em here; but, if my conjecture is correct, we have an additional
explanation of the fact that Socrates was disposed to anything rather than
an attack on the established religion.

A view of popular religion such as I have here sketched bore in itself the
germ of a further development which must lead in other directions. A
personality like Socrates might perhaps manage throughout a lifetime to
keep that balance on a razor's edge which is involved in utilising to the
utmost in the service of ethics the popular dogmas of the perfection of
the gods, while disregarding all irrelevant tales, all myths and all
notions of too human a tenor about them. This demanded concentration on
the one thing needful, in conjunction with deep piety of the most genuine
antique kind, with the most profound religious modesty, a combination
which it was assuredly given to but one man to attain. Socrates's
successors had it not. Starting precisely from a Socratic foundation they
entered upon theological speculations which carried them away from the
Socratic point of view.

For the Cynics, who set up virtue as the only good, the popular notions of
the gods would seem to have been just as convenient as for Socrates. And
we know that Antisthenes, the founder of the school, made ample use of
them in his ethical teaching. He represented Heracles as the Cynical ideal
and occupied himself largely with allegorical interpretation of the myths.
On the other hand, there is a tradition that he maintained that "according
to nature" there was only one god, but "according to the law" several--a
purely sophistic view. He inveighed against the worship of images, too,
and maintained that god "did not resemble any thing," and we know that his
school rejected all worship of the gods because the gods "were in need of
nothing." This conception, too, is presumably traceable to Antisthenes. In
all this the theological interest is evident. As soon as this interest
sets in, the harmonious relation to the popular faith is upset, the
discord between its higher and lower ideas becomes manifest, and criticism
begins to assert itself. In the case of Antisthenes, if we may believe
tradition, it seems to have led to monotheism, in itself a most remarkable
phenomenon in the history of Greek religion, but the material is too
slight for us to make anything of it. The later Cynics afford interesting
features in illustration of atheism in antiquity, but this is best left to
a later c