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654
HEADERTEXT.
654

654 Ogyges. certainly appears more probable than the wish to exalt the antiquity of their city by ascribing its origin to the son of the first king of Attica. But neither does the fact, if assumed, that the Eleusinian religion travelled out of Bceotia into Attica, raise so much as a shade of reasonable suspicion that any particular king, either of all Bceotia or of Thebes, was the author of the religion, or derived his name from its rites. If Ogyges was only king of Thebes, he would seem to be even positively excluded from all share in them : for their Thracian founders are not represented as having inhabited Thebes, nor is Ogyges connected with the Boeotian Eleusis, though if he had been, this would not bring him into any relation with the rites of Ceres, which are nowhere as far as I remember said to have been celebrated there. The allusion which Euripides, in the passage quoted by J. K. from the Phoenissae, 694, appears to make to the worship of Ceres at Thebes, if that was the poet'^s meaning, does not bear upon the present question, since it is not accompanied by any men- tion of Ogyges. The case would indeed be different if Ogyges had ever been represented as the father of Proserpine ; but though Wpa^iliKr} is a title given to that goddess in an Orphic hymn, and though Panyasis sang of Tremilus that he married ^vjucprjv 'Qyvy Irjv i]v Ylpa^LCLKr]v KoXeovai ^ijSpip err apyvpeco TTOTa/mw Trapd ^ivrjevri (Steph. Byz. TpejuLiXrj), this does not seem to establish an identity or even an affinity between the Lycian river-nymph and the daughter of Ceres, nor to connect the Theban Ogyges with either of them. The digression therefore in which J. K. proceeds to compare the name of Ogyges with that of Orpheus, and other founders of mystic rites, though it contains a number of ingenious combinations, is one into which we cannot accompany him, because we have not yet found any point to start from as the ground of the com- parison. We still want some one piece of authentic evidence to warrant the conjecture, that Ogyges had anything to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for which at present we cannot discover any kind of foundation. The question then : how Ogyges came by his place in the list of the Attic kings, requires a different answer. That which we are about to propose or rather to defend has one ad- vantage over the hypothesivS just examined, in setting out from