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 tragoediam_. 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? Anaemic, 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 naive character of the Greeks observed by the Egyptians. 145 The truly scientific people, the literary people, were the Egyptians and not the Greeks. That which has the appearance of science among the Greeks, originated among the Egyptians and later on returned to them to mingle again with the old current. Alexandrian culture is an amalgamation of Hellenic and Egyptian . and when our world again founds its culture upon the Alexandrian culture, then....[12] 146 The Egyptians are far more of a literary people than the Greeks. I maintain this against Wolf. The first grain in Eleusis, the first vine in Thebes, the first olive-tree and fig-tree. The Egyptians had lost a great part of their mythology. 147 The unmathematical undulation of the column in Paestum is analogous to the modification of the _tempo_: animation in place of a mechanical movement. 148