Prof. Mahaffy, with his more vivacious habit of thought, comes to the evaded issue. "How," he asks, "did the Athenian audience, who vehemently attacked the poet for divulging the mysteries, tolerate such a drama? And still more, how did Æschylus, a pious and serious thinker, venture to bring such a subject on the stage with a moral purpose?" The answers suggested are: (1) that in all old religions there are tolerated anomalous survivals; (2) that "a very extreme distortion of their Gods will not offend many who would feel outraged at any open denial of them"; (3) that all Greeks longed for despotic power for themselves, and that "no Athenian, however he sympathized with Prometheus, would think of blaming Zeus for ... crushing all resistance to his will." But even if these answers--of which the last is the most questionable--be accepted, "the question of the poet's intention is far more difficult, and will probably never be satisfactorily answered." Finally, we have this summing-up: "Æschylus was, indeed, essentially a theologian ... but, what is more honourable and exceptional, he was so candid and honest a theologian that he did not approach men's difficulties for the purpose of refuting them or showing them weak and groundless. On the contrary, though an orthodox and pious man, though clearly convinced of the goodness of Providence, and of the profound truth of the religion of his fathers, he was ever stating boldly the contradictions and anomalies in morals and in myths, and thus naturally incurring the odium and suspicion of the professional advocates of religion and their followers. He felt, perhaps instinctively, that a vivid dramatic statement of these problems in his tragedies was better moral education than vapid platitudes about our ignorance, and about our difficulties being only caused by the shortness of our sight" (Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 260-61, 273-74).