ak, 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.

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