A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries

for this last piece of information was, according to Plato in the Phaedo, the ultimate design of the mysteries; and the former is necessarily inferred from the present discourse. Hence the reason why it was obvious to none but the Pythagoric and Platonic philosophers, who derived their theology from Orpheus himself, the original founder of these sacred institutions; and why we meet with no information on this particular in any writer prior to Plotinus; as he was the first who, having penetrated the profound wisdom of antiquity, delivered it to posterity without the concealments of mystic symbols and fabulous narrations.

Hence too, I think, we may infer, with the greatest probability, that this recondite meaning of the mysteries was not known even to Virgil himself,