By the close of this second period--_c._ 500 B.C.--the Hellenic national consciousness had realised itself in respect of intellectual culture, ethics and religion. Zeus Hellanios, the tribal God, is becoming Panhellanios. The age of the tyrants contributed much to the growth of Pan-Hellenism; Peisistratos something to the idea of a national religion, in that he seems to have worked zealously for the organisation and expansion of the Eleusinian mysteries. The cult of Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of civic worship. {88} But the two most striking phenomena in the spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly, the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces affecting the life of the popular religion. _Sixth-century philosophy_.--The relations of Greek philosophy to Greek religion is a great and complex subject, the theme of many modern treatises; and in this slight sketch of the whole history of the polytheism there is no room for more than a few most general observations. So far as the new speculation, which gave birth to the free secular science of Europe, was preoccupied with questions of the physical origins of things and elemental theories of cosmogony, it would not necessarily clash with any orthodox prejudice of the average Hellene. For he had no sacred books which dictated to him any views concerning the origin of the world or the constitution of nature, and which he would have considered it immoral to disbelieve. In fact when Herakleitos boldly declared that “neither God nor man made the Kosmos,” there was no authoritative Greek myth or theologic dogma to gainsay him. But the great philosophers of the sixth century, Pythagoras, Empedokles, Xenophanes and Herakleitos were also directly concerned with the philosophy of religion, with speculations on the nature and with the true definition of Godhead; and some of the surviving fragments of their works express ideas and sentiments in sharp antagonism to the concepts and ritual of the contemporary polytheism. The main trend of their {89} speculations ran counter to the anthropomorphic theory of divinity; and they tend to define God not as a person, but rather as the highest spiritual or metaphysical or even physical power or function of the universe; and there is a common tendency in this sixth-century thought away from the theistic to the pantheistic view. Pythagoras is said to have explained the conception of God in terms of mathematics and to have been willing to accept the personages of the popular polytheism on condition of finding their true mathematical equation.[89.1] But this philosopher