her
own, idealised and refined the parts of nature held divine, and
ascribed to them not only, as all early races do, human motives and
human passions, but also human beauty and wisdom and goodness.
Whatever rude materials she received to work on, either from the
earlier dwellers on Greek soil or from foreign lands, she made them
her own by transfiguring them into ideal men and women. Thus the
Greeks reached the position, which they taught the world first in
immortal poetry and then in immortal plastic art, that man should not
bow down to anything that is beneath him, and that nature can only
become fit to be worshipped by being idealised and made human. An end
was made to the dark imagination which was so apt to creep over all
early religion, that deity and humanity may be different and
opposite; that an object devoid of reason, an object or an animal
admired not for its goodness but for something about it which man
cannot understand, may be his god and have a claim to his allegiance.
God and man are of the same nature, the Greeks found; to arrive at a
true idea of a god we have to form, on the basis of the natural
object where he is supposed to dwell, the image of an ideal man or
woman. This was a great step, but in this conception of deity the
Greeks also laid up for themselves, as we shall see, many
difficulties.

Early Eastern Influences.--Our positive knowledge of Greek history
begins about the middle of the second millennium B.C.; we have
information of this period in the ruins of Mycenae and Tiryns and
other places. These remains attest a political condition widely
different from that of the patriarchal settlements of the period when
the Greeks were emerging from Aryan barbarism; very different also
from the free city life which came afterwards. The recent excavations
have brought to light the palaces of kings, built, it is evident,
according to an Eastern type, and with arrangements for the burial
and worship of dead potentates, not unlike those of the pyramids. The
art is rude, but shows large forces to have been at the command of
those who directed it. We have here, therefore, a state of matters
such as that described in the Homeric poems, in which petty kings
rule in many of the Greek towns, some of them being personages of
great rank and power. The movement in civilisation attested by these
remains is admitted to be due to an impulse from the East; but
whether this impulse was imparted by the voyages of P