INTRODUCTION.

them we are informed: “That what Orpheus delivered mystically through arcane narrations, this Pythagoras learned when he celebrated orgies in the Thracian Libethra, being initiated by Aglaophamus in the mystic wisdom which Orpheus derived from his mother Calliope, in the mountain Pangæus.”

This sublime theology, though it was scientifically disseminated by Plato, was still—conformably to the custom of the most ancient philosophers—delivered by him synoptically, in such a way as to be inaccessible to the vulgar. But when, in consequence of the commencement of a degraded and barren period, this theology became corrupted through the negligence and confusion of its followers, then such of his disciples as happened to live when it was thus degraded and deformed found it necessary to unfold it more fully, to prevent its becoming utterly extinct. The men by whom this arduous task was accomplished were the last of the disciples of Plato; men who, though they lived in a base—