The Greek gods did not demand any complete changes of character, and were, generally speaking, by no means burdensome or importunate: it was thus possible to take them seriously and to believe in them. At the time of Homer, indeed, the nature of the Greek was formed: flippancy of images and imagination was necessary to lighten the weight of its passionate disposition and to set it free. 134 Every religion has for its highest images an analogon in the spiritual condition of those who profess it. The God of Mohammed: the solitariness of the desert, the distant roar of the lion, the vision of a formidable warrior. The God of the Christians: everything that men and women think of when they hear the word "love." The God of the Greeks: a beautiful apparition in a dream. 135 A great deal of intelligence must have gone to the making up of a Greek polytheism: the expenditure of intelligence is much less lavish when people have only _one_ God. 136 Greek morality is not based on religion, but on the _polis._ There were only priests of the individual gods; not representatives of the whole religion: _i.e.,_ no guild of priests. Likewise no Holy Writ. 137 The "lighthearted" gods: this is the highest adornment which has ever been bestowed upon the world--with the feeling, How difficult it is to live! 138 If the Greeks let their "reason" speak, their life seems to them bitter and terrible. They are not deceived. But they play round life with lies: Simonides advises them to treat life as they would a play; earnestness was only too well known to them in the form of pain. The misery of men is a pleasure to the gods when they hear the poets singing of it. Well did the Greeks know that only through art could even misery itself become a source of pleasure; _vide tragœdiam._ 139 It is quite untrue to say that the Greeks only took _this_ life into their consideration--they suffered also from thoughts of death and Hell. But no "repentance" or contrition. 140 The incarnate appearance of gods, as in Sappho's invocation to Aphrodite, must not be taken as poetic licence: they are frequently hallucinations. We conceive of a great many things, including the will to die, too superficially as rhetorical. 141 The "martyr" is Hellenic: Prometheus, Hercules. The hero-myth became pan-Hellenic: a poet must have had a hand in that! 142 How _realistic_ the Greeks were even in the domain of pure inventions! They poetised reality, not yearning to lift themselves out of it. The raising of the present into the colossal and eternal, _e.g.,_ by Pindar. 143 What condition do the Greeks premise as the model of their life in Hades? Anæmic, dreamlike, weak: it is the continuous accentuation of old age, when the memory gradually becomes weaker and weaker, and the body still more so. The senility of senility: this would be our state of life in the eyes of the Hellenes. 144 The naïve character of the Greeks observed by the Egyptians. 145