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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which
may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of
Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a
column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on
earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and
heroes of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose
achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,'
and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the
treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to
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