CHAPTER II.
The unimportant consequences to be deduced from the admission that Cecrops might be Egyptian .-- Attic Kings before Theseus .-- The Hellenes .-- Their Genealogy .-- Ionians and Achaeans Pelasgic .-- Contrast between Dorians and Ionians .-- Amphictyonic League.
I.

In allowing that there does not appear sufficient evidence to induce us to reject the tale of the Egyptian origin of Cecrops, it will be already observed, that I attach no great importance to the dispute: and I am not inclined reverently to regard the innumerable theories that have been built on so uncertain a foundation.

An Egyptian may have migrated to Attica, but Egyptian influence in Attica was faint and evanescent;--arrived at the first dawn of historical fact, it is with difficulty that we discover the most dubious and shadowy vestiges of its existence.

Neither Cecrops nor any other Egyptian in those ages is recorded to have founded a dynasty in Attica--it is clear that none established a different language--and all the boasted analogies of religion fade, on a close examination, into an occasional resemblance between the symbols and attributes of Egyptian and Grecian deities, or a similarity in mystic ceremonies and solemn institutions, which, for the most part, was almost indisputably formed by intercourse between Greece and Egypt in a far later age.
Taking the earliest epoch at which history opens, and comparing the whole character of the Athenian people--moral, social, religious, and political--with that of any Egyptian population, it is not possible to select a more startling contrast, or one in which national character seems more indelibly formed by the early and habitual adoption of utterly opposite principles of thought and action.

[71] I said that Cecrops founded no dynasty: the same traditions that bring him from Egypt give him Cranaus, a native, for his successor.