eration of this principle is seen in all directions throughout
Greek literature after the date that has been mentioned, and this the
more strikingly as the time is later. The national intellect became more
and more ashamed of the fables it had believed in its infancy. Of the
legends, some are allegorized, some are modified, some are repudiated.
The great tragedians accept the myths in the aggregate, but decline them
in particulars; some of the poets transform or allegorize them; some use
them ornamentally, as graceful decorations. It is evident that between
the educated and the vulgar classes a divergence is taking place, that
the best men of the times see the necessity of either totally abandoning
these cherished fictions to the lower orders, or of gradually replacing
them with something more suitable. Such a frittering away of sacred
things was, however, very far from meeting with public approbation in
Athens itself, although so many people in that city had reached that
state of mental development in which it was impossible for them to
continue to accept the national faith. They tried to force themselves to
believe that there must be something true in that which had been
believed by so many great and pious men of old, which had approved
itself by lasting so many centuries, and of which it was by the common
people asserted that absolute demonstration could be given. But it was
in vain; intellect had outgrown faith. They had come into that condition
to which all men are liable--aware of the fallacy of their opinions, yet
angry that another should remind them thereof. When the social state no
longer permitted them to take the life of a philosophical offender, they
found means to put upon him such an invisible pressure as to present him
the choice of orthodoxy or beggary. Thus they disapproved of Euripides
permitting his characters to indulge in any sceptical reflections, and
discountenanced the impiety so obvious in the 'Prometheus Bound' of
Aeschylus. It was by appealing to this sentiment that Aristophanes added
no little to the excitement against Socrates. They who are doubting
themselves are often loudest in public denunciations of a similar state
in others.

[Sidenote: Secession of the philosophers.]

If thus the poets, submitting to common sense, had so rapidly fallen
away from the national belief, the philosophers pursued the same course.
It soon became the universal impression that there was an intrinsic
oppositi