Now the Gods, as here conceived by Plato conformably to his own ethical exigencies, are representatives of abstract goodness, or of what he considers as such[83]--but they are nothing else. They have no other human emotions: they are invoked for the purposes of the schoolmaster and the lawgiver, to distribute prizes, and inflict chastisements, on occasions which Plato thinks suitable. But Gods with these restricted functions were hardly less at variance with the current religious belief than the contemplative, theorising, Gods of Aristotle--or the perfectly tranquil and happy Gods of Epikurus. The Gods of the popular faith were not thus specialised types, embodiments of one abstract, ethical, idea. They were concrete personalities, many-sided and many-coloured, endowed with great variety of dispositions and emotions: having sympathies and antipathies, preferences and dislikes, to persons, places, and objects: sensitive on the score of attention paid to themselves, and of offerings tendered by men, jealous of any person who appeared to make light of them, or to put himself upon a footing of independence or rivalry: connected with particular men and cities by ties of family and residence.[84] They corresponded with all the feelings of the believer; with his hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows, his pride or his shame, his love or preference towards some persons or institutions, his hatred and contempt for others. They were sometimes benevolent, sometimes displeased and unpropitious, according to circumstances. They were indeed believed to interfere for the protection of what the believer accounted innocence or merit, and for the avenging of what he called wrong. But this was only one of many occasions on which they interfered. They dispensed alternately evil and good, out of the two casks mentioned in that Homeric verse[85] which Plato so emphatically censures. Nay, it was as much a necessity of the believer's imagination to impute marked and serious suffering to the envy or jealousy of the Gods, as good fortune and prosperity to their kindness. Such a turn of thought is not less visible in Herodotus, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Lykurgus, &c., than in Homer and the other poets whom Plato rebukes. Moreover it is frequently expressed or implied in the answers or admonitions delivered from oracles.[86] [Footnote 83: Plato, Republic, ii. p. 379. In the sixteenth chapter of my "History of Greece" (see p. 504 seq.) I have given many remarks on the ancient Grecian legends, and on the varying views entertained in ancient times respecting them, considered chiefly in reference to the standard of historical belief. I here regard them more as matters of religious belief and emotion.]