The gods, in the opinion of Pausanias, were neither cold abstractions nor blessed beings who, lapped in the joys of heaven, took no thought for the affairs of earth. They actively interfered in the course of events, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. They were the givers of good things to men; and if their rewards had been more open and manifest in days of old, the prosperity of the pious Athenians was a standing proof that even in later times the gods had not forgotten to recompense their worshippers. Yet, like most people who lay themselves out to justify the ways of God to man, Pausanias was readier to detect the hand of the deity in the miseries and misfortunes of his fellow-creatures than in their joys and blessings. The confidence with which he lays his finger on the precise misdeed which drew down on a malefactor the wrath of a justly offended god implies an astonishing familiarity with the counsels of the Almighty. He knew that the Persians were defeated at Marathon because they had angered Nemesis by bringing, in the pride of their hearts, a block of marble which they proposed to set up as a trophy of their expected victory; that the destruction of Sparta and Helice by earthquakes was due to the wrath of Poseidon at the violation of his sanctuaries; that the ruin and death of Mithridates had been brought to pass by Apollo, whose sacred island had been sacked by the king’s general; that Sulla’s miserable end was a direct consequence of his guilt in tearing Aristion from the sanctuary of Athena; and that the wrath of the Eleusinian goddesses abode on the Megarians for ever because they had encroached on the sacred land and murdered a herald who warned them to desist. Again, he shrewdly suspects that the long misfortunes of the Messenians flowed directly from the anger of the Dioscuri at the impious presumption of two Messenian youths; and he surmises that gods and heroes combined to wreak their displeasure on the devoted head of Cleomenes, who had tampered with the Delphic oracle, ravaged the sacred Eleusinian land, and burned the grove of the hero Argus. The Delphic Apollo was quick and powerful, according to Pausanias, to defend his honour and to visit with vengeance the sacrilegious persons who dared to assail his sanctuary or rifle his treasures. King Archidamus, who had fingered the sacred moneys, fell in battle in a foreign land and his corpse weltered unburied; the Phlegyans, who made a raid on Delphi, perished by thunderbolts and earthquakes; and it was in all the majesty of thunder, lightning, and earthquake that at a later time the god stood forth to repel the Gauls. Amongst the punishments with which the gods were thought to visit unwarranted intrusions into their sanctuaries, blindness and madness had a special place. King Aepytus, on forcing his way into the shrine of Poseidon at Mantinea, which none might enter, was instantly struck blind and died soon afterwards; some Persian soldiers who ventured into the