As religion became more general, it united to make a more common social practice, and in the later period of Greek life was made the basis of the games and general social gatherings. Religion brought the Greeks together in a social way, and finally led to the mutual advantage of members of society. {213} Later, mutual advantage superseded religion in its practice. The Greeks, at an early period, attempted to explain the origin of the earth and unknown phenomena by referring it to the supernatural powers. Every island had its myth, every phenomenon its god, and every mountain was the residence of some deity. They sought to find out the causes of the creation of the universe, and developed a theogony. There was the origin of the Greeks to be accounted for, and then the origin of the earth, and the relation of man to the deities. Everything must be explained, but as the imagination was especially strong, it was easier to create a god as a first cause than to ascertain the development of the earth by scientific study. _Influence of Old Greek Life_.--In all of the traditions and writings descriptive of the old Greek social life, with the exception of the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod, the aristocratic class appears uppermost. Hesiod "pictures a hopeless and miserable existence, in which care and the despair of better things tended to make men hard and selfish and to blot out those fairer features which cannot be denied to the courts and palaces of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_." It appears that the foundation of aristocracy--living in comparative luxury, in devotion to art and the culture of life--was early laid by the side of the foundation of poverty and wretchedness of the great mass of the people. While, then, the Greeks derived from their ancestry the beautiful pictures of heroic Greece, they inherited the evils of imperfect social conditions. As we pass to the historical period of Greece, these different phases of life appear and reappear in changeable forms. If to the nobleman life was full of inspiration; if poetry, religion, art, and politics gave him lofty thoughts and noble aspirations; to the peasant and the slave, life was full of misery and degradation. If one picture is to be drawn in glowing colors, let not the other be omitted.