=10.= The departure of the Persians from Europe was the signal for an outburst of enthusiasm in Greece for the old gods and their worship with the aid of images. Yet, unfavourable as the time might seem, a monotheistic sentiment developed apace in Hellas, which we shall follow more closely in the next chapter[27]. Even Herodotus, writing as a fair-minded historian, no longer regards the Persians as impious, but realizes that they are actuated by conviction[28]. Socrates was an outspoken defender of all the main articles of the Religion, to the horror of nationalists like Aristophanes, who not unjustly accused him of corrupting the loyalty of the youth of Athens to the institutions of their mother city. Xenophon, the most intimate of his disciples, translated this bias into action, and joined with the 10,000 Greeks in a vain effort to re-establish the strength of Persia: he did not even hesitate to engage in war against his native land. To him Cyrus the Persian was a greater hero than any Homeric warrior or Greek sage; and from Cyrus he drew the belief in the immortality of the soul which from this time on is one of the chief subjects of philosophic speculation. [Sidenote: Persism welcomed in Rome.] =11.= The Romans had not the same national motives as the Greeks to feel an antipathy to Persism. For the doctrine of monotheism they had probably been prepared by their Etruscan sovereigns, and the temple of Capitoline Jove kept before their eyes a symbol of this sentiment. But in the Roman period Persian sovereignty had receded to the far distance, and the doctrines of Persism only reached Rome through the Greek language and in Greek form. Thus of the doctrines of the Evil Spirit, the war between Good and Evil, and the future punishment of the wicked, only faint echoes ever reached the Roman ear. On the other hand the doctrines of the divine government of the world and of the immortality of the soul made a deep impression; and Cicero in a well-known passage repeats and amplifies the account Xenophon gives in his _Cyropaedia_ of the dying words of Cyrus, which is doubtless to some extent coloured by recollections of the death of Socrates: