In his 1609 publication De Sapientia Veterum, Bacon sets out to discover the hidden, allegorical truths embedded in thirty-one figures from classical mythology. Though elsewhere he urges that ‘science must eliminate the fable and focus on facts’, his Preface to De Sapientia Veterum argues for the continued necessity of parables and similitudes to advance learning. These not only sweeten the pill when introducing new theories – allowing the philosopher to communicate without ‘offence or harshness’ – but also sustain communion with the divine in the pursuit of knowledge, evoking the very use of typological ‘veils and shadows’ that ‘religion delights in’. Allegories, even as they cloak and protect their hidden significance, allow the learner a glimpse of purer, more distant truths.

Memorably, Bacon includes amongst his mythologies the myth of Cupid, or ‘Love’, whom he equates with the ‘appetite or instinct of primal matter; or to speak more plainly, the natural motion of the atom’. In the section ‘Cupid, or the Atom’, Bacon traces the cryptic history of a complex figure who bears two forms from his classical origins. The newest and most recognisable of these is the cherubic infant, ‘youngest of all the gods, son of Venus’.