more conservative than ritual; and Greece produced no ardent Protestant reformer. Therefore, the average educated Athenian even of the fourth century would doubtless agree with the orator Lysias, that “it is prudent to maintain the same sacrifices as had been ordained by our ancestors who made our city great, if for no other reason, for the sake of the city’s luck.”[124.3] _Strength of the traditional religion in the fifth century_.--The question naturally occurs--were the mass of the citizens touched at all in their inward theory of things by the spirit of modernism which breathed from Ionia and inspired the sophists? The culture that was the stock-in-trade of the latter was only offered to those who could pay; and upon these the poorer Athenian looked askance. He heard of it at first with a dislike that might become dangerous. Fanaticism, as we are familiar with it in the pages of European and Semitic history, was happily alien to the Greek temperament. But the banishment of Anaxagoras and Protagoras, and the execution of Sokrates by the city that was to become {125} the schoolmistress of Greece, might seem to savour somewhat of this temper of mind. These acts, indeed, were not inspired solely by religious feelings; but they are clear proofs that the polytheism was by no means moribund and could be dangerous in its own defence. Nothing is more erroneous than the view which is sometimes expressed, that the popular devotion to the old religion was abating and its divine personalities and forms losing life and value towards the close of the fifth century. In their dark days the Athenians bided truer to their old faith than did Rome in her time of terror. We do not find a prostrate Athens turning desperately for aid to alien Oriental cults. We hear indeed of the beginnings of Adonis-cult in the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, the first ripple of a wave of Orientalism that was to surge westward later. But this feminine excess was unauthorised, and Aristophanes hates it and mocks at it. And the shallow view mentioned above would be sufficiently refuted by his comedy of ‘the Clouds,’ in which he, the greatest literary genius of his time, poses as the champion of the reaction against modernism. It is refuted also by other incidents in Athenian history that fall within the last decades of this century; for the rage of the people at the mutilation of the Hermai, at the supposed insult to the Eleusinian mysteries, at the neglect of the dead after the battle of Arginousai, may be evidence of morbid religiosity, and is surely inconsistent with a general prevalence of scepticism. In these episodes the whole people reveal a passionate attachment to their holy mysteries, to their quaint phallic Herme-images on which the luck and the life of the State depended, to {126} the duties of the loving tendance of the dead. Even their animistic beliefs concerning the common phenomena of the physical