hideous ruin," like the wicked angels of Milton, whose poem, by the way, encouraged a later belief that the Arch-fiend and his associates were no other than the gods of the elder faiths, Beelzebub, Belial, and, among others,