Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/396

 372 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE But these things were in the heart fibres of the Greek race, and it pined when deprived of them. The middle ages and the East made up for their absence of pubHc interests by enthusiastic reHgious faith. But this solace likewise was denied the later Greek. The traditional religion was moribund among educated men in the fifth century ; after the fourth it was hardly worth attacking. People knew it was nonsense, but considered it valuable for the vulgar ; and, above all, they asked each thinker if he had anything to put in its place. Much of the intellect of the fourth century is thrown into answering this demand. On the one hand we find Athens full of strange faiths, revived or imported or invented ; superstition is a serious fact in life. One could guess it from the intense earnestness of Epicurus on the subject, or from the fact that both Antiphanes and Menander wrote comedies upon The Superstitious Man. But the extant inscriptions are direct evidence. On the other hand came the great philosophical systems. Three of these were especially religious, resembling the sixth century rather than the fifth. The Cynics cared only for virtue and the rela- tion of the soul to God ; the world and its learning and its honours were as dross to them. The Stoics and Epicureans, so far apart at first sight, were very similar in their ultimate aim. What they really cared about was ethics — the practical question how a man should order his life. Both indeed gave themselves to some science — the Epicureans to physics, the Stoics to logic and rhetoric — but only as a means to an end. The Stoic tried to win men's hearts and convictions by sheer subtlety of abstract argument and dazzling sublimity of thought and expression. The Epicurean was deter-