It is of course impossible to base any statement of the relation of the two philosophers to popular belief on such a foundation. But it is, nevertheless, worth noticing that while not a single one of the earlier naturalists acquired the designation atheist, it was applied to two of the latest and otherwise little-known representatives of the school. Take this in combination with what has been said above of Anaxagoras, and we get at any rate a suspicion that Greek naturalism gradually led its adherents beyond the naïve stage where many individual phenomena were indeed ascribed to natural causes, even if they had formerly been regarded as caused by divine intervention, but where the foundations of the popular belief were left untouched. Once this path has been entered on, a point will be arrived at where the final conclusion is drawn and the existence of the supernatural completely denied. It is probable that this happened towards the close of the naturalistic period. If so early a philosopher as Anaxagoras took this point of view, his personal contribution as a member of the Periclean circle may have been more significant in the religious field than one would conjecture from the character of his work. Before we proceed to mention the sophists, there is one person on our list who must be examined though the result will be negative, namely, Diagoras of Melos. As he appears in our records, he falls outside the classification adopted here; but as he must have lived, at any rate, about the middle of the fifth century (he is said to have “flourished” in 464) he may most fitly be placed on the boundary line between the Ionian philosophy and Sophistic. For later antiquity Diagoras is the typical atheist; he heads our lists of atheists, and round his person a whole series of myths have been formed. He is said to have been a poet and a pious man like others; but then a colleague once stole an ode from him, escaped by taking an oath that he was innocent, and afterwards made a hit with the stolen work. So Diagoras lost his faith in the gods and wrote a treatise under the title of _apopyrgizontes logoi_ (literally, destructive considerations) in which he attacked the belief in the gods.