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224 well have been that of those patriots who could not forgive or forget the poltroonery of Delphi before the war (see p. 138). However this may be, he is in religious thought generally the precursor of Euripides. He stands indeed at a stage where it still seems possible to reconcile the main scheme of traditional theology with morality and reason. Euripides has reached a further point, where the disagreement is seen to be beyond healing. Not to speak of the Prometheus, which is certainly subversive, though in detail hard to interpret, the man who speaks of the cry of the robbed birds being heard by "some Apollo, some Pan or Zeus" (Ag. 55); who prays to "Zeus, whoe'er he be" (160); who avows "there is no power I can find, though I sink my plummet through all being, except only Zeus, if I would in very truth cast off this aimless burden of my heart"—is a long way from Pindaric polytheism. He tries more definitely to grope his way to Zeus as a Spirit of Reason, as opposed to the blind Titan forms of Hesiodic legend. "Lo, there was one great of yore, swollen with strength and lust of battle, yet it shall not even be said of him that once he was! And he who came thereafter met his conqueror, and is gone. Call thou on Zeus by names of Victory. . . . Zeus, who made for Man the road to Thought, who [sic]stablished 'Learn by Suffering' to be an abiding Law!" That is not written in the revelations of Delphi or Eleusis; it is true human thought grappling with mysteries. It involves a practical discarding of polytheism in the ordinary sense, and a conception—metaphorical, perhaps, but suggestive of real belief—of a series of ruling spirits in the government of the world—a long strife of diverse Natural Powers, culminating in a present universal order based on reason, like the political order which Æschylus had seen