tence could not but be joyful and immortal, if it had
once found, in land, sea, or air, a form congruous with that element.
Such congruity would render a being stable, efficient, beautiful. He
would achieve a perfection grounded in skilful practice and in a
thorough rejection of whatever was irrelevant. These things the Greeks
called virtue. The gods were perfect models of this kind of excellence;
for of course the amours of Zeus and Hermes' trickery were, in their
hearty fashion, splendid manifestations of energy. This natural divine
virtue carried no sense of responsibility with it, but it could not fail
to diffuse benefit because it radiated happiness and beauty. The
worshipper, by invoking those braver inhabitants of the cosmos, felt he
might more easily attain a corresponding beauty and happiness in his
paternal city.

[Sidenote: Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.]

The source of myth had been a genial sympathy with nature. The observer,
at ease himself, multiplied ideally the potentialities of his being; but
he went farther in imagining what life might yield abroad, freed from
every trammel and necessity, than in deepening his sense of what life
was in himself, and of what it ought to be. This moral reflection,
absent from mythology, was supplied by politics. The family and the
state had a soberer antique religion of their own; this hereditary
piety, together with the laws, prescribed education, customs, and
duties. The city drew its walls close about the heart, and while it
fostered friendship and reason within, without it looked to little but
war. A splendid physical and moral discipline was established to serve a
suicidal egoism. The city committed its crimes, and the individual
indulged his vices of conduct and estimation, hardly rebuked by
philosophy and quite unrebuked by religion. Nevertheless, religion and
philosophy existed, together with an incomparable literature and art,
and an unrivalled measure and simplicity in living. A liberal fancy and
a strict civic regimen, starting with different partial motives and
blind purposes, combined by good fortune into an almost rational life.

It was inevitable, however, when only an irrational tradition supported
the state, and kept it so weak amid a world of enemies, that this state
should succumb; not to speak of the mean animosities, the license in
life, and the spirit of mockery that inwardly infested it. The myths,
too, faded; they had expressed