Socrates, obviously unfair though he is, puts his finger on the weak spot of Greek religion as orthodoxly conceived in the fifth century B.C. Its formula is _do ut des_. It is, as Socrates says, a ‘business transaction’ and one in which, because god is greater than man, man gets on the whole the best of it. The argument of the _Euthyphron_ is of importance to us because it clearly defines one, and a prominent, factor in Greek religion, that of _service_ (θεραπεία), and in this service, this kindly ‘tendance,’ there is no element of fear. If man does his part in the friendly transaction, the gods will do theirs. None of the deeper problems of what we moderns call religion are even touched: there is no question of sin, repentance, sacrificial atonement, purification, no fear of judgment to come, no longing after a future complete beatitude. Man offers what seems to him in his ignorance a reasonable service to gods conceived of as human and rational. There is no trace of scepticism; the gods certainly exist, otherwise as Sextus Empiricus[6] quaintly argues ‘you could not serve them’: and they have human natures. ‘You do not serve Hippocentauri, because Hippocentauri are non-existent.’ To the average orthodox Greek the word θεραπεία, service, tendance, covered a large, perhaps the largest, area of his conception of religion. It was a word expressing, not indeed in the Christian sense a religion whose mainspring was love, but at least a religion based on a rational and quite cheerful mutual confidence. The Greeks have however another word expressive of religion, which embodies a quite other attitude of mind, the word δεισιδαιμονία, _fear of spirits_; fear, not tendance, fear not of gods but of spirit-things, or, to put it abstractly, of the supernatural. It is certainly characteristic of the Greek mind that the word δεισιδαιμονία and its cognates early began to be used in a bad sense, and this to some extent bears out Mr Ruskin’s assertion. By the time of Theophrastos ὁ δεισιδαίμων is frankly in our sense ‘the superstitious man,’ and superstition Theophrastos defines as not just and proper reverence but simply ‘cowardice in regard to the supernatural.’ Professor Jebb[7] has pointed out that already in Aristotle the word δεισιδαίμων has about it a suspicion of its weaker side. An absolute ruler, Aristotle[8] says, will be the more powerful ‘if his subjects believe that he fears the spiritual beings’ (ἐὰν δεισιδαίμονα νομίζωσιν εἶναι) but he adds significantly ‘he must shew himself such _without fatuity_’ (ἄνευ ἀβελτερίας).