But from a hero, limited and obscure, to a god, seated in full effulgence at the table of Zeus, was a big step, and bigger yet was the deification of living men. It may even be that the latter conception was not Greek, but was borrowed from Egypt or Mesopotamia. There is no indication of its presence before Alexander. That a man in the flesh might be translated from mortality to immortality—_entrückt_—was a very ancient conviction. The son-in-law of Zeus, Menelaos, had been so privileged.[32] A poetic hyperbole claimed as much for the tyrannicide Harmodius.[33] There were others, of no special moment, who by popular legend had walked among men and were not found, as in later times happened to Arthur and Barbarossa. But they became as gods only by their translation. We do not meet in Greece for centuries men who ventured to claim for themselves in the visible body that measure of divinity. In Egypt, however, and Mesopotamia the conception was not new. Certainly Pharaoh did not wait to receive his divine character from the hand of the embalmer. He was at all times Very God. At both the Euphrates and the Nile, Alexander found ample precedent for the assumption of divine honors, to which he no doubt sincerely believed he had every claim. We know how he derived his descent, without contradiction from his mother Olympias. It was novel doctrine for Greeks, but the avidity with which it was accepted and imitated showed that it did not absolutely clash with Greek manner of thought. After Alexander, every king or princelet who appeared with sufficient force to overawe a town could scarcely avoid the formal decree of divinity. The Ptolemies quietly stepped—though not at once—into the throne and prerogatives of Ra. Seleucus adopted Apollo as his ancestor, and his grandson took Θεός, “the God,” as his title. His line maintained a shadowy relation with Marduk and Nebo of Babylon. Demetrius the Besieger had only to show himself at Athens to be advanced into Olympus. The religion briefly and imperfectly sketched in this chapter was not really a system at all. There is a deal of incoherency in it, of cross-purposes and contradiction. There was no priestly caste among the Greeks to gather into a system the confused threads of religious thinking. Its ethical bearings came largely through the idea of the state, in which religion was a highly important constituent. There was also a personal and emotional side to Greek religion, and in particular cases the adoration of the worshiper was doubtless the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart, and not the blood of bullocks. But the crudities of animism cropped out in many places, and in the loftiest of Greek prayers there is no note like “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy might.” In its most developed form a Greek’s dependence on his god was resignation, not self-immolation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------