We do not mean to say that moral feeling was to the same degree active in calling into existence Greek athleticism that religious-ethical feeling was active in the creation of Oriental asceticism, but simply that the ethical motive held a place among the various motives and sentiments at work. Without this motive the Olympian games and the other sacred festivals into which athletic exercises and competitions entered, would never have won the place they held in Greek life and culture. When in later times these festivals, subjected to commercial and mercenary influences, lost wholly or in part this religious-ethical element, then they lost also their distinctive character, and that morally wholesome and uplifting influence which they had exercised upon the Greek world throughout the best days of Hellas. [Sidenote: Identification of moral goodness with beauty] Just as the cultured Greek brought the intellectual domain of life within the province of morals, so likewise did he with the æsthetic. It was not merely his æsthetic sense which was offended by ugliness in form, but also his moral sense. To the Greek mind, to love beauty, sensuous and spiritual, and to be beautiful was synonymous with being good. “He who is beautiful to look upon,” says Sappho, “is good; and who is good will soon be beautiful.”[442] “The beautiful,” comments Wuttke in speaking of this phase of Greek ethics, “is _per se_ the good; in enjoying and creating the beautiful man is moral.”[443] “The ‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’”--thus G. Lowes Dickinson sums up the Greek view--“were one and the same thing; that is the first and the last word of the Greek ideal.”[444] This identification by the Greeks of goodness with beauty is one of the most important matters in Greek ethics. For the conception was not with them an inert thing. Greek civilization in all its phases was in a great measure the expression of this conviction. The Greeks filled the world with beautiful things because to create beauty was with them an ethical as well as an æsthetic impulse and necessity. They felt the holiness of beauty. [Sidenote: Live according to nature sums up all moral requirements] All the particular requirements of Greek morality, some of the most important of which we have now briefly commented upon, are summed up in the formula, Live conformably to nature. The idea here embodied of what constitutes man’s full duty springs naturally from the doctrine that man’s nature is essentially good. If that nature be good, then virtuousness will consist in the well-rounded symmetrical development of all the capacities of body and mind. Pindar’s profound injunction, “Be what you are,” embodies the essence of the teachings of the Greek moralists. They taught that man fulfills his destiny by becoming what he is in his innermost being--by complete self-realization.[445] III. LIMITATIONS AND DEFECTS OF THE IDEAL [Sidenote: Its aristocratic character]