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 Muller![10] How Christian it is to assume, with Welcker,[11] 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. 127 In the religious cultus an earlier degree of culture comes to light a remnant of former times. The ages that celebrate it are not those which invent it, the contrary is often the case. There are many contrasts to be found here. The Greek cultus takes us back to a pre-Homeric disposition and culture. It is almost the oldest that we know of the Greeks--older than their mythology, which their poets have considerably remoulded, so far as we know it--Can this cult really be called Greek? I doubt it: they are finishers, not inventors. They _preserve_ by means of this beautiful completion and adornment. 128