rship of Bacchus in Greece met with great opposition, and that
his priests and devotees published several miracles and prodigies, the
more easily to influence the minds of their fellow-men. Thus, the
daughters of Minyas are said to have been changed into bats, solely
because they neglected to join in the orgies of that God; when,
probably, the fact was, that they were either secretly despatched, or
were forced to fly for their lives; and their absence was accounted
for to the ignorant and credulous, by the invention of this Fable. The
story of Dercetis, as related by Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and
Herodotus, is, that having offended Venus, that Goddess caused her to
fall in love with a young man, by whom she had a daughter. In despair
at her misfortune, she killed her lover, and exposed her child, and
afterwards drowned herself. The Syrians, lamenting her fate, built a
temple near where she was drowned, and honored her as a Goddess. They
stated that she was turned into a fish, and they there represented her
under the figure of a woman down to the waist, and of a fish thence
downwards. They also abstained from eating fish; though they offered
them to her in sacrifice, and suspended gilded ones in her temple.
Selden, in his Treatise on the Syrian Gods, suggests that the story of
Dercetis, or Atergatis, was founded on the figure and worship of
Dagon, the God of the Philistines, who was represented under the
figure of a fish; and that the name of Atergatis is a corruption of
'Adir Dagon,' 'a great fish,' which is not at all improbable. The same
author supposes that Dercetis was originally the same Deity with
Venus, Astarte, Minerva, Juno, Isis, and the Moon; and that she was
worshipped under the name of Mylitta by the Assyrians, and as Alilac
by the Arabians. Lucian tells us, that Dercetis was reported to have
been the mother of Semiramis.

Ovid and Hyginus are the only authors that make mention of the story
of Pyramus and Thisbe, and both agree in making Babylon the scene of
it. It seems to be rather intended as a moral tale, than to have been
built upon any actual circumstance. It affords a lesson to youth not
to enter rashly into engagements: and to parents not to pursue, too
rigorously, the gratification of their own resentment, but rather to
consult the inclination of their children, when not likely to be
productive of unhappiness at a future period.