[xvi:1] Professor Nock's edition (Cambridge 1926) has admirably filled this gap. CONTENTS PAGE I. SATURNIA REGNA 1 II. THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 39 III. THE GREAT SCHOOLS 79 IV. THE FAILURE OF NERVE 123 V. THE LAST PROTEST 173 APPENDIX: TRANSLATION OF THE TREATISE OF 200 SALLUSTIUS, περὶ Θεῶν καὶ Κόσμου INDEX 227 Ο πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ὲκ γῆς, χοῖκός· ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ὁ Κύριος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven." I SATURNIA REGNA Many persons who are quite prepared to admit the importance to the world of Greek poetry, Greek art, and Greek philosophy, may still feel it rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion specially repays our study at the present day. Greek religion, associated with a romantic, trivial, and not very edifying mythology, has generally seemed one of the weakest spots in the armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I will venture to make for Greek religion almost as great a claim as for the thought and the literature, not only because the whole mass of it is shot through by those strange lights of feeling and imagination, and the details of it constantly wrought into beauty by that instinctive sense of artistic form, which we specially associate with Classical Greece, but also for two definite historical reasons. In the first place, the student of that dark and fascinating department of the human mind which we may call Religious Origins, will find in Greece an extraordinary mass of material belonging to a very early date. For detail and variety the primitive Greek evidence has no equal. And, secondly, in this department as in others, ancient Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of beginning at the very bottom and struggling, however precariously, to the very summits. There is hardly any horror of primitive superstition of which we cannot find some distant traces in our Greek record. There is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the world that has not its archetype or its echo in the stretch of Greek literature that lies between Thales and Plotinus, embracing much of the 'Wisdom-Teachers' and of St. Paul.