to
make ancient life appear in our eyes more sunny and healthy and less
distressed, than the life of modern times. And in this instance, too,
though we are not dealing with any immediate or remote effects of
leisureliness, we still have to note the peculiar advantage gained by
the absence of a great complexity of interests in the ancient community.

With respect to religion, the Athenians were peculiarly situated. They
had for the most part outgrown the primitive terrorism of fetishistic
belief. Save in cases of public distress, as in the mutilation of the
Hermai, or in the refusal of Nikias to retreat from Syracuse because of
an eclipse of the moon, they were no longer, like savages, afraid of the
dark. Their keen aesthetic sense had prevailed to turn the horrors of
a primeval nature-worship into beauties. Their springs and groves were
peopled by their fancy with naiads and dryads, not with trolls and
grotesque goblins. Their feelings toward the unseen powers at work
about them were in the main pleasant; as witness the little story about
Pheidippides meeting the god Pan as he was making with hot haste toward
Sparta to announce the arrival of the Persians. Now, while this original
source of mental discomfort, which afflicts the uncivilized man, had
ceased materially to affect the Athenians, they on the other hand
lived at a time when the vague sense of sin and self-reproof which was
characteristic of the early ages of Christianity, had not yet invaded
society. The vast complication of life brought about by the extension of
the Roman Empire led to a great development of human sympathies,
unknown in earlier times, and called forth unquiet yearnings, desire for
amelioration, a sense of short-coming, and a morbid self-consciousness.
It is accordingly under Roman sway that we first come across characters
approximating to the modern type, like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius. It is then that we find the idea of social progress
first clearly expressed, that we discover some glimmerings of a
conscious philanthropy, and that we detect the earliest symptoms of that
unhealthy tendency to subordinate too entirely the physical to the moral
life, which reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. In the palmy
days of the Athenians it was different. When we hint that they were not
consciously philanthropists, we do not mean that they were not humane;
when we accredit them with no idea of progress, we do not forget how
m