such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of their
history could be described as an age of optimism. They were never, by
their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or philosophy,
exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high hopes on
human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything--[words in
Greek],--they did not go further than that.

This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which
perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They
always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable
powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and gains.
Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on man's
inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection that his
friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high seas if the
art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had submissively
respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is audacious:

Nequiquam deus abscidit
Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.

In vain a wise god sever'd lands
By the dissociating sea.

Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this unnatural
conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:

Man finds no feat too hard or high;
Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
He dares not lay his thunder by.

The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what would
have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the idea of
Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck them as
audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at ease in the
presence of unknown incalculable powers.

This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading Greek
thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics identified
Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that the universe is
permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira, for which we have no
equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is misleading. Moira meant a
fixed order in the universe; but as a fact to which men must bow, it had
enough in common with fatality to demand a philosophy of resignation and
to hinder the creation of an optimistic atmosphere of hope. It