fostering care of Trajan and the Antonines. It then became clear that Cicero had not looked in vain to Greek Philosophy to save his countrymen from that moral degradation and disorder which, in his own words, it demanded the most earnest endeavours of every individual citizen to check and restrain.[42] In Greece, Religion and Philosophy had early enjoyed mutual relations of an intimate character. The force of the weighty invocations which the poet of the “Works and Days”[43] addresses to his dishonourable brother Perses lies less in the conventional theology which alludes to the wrath of “broad-sighted Zeus” as tracking the footsteps of the wicked, than in the reasoned choice which the sinner is invited to make between Injustice as leading inevitably to ruin, and Virtue leading as inevitably to prosperity;[44] and the claims of individual judgment, the right of every man to subject everything to the test of his own intelligence, never found finer expression than in the verse which assigns the palm of moral perfection to him who has the courage to think for himself.[45] Pindar, the most religious poet of antiquity, applies the test of reason to the established myths of Hellas when he refuses to credit such legends as depict the gods in unseemly situations, or under the influence of degrading passions.[46] Xenophanes thought that the claims of Religion and Morality could be best advanced by cleansing the moral atmosphere of the gods whose recorded lives were so flagrantly in opposition to the dictates of purity, reason, and honour; a strain of criticism which found its most striking and notorious expression in the famous Second and Third Books of Plato’s “Republic,” but which had not been without its exponents among more whole-hearted adherents of the national Religion. But, meanwhile, the national Religion, as embodied, at least, in the national liturgy, had been coming to terms with the growing strength of Philosophy, and the vestibules of the Temple at Delphi were inscribed with those famous philosophical apophthegms, whose presence there subsequently enabled Plutarch to claim that Apollo was not only a God and a Seer, but a Philosopher.[47] The popular morality of the days of Socrates, which supplied his cross-examinees with ready-made answers to questions on the nature of Vice and Virtue, and of the vices and the virtues, was composed as much of Philosophy as of Religion in the narrower sense of the term.[48] The Theogonies of Homer and Hesiod furnished the external machinery of the supernatural world, but the moral utterances of these two poets, and not of these only, but of Simonides and Solon, of Theognis and the “Seven Sages,” contained many striking lessons, and many emphatic warnings, touching the necessity and advantages of a life of virtue. It became, in fact, quite evident, though not, of course, explicitly asserted, or perhaps even consciously admitted, that the gods, as represented in the Homeric poems