How might an emotionally sensitive or mentally trained man pour forth supplication before a guzzling braggart like the Aristophanic Heracles or an effeminate voluptuary like the Apollo of Alexandrian poetry? It seems hard to discover any other defense than the one Charles Lamb offered for the dramatists of the Restoration—that the world the gods moved in was a wholly different one from the human world; a world in which moral categories had no existence, a Land of Cockayne without vices, because it was without the sanctions which vice disregards. No doubt some Greeks felt in this way toward the myths. But it was not a satisfactory theory. It introduced a dualism into standards of conduct that soon became intolerable, when men reflected seriously upon other sides of the divine nature, and drew inferences from it. As a matter of fact, the difficulty we find in addressing words of prayer and praise to such unworthy gods as sat upon the Homeric Olympus is modern, and was probably not felt at all by the vast majority of Greeks, either in Homer’s time or later. Not that the fraud, cruelty, faithlessness there exhibited seemed to the Greeks of any epoch commendable or imitable qualities. Even the Homeric Greek was far from being in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state. Civic virtues as between men were known and practised. But the personality of the individual gods in these stories could be disregarded in practice, because they were in no sense a part of the Greek religion. The chastest of men might with a clear conscience worship the lecherous Zeus, because worship did not at all concern itself with the catalogue of his amours. In Homer’s time and after, the Greek firmly believed that the Olympians were actually existing beings, but he scarcely stopped to ask himself whether it was literally true that Zeus had bidden Hera be silent under threats of personal violence. What did concern him in his relation with his gods was the disposition in which the god was likely to be toward him or his people. And his religious activity was directed to the end of making that disposition as good as possible.