Speaking generally, in spite of many important differences, we may regard the religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and Egypt belonged as morphologically the same as that which I am defining as Hellenic. Also, among all these peoples, by the side of the few higher deities who have developed moral personalities, we find special elemental divinities, as, in Hellas, we find Helios and the deities of the wind, Hephaistos the fire-god. The distinction between the religions of the Hellenes and “the barbarians,” which Aristophanes defines as the difference between the worship of ideal divine personages, such as Zeus, Apollo, and Demeter, and the direct worship of elementary powers, such as sun and moon, is not borne out by modern research. Where we find sun-worship or moon-worship in the East, it does not appear to have been directed immediately to the thing itself regarded as a living or animate body, but to a personal god of the sun or the moon--Bel, Shamash, or Sin. We can only distinguish the Greek from the Oriental in respect of Nature-religion by the lesser degree of devotion that the Hellene showed to it. Only those of his divinities whose names connoted nothing in the material or natural world, could develop into free moral personalities, and dominate the religious imagination of the people. Nowhere, for instance, had Helios any high position in the Greek world except at Rhodes, where we must reckon with pre-Hellenic, Minoan, and later with Semitic influences. Therefore, when, shortly {10} before and after the beginning of the Graeco-Roman period, a wave of sun-worship welled from the East over the West, it may have brought with it religious ideas of high spirituality and ethical purity, yet by the race-consciousness of the Hellenes it must have been judged to be a regress towards a barbaric past.