infancy, what would their views be today?

In the consideration of the Greek thinkers of lesser importance one
finds that they were continually storming against the religious
conceptions of the populace. The philosophers were ever unpopular with
the credulous. "Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia was
impeached for blasphemy and the tears of Pericles alone saved her;
Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for
a chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of
his disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the
tutor of Alexander." (_Winwood Reade: "The Martyrdom of Man."_)

Anaxagoras, the friend and master of Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates,
was accused by the superstitious Athenians of atheism and impiety to the
gods. He was condemned to death and barely escaped this fate through the
influence of Pericles; which resulted in the accusation of atheism
against Pericles. Euripides was accused of heresy, and Aeschylus was
condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy and was saved from this
fate by his brother Aminias. The philosophy of Parmenides was distinctly
pantheistic, and Pythagoras, who attempted to purify the religion of the
Greeks and free it from its absurdities and superstitions, was exiled
for his scepticism.

Democritus, a materialist and atheist of 2500 years ago, formulated a
mechanical view of phenomena in accordance with which everything that
happens is due to physical impacts. "Such a materialism was a great
liberation from superstition; and had it survived in its integrity, the
path of European wisdom would have been vastly different from what it
was. What the path would have been, we are beginning to see to-day, for
since the nineteenth century we have been treading it more or less
consistently but by no means so gallantly and courageously as
Democritus." (_G. Boas: "The Adventures of Human Thought."_)

Democritus and the Epicureans strove to deliver men from their two chief
apprehensions: the fear of the gods, and the fear of death; and in so
doing rejected the religious beliefs and substituted a rational and
scientific conception of the universe.

It was Xenophanes, the Voltaire of Greece, who brought to the attention
of his countrymen the discovery that man created the gods in his own
image. He attacked the conceptions of the Greek deities with these
words, "Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are, and hav