The Areopagus at Athens had the care of religion, but the Areopagites were not priests.

This absence of a priestly caste had considerable effect upon the flexile and familiar nature of the Grecian creed, because there were none professionally interested in guarding the purity of the religion, in preserving to what it had borrowed, symbolical allusions, and in forbidding the admixture of new gods and heterogeneous creeds.

The more popular a religion, the more it seeks corporeal representations, and avoids the dim and frigid shadows of a metaphysical belief.

[34] The romantic fables connected with the Grecian mythology were, some home-sprung, some relating to native heroes, and incorporating native legends, but they were also, in great measure, literal interpretations of symbolical types and of metaphorical expressions, or erroneous perversions of words in other tongues.

The craving desire to account for natural phenomena, common to mankind--the wish to appropriate to native heroes the wild tales of mariners and strangers natural to a vain and a curious people--the additions which every legend would receive in its progress from tribe to tribe--and the constant embellishments the most homely inventions would obtain from the competition of rival poets, rapidly served to swell and enrich these primary treasures of Grecian lore--to deduce a history from an allegory--to establish a creed in a romance.