With this series of pictures, hardly altered at all from Homer,[27\7] contrast for a moment the scenes of torment represented in Etruscan pictures of the Underworld, or the pedantic details of the trial of the dead on the day of judgment as the Egyptians elaborated them in picture and writing. From such gloomy severity, from the rigid and overpowering dogmatism that a people without imagination had constructed for itself out of religious speculations and visions won by much labour and thought, the Greeks were fortunately preserved by their own genius. Their fancy is a winged god whose nature it is to pass lightly over things--not to fall heavily to earth and there remain ponderously prostrate. Nor were they very susceptible during their best centuries to the infectious malady of a "sick conscience". What had they to do with pictures of an underworld of purgatory and torment in expiation of all imaginary types and degrees of sin, as in Dante's ghastly Hell? It is true that even such dark fancies of the Christian Hell are in part derived from Greek sources. But it was only the misguided fancy of particular isolated sects that could call forth such pictures as these, and recommend itself to a philosophic speculation which in its worst excesses violently contradicted all the most fundamental principles of Greek culture. The people and the religion of Greece, the mysteries which her cities organized and deemed holy, may be freely acquitted of all such aberrations. NOTES TO CHAPTER VII [1\7: Plu. (the MSS. wrongly give Themistios) _de An. fr._ 6 ap. Stob., _Fl._ iv, 52 b, 48 H. = p. 107, 27 ff. Mein.; Luc., _Catapl._ 23.] [2\7: Paus. 9, 31, 5.]