s, drawn from Greek literature at various ages, will suggest
the popular attitude. In the first instance, consider the poems of Homer
and of Hesiod. For these writers, and doubtless for the vast majority
of their readers, not merely of their own but of many subsequent
generations, the world is peopled with a multitude of invisible
apparitions, which, under title of gods, are held to dominate the
affairs of man. It is sometimes difficult to discriminate as to where
the Greek imagination drew the line between fact and allegory; nor need
we attempt to analyse the early poetic narratives to this end. It will
better serve our present purpose to cite three or four instances which
illustrate the tangibility of beliefs based upon pseudo-scientific
inductions.

Let us cite, for example, the account which Herodotus gives us of the
actions of the Greeks at Plataea, when their army confronted the remnant
of the army of Xerxes, in the year 479 B.C. Here we see each side
hesitating to attack the other, merely because the oracle had declared
that whichever side struck the first blow would lose the conflict. Even
after the Persian soldiers, who seemingly were a jot less superstitious
or a shade more impatient than their opponents, had begun the attack,
we are told that the Greeks dared not respond at first, though they
were falling before the javelins of the enemy, because, forsooth, the
entrails of a fowl did not present an auspicious appearance. And these
were Greeks of the same generation with Empedocles and Anaxagoras and
aeschylus; of the same epoch with Pericles and Sophocles and Euripides
and Phidias. Such was the scientific status of the average mind--nay, of
the best minds--with here and there a rare exception, in the golden age
of Grecian culture.

Were we to follow down the pages of Greek history, we should but repeat
the same story over and over. We should, for example, see Alexander
the Great balked at the banks of the Hyphasis, and forced to turn back
because of inauspicious auguries based as before upon the dissection of
a fowl. Alexander himself, to be sure, would have scorned the augury;
had he been the prey of such petty superstitions he would never have
conquered Asia. We know how he compelled the oracle at Delphi to yield
to his wishes; how he cut the Gordian knot; how he made his dominating
personality felt at the temple of Ammon in Egypt. We know, in a word,
that he yielded to superstitions only in so far as they