That it had none for Egypt and the nations of Asia, to whom the god of Siwah, like the prophet in his own country, was without honor, implies that Alexander esteemed highly its value in the Greek world, where the voice heard at Siwah was in fact an admonition to the pious and might be an embarrassment to all in official positions. An oracle, however, was always addressed primarily to him who received it. Other persons could neglect it with impunity. Nevertheless, Alexander had made it improbable that anybody should be unaware that Zeus had acknowledged him as his son. Doubtless, much discussion was provoked; but there the matter seems to have ended so far as Hellas was concerned till seven years later, at the time of the feast at Susa, when Alexander issued a mandate to all the Greek city-states, new and old, that they should recognize him as a god. Strange as it may seem to us, among whom church and state are separated sharply, and religion depends upon a revelation which can be interpreted but not supplemented, the question was one which came properly within the province of the general assembly of the citizens of each city. At this very time the Athenians, for example, had waiting within their gates many foreign deities whose claims to official recognition were being pressed upon the ecclesia by votaries among both the alien and the native population. Such were Isis the Egyptian, and the Cypriote Aphrodite. In comparatively recent times, moreover, the ecclesia had yielded to similar solicitations, and had enrolled among the deities of the Athenian people Asclepius and the Thracian Bendis. In a polytheistic world there is no logical limit to the possible number of gods; so that the chance always existed that there were deities whom a given community had not yet discovered at any given moment. There is, in such a world, a logical necessity that anarchy should be absent from heaven. Hence each community had to rank its gods and goddesses according to their power and spheres of activity. The lowest god, demigod or hero was, accordingly, separated from mankind by no deep or broad chasm. With most of their deities, in fact, the Greeks were on terms of familiar intimacy, as were mediæval Christians with their saints. Various of the lesser gods, Theseus and Heracles among the ancestors of Alexander for example, had once been men who had been elevated to Olympus by the grace of Zeus because of the many services which they had rendered to men. It is true that they were the children of Zeus; but had not Zeus also claimed Alexander as his own son? Why, then, should not he too be deified?