Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/472

 440 HISTORY OF GREECE. city, the philosopher sympathized with the audience in the thea- tre, and took a devout share in the established ceremonies, nor was he justified in trying what he heard in the one or saw in the other by his own ethical standard. But in the private as semblies of instructed or inquisitive men, he enjoyed the fullest liberty of canvassing every received tenet, and of broaching his own theories unreservedly, respecting the existence and nature of the gods. By these discussions, the activity of the philosophi- cal mind was maintained and truth elicited ; but it was such truth as the body of the people ought not to hear, lest their faith in their own established religious worship should be overthrown. In thus distinguishing the civil theology from the fabulous, Vairo was enabled to cast upon the poets all the blame of the objec- tionable points in the popular theology, and to avoid the neces- sity of pronouncing censure on the magistrates, who (he contend- ed) had made as good a compromise with the settled prejudices of the public as the case permitted. The same conflicting sentiments which led the philosophers to decompose the divine mythes into allegory, impelled the histo- rians to melt down the heroic mythes into something like contin- uous political history, with a long series of chronology calculated upon the heroic pedigrees. The one process as well as the other was interpretative guesswork, proceeding upon unauthorized as- sumptions, and without any verifying test or evidence : while it frittered away the characteristic beauty of the my the into some- thing essentially anti-mythical, it sought to arrive both at history and philosophy by impracticable roads. That the superior men of antiquity should have striven hard to save the dignity of legends which constituted the charm of their literature as well as the sub- stance of the popular religion, we cannot be at all surprised ; but mentatio, p. 8 ; and Lactantius, De Origin. Error, ii. 3. The doctrine of the Stoic Chrysippus, ap. Etymologicon Magn. v. Te/lerot Xpvcwnror tie $r)ai, rove Trepl TIJV tieiuv Tioyovf tlnoTUf Kaheltrdai TE/Urcif, xpn val f^P rovrovf re/levratovf Kal inl Ttuai. 6i6daKed(f>, TU 6e vofiy, rti 6e /toy^i, mariv i apxqf ECTXTJKE- rf/f 6' oiv iftpt l vrnd-dcrni Kal rplrov, il