Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/381

 GOD AND MEN IN COMMUNION. 349 for their tales, and which were of a nature eminently inviting and expansive. For Grecian religion was many-sided and many colored ; it comprised a great multiplicity of persons, together with much diversity in the types of character ; it divinized every vein and attribute of humanity, the lofty as well as the mean the tender as well as the warlike the self-devoting and adven- turous as well as the laughter-loving and sensual. We shall here- after ?each a time when philosophers protested against such identification of the gods with the more vulgar 'appetites and en- joyments, believing that nothing except the spiritual attributes of man could properly be transferred to superhuman beings, and drawing their predicates respecting the gods exclusively from what was awful, majestic and terror-striking in human affairs. Such restrictions on the religious fancy were continually on the in- crease, and the mystic and didactic stamp which marked the last century of paganism in the days of Julian and Libanius, contrasts forcibly with the concrete and vivacious forms, full of vigorous impulse and alive to all the capricious gusts of the human temper- ament, which people the Homeric Olympus. 1 At present, how- 1 Generation by a god is treated in the old poems as un act entirely human and physical (e^iyr) rrapfXe^aro) ; and this was the common opinion in the days of Plato (Plato, Apolog. Socrat. c. 15. p. 15); the hero Astrabakus is father of the Lacedaemonian king Demaratus (Herod, vi. 66). [Herodotus does not believe the story told him at Babylon respecting Belus (i. 182)] Euripides sometimes expresses disapprobation of the idea (Ion. 350), but Plato passed among a large portion of his admirers for the actual son of Apollo, and his reputed father Aristo on marrying was admonished in a dream to respect the person of his wife Periktione, then pregnant by Apollo, until after the birth of the child Plato (Plutarch, Qucest. Sympos. p. 717. viii. 1 ; Diogen. Lafirt. iii. 2 ; Origen, cont. Cels. i. p. 29). Plutarch (in Life of Numa, c. 4 ; compare Life of Theseus, 2) discusses the subject, and is in- clined to disallow everything beyond mental sympathy and tenderness in a god : Pausanias deals timidly with it, and is not always consistent with him- self; while the later rhetors spiritualize it altogether. Meander, irepl 'ETR- 6eiKTiK(Jv, (towards the end of the third century B. c.) prescribes rules for praising a king : you are to praise him for the gens to which he belongs : perhaps you may be able to make out that he really is the son of some god ; for many who seem to be from men, arc really sent down by God&nA are ema- nations ftrm the Supreme Potency noUol rb fiev SOKEIV f uvSpuiruv elai, TI) d 1 utitr&eig, Ttaptl rov #eoC naravi^Ttovra /cat elaiv uirofr/toiai ovruf rov Kpsirrovof Kal -yap 'Hpa/^f ivofii&TO ftev 'Afiirpvui>of, ry 6c d/l^iScta ^ i6f. Ouru KOI f3aadevf 6 fj^e'-epof rd uev donclv i!; avdpuiruv, ry fe ahy