as Minerva, Ares as Mars, and Hermes as Mercury, it is by reason of the syncretism brought into fashion by Alexander’s conquests. Neither must we forget that the deification of Alexander during his lifetime brought an entirely new conception of the Divine into the European world. The divinization of the king was indeed no new thing in Egypt, where the Pharaoh from the earliest times was looked upon after his enthronement as the living form of the sun-god Horus; but to the religious ideas of the Greeks it was evidently a surprising shock. The distinguishing attribute of a Greek god was his deathlessness or incorruptibility; and although heroes like Theseus and Heracles were fabled to have become immortal and therefore fit subjects for worship, this was only because they were in the natural way the progeny of the gods themselves, and as such were taken into heaven by their fathers after death and the purging away of their mortal nature[78]. Alexander, on the other hand, demanded from the Greeks as from his other subjects divine honours during his life, and these were accorded to him with servile readiness by the governments of Athens and other Greek city-states, the Spartans not excepted[79]. What he meant exactly by this demand it would be hard to say, because his supposed sonship to Amen on which it was ostensibly based, was, as Sir Gaston Maspero has shown, merely the form by which, on a change of dynasty, the priests of Amen were accustomed to legitimize the accession to the throne of a king who could show no right thereto but force[80]. It is evident, too, that Alexander did not himself take his deification very seriously, since he allowed its propriety to be discussed before him at a wine-party[81]; and his apologists, Arrian and Plutarch, are possibly well-founded when they declare that it was a mere political device to secure the grudging obedience of his Macedonian countrymen[82]. But his successors in this matter went far beyond him. Ptolemy and Arsinoe, without any pretence of divine descent, were proclaimed “Saviour-gods” for their Greek as well as for their Egyptian subjects quite apart from any identification of themselves with Horus or any other native deity. Antigonus, when claiming to be the _strategos_ or generalissimo of the whole Empire, was hailed as a god, which drew from the rough old king a repartee more pointed than decent[83]. So, too, was his son, Demetrius the City Taker, although at the time of his deification he had not even an independent kingdom of his own, but was merely ruling Greece as the viceroy of his father. And the barriers between the Divine and the human being thus broken down, men’s minds soon became so familiar with the idea that they not only thought men might become gods, but declared that the gods were only deified men. The Athenians in the hymns that they sang to Demetrius declared that he was the only true god, and that the others were either