Wanton, mutual annihilation inevitable: so long as a single _polis_ wished to exist--its envy for everything superior to itself, its cupidity, the disorder of its customs, the enslavement of the women, lack of conscience in the keeping of oaths, in murder, and in cases of violent death. Tremendous power of self-control: for example in a man like Socrates, who was capable of everything evil. 121 Its noble sense of order and systematic arrangement had rendered the Athenian state immortal.--The ten strategists in Athens! Foolish! Too big a sacrifice on the altar of jealousy. 122 The recreations of the Spartans consisted of feasting, hunting, and making war: their every-day life was too hard. On the whole, however, their state is merely a caricature of the polis; a corruption of Hellas. The breeding of the complete Spartan--but what was there great about him that his breeding should have required such a brutal state! 123 The political defeat of Greece is the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth. The rise of Christianity was the second greatest failure: brute force on the one hand, and a dull intellect on the other, won a complete victory over the aristocratic genius among the nations. To be a Philhellenist now means to be a foe of brute force and stupid intellects. Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a federal combination. 124 There are domains of thought where the _ratio_ will only give rise to disorder; and the philologist, who possesses nothing more, is lost through it and is unable to see the truth: _e.g.,_ in the consideration of Greek mythology. A merely fantastic person, of course, has no claim either: one must possess Greek imagination and also a certain amount of Greek piety. Even the poet does not require to be too consistent, and consistency is the last thing Greeks would understand. 125 Almost all the Greek divinities are accumulations of divinities: we find one layer over another, soon to be hidden and smoothed down by yet a third, and so on. It scarcely seems to me to be possible to pick these various divinities to pieces in a scientific manner; for no good method of doing so can be recommended: even the poor conclusion by analogy is in this instance a very good conclusion. 126 At what a distance must one be from the Greeks to ascribe to them such a stupidly narrow autochthony as does Ottfried Müller![11] How Christian it is to assume, with Welcker,[12] that the Greeks were originally monotheistic! How philologists torment themselves by investigating the question whether Homer actually wrote, without being able to grasp the far higher tenet that Greek art long exhibited an inward enmity against writing, and did not wish to be read at all.