e
clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... Yes, and if oxen and horses
or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works
of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses,
and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several
kinds.... The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the
Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair."

Considering Greek philosophy in its entirety, we see that it was
naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather
than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the
existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the
role of Providence and fewer still believed in personal immortality.

Professor Boas, in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy,
remarks: "The Asiatic myths assumed the existence of beings beyond the
world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course
of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They
seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question
was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became
dominant in Europe, much of its theologians' time was spent in answering
it. The only plausible answer then was that God made the world because
He felt like it. For no reason could be given sufficiently compelling to
sway the will of the Omnipotent. But such an answer was unsatisfactory
to the Greek. In his philosophy all this is changed. No god steps out of
the machine to initiate cosmic history. The First Cause is a physical
substance, some material thing, which operates by the laws of its own
nature. Its every movement is theoretically open to the scrutiny of
reason. And hence, a scientific rather than a religious answer can be
given to every question."

At the beginning of the Christian era, the cultured Romans were stoics
or epicureans. The poet Lucretius was an epicurean who regarded the
belief in the gods as a product of the terrors of primitive man and
recommended that the mind should be emancipated from the fear of the
gods and argued against the immortality of the soul. Seneca, Epictetus,
and Marcus Aurelius were stoics. Cicero insinuates that the gods are
only poetical creations, that the popular doctrine of punishment in a
world to come is only an idle fable, and is uncertain whether the soul
is immortal. Seneca wrote against the religion of his co