1

II. THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 39

III. THE GREAT SCHOOLS 79

IV. THE FAILURE OF NERVE 123

V. THE LAST PROTEST 173

APPENDIX: TRANSLATION OF THE TREATISE OF
SALLUSTIUS, +peri Theon kai Kosmou+ 200

INDEX 227

+O protos anthropos ek ges, choikos; ho deuteros anthropos ho
Kyrios ex ouranou.+

"The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the
Lord from heaven."

I

SATURNIA REGNA

Many persons who are quite prepared to admit the importance to the world
of Greek poetry, Greek art, and Greek philosophy, may still feel it
rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion specially repays our
study at the present day. Greek religion, associated with a romantic,
trivial, and not very edifying mythology, has generally seemed one of
the weakest spots in the armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I
will venture to make for Greek religion almost as great a claim as for
the thought and the literature, not only because the whole mass of it is
shot through by those strange lights of feeling and imagination, and the
details of it constantly wrought into beauty by that instinctive sense
of artistic form, which we specially associate with Classical Greece,
but also for two definite historical reasons. In the first place, the
student of that dark and fascinating department of the human mind which
we may call Religious Origins, will find in Greece an extraordinary mass
of material belonging to a very early date. For detail and variety the
primitive Greek evidence has no equal. And, secondly, in this department
as in others, ancient Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of
beginning at the very bottom and struggling, however precariously, to
the very summits. There is hardly any horror of primitive superstition
of which we cannot find some distant traces in our Greek record. There
is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the world that has
not its archetype or its echo in the stretch of Greek literature that
lies between Thales and Plotinus, embracing much of the
'Wisdom-Teachers' and of St. Paul.

The progress of Greek religion falls naturally into three stages, all of
them historically important. First there is the primitive _Eue