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528 petual agitation the native indolence of a people incapable of knowing itself while it pursued indefatigably the phantom of its Reason.

In every period of Greek history, from the Trojan war to the adventure of Alexander—passing by the struggles between Sparta and her neighbours, and the Peloponnesian and Sicilian wars—in all the scattered cities it is easy to discover the spirit of warfare and chicanery which gives Greek history, clothed in all the splendour of plastic and poetic fiction, a tone of terrifying ferocity. A race of tradesmen, pillagers, comedians, orators, slaves, panders, politicians. The tragedy of Troy and of the house of Atreus may be nothing more than a symbolic résumé of the unbridled passions which characterize its way of life. By the gods the race creates, it confesses its terrible impulses. They are not, like the gods of India, elementary fatalities, instinctive, irresistible entities, like death and birth, tides, seasons, the movements of the stars. They are psychological entities, entirely conscious monsters, made in the image and measure of man, Zeus and Ares, Athene and Aphrodite, Hermes and Hera, admirable in courage and authority when they are gratifying their passions; they are genuine debauchees, treacherous and cruel in turn; they are liars; they are vindictive, lecherous, sadistic—often stupid in addition. I see no discrepancy—since they are human beings. But why, then, have they so long passed as Gods?

Because, such as they are, in fury or valour or cruelty or dissimulation, they carry their impulses to the very utmost of their capacity, to the most uncompromising and definitive perfection. The Greek genius as a whole may be but a relative thing for humanity; it is a Hellenic and, momentarily, European absolute. Out of it Christianity has only disengaged the idea of perfection to carry it over entire, in one piece, and in a single direction, and to erect on this illusion a too rigid, but entirely logical, system. The saint succeeds the hero, that is all, and in all domains—moral, aesthetic, social, simultaneously or in turn—one or the other rules and imposes on man a single idea-force which culminates here in asceticism, there in academicism, elsewhere in communism. I do not despise the historical advantages of this. But there are other idea-forces equally propitious, and a deep study of the non-Hellenic world of the spirit reveals them to us, especially by the striking evidence of their mul-