Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/70

34 it has, like every other craving, neither this nor any moral character and name at all, nor even a definite companion sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it does not acquire all this as its second nature until it enters into relation with cravings which previous times have stamped as good or evil, or until it has been noted down as a property of beings whom the people morally weighed and valued before. Thus the sentiment of the ancient Greeks respecting envy totally differed from ours.Hesiod mentions it among the effects of kind andbeneficent Eris, and it gave no offence to attribute even to the gods some sort of envy. This we can easily understand in a state of things in which emulation formed the mainspring of all actions: but emulation was estimated and valued as a good thing. The Greeks also differed from is in the valuation of hope: they represented it as blind and cunning. Hesiod, in one of Iris fables, made the strongest possible allusion to it, which is, indeed, so strange that none of the modern commentators have understood it—for it runs counter to the modern mind, which, proceeding from Christianity, has learnt to believe in hope as a virtue. With the Greeks, on the contrary, to whom the approach to the knowledge of the future appeared but partially closed: and upon whom, in numberless cases, it was impressed as a religious duty to inquire into the future--where we content ourselves with hope—hope, thanks to the oracles and soothsayers, necessarily became degraded and