This "sacred writ" was naturally the latest and most authoritative revelation. It was saved, moreover, from being a gospel of atheism because, as Cumont[74] says, "It left to the eternal and incorruptible stars ... the dignity of original gods and exalted them in proportion as it lowered their rivals of bygone days." The signal merit of Chronus had been to introduce the worship of the heavenly bodies in Panchæa. In this respect the _Scriptures_ of Euhemerus accorded with a strong current of both earlier and contemporary religious thought. Most men at that time recognized supernatural powers of a certain sort, like Tyche, "Chance,"--the favorite deity of the Hellenistic world,--whose play in human affairs modern disbelievers in religion also would be the last to deny. But they declined to recognize as efficacious the gods and goddesses in whose honor the cities maintained temples, priests, sacrifices, and games, except when they had lived on the earth as men and women. At the best, therefore, these deities were simply prototypes of Alexander, who had founded seventy cities and given them their constitutions and laws, who had conquered all the territory which Dionysus had once overrun, and who was planning to build a highway along the coast of North Africa to the pillars set by Heracles at the limits of the world; who, moreover, was moulding the masses of Europe and Asia into a new race, and upheld, as no god had ever done, the social and political framework of the world. Religion was unable to elevate a living man to godhood. Even in Egypt the sacred animals were but sacred animals till seventy days after their death, when they became deities. But irreligion, having degraded all gods to the level of human beings, had no reason to withhold from great men the homage which it accorded to the great dead. The fundamental document on the deification of Greek kings comes to us stamped with the seal of the Athenian state. It was sung by the multitude at the official reception of its sovereign, the young Macedonian king, Demetrius Poliorcetes, on his return to Athens in 290 B.C.[75] "The king comes, light-hearted as befits a god, fair and laughing, yet majestic withal in his circle of courtiers, he the sun, they the stars: hail! child of mighty Poseidon and of Aphrodite. The other gods are a long way off, or have no ears, or no existence, or take no care of us, but thee we see face to face--a true god, not one of wood and stone." This catchy bit of blasphemy makes it impossible for any reasonable doubt to linger as to the regions of thought from which the worship of Greek rulers sprang.