ined phases through which on such an occasion public opinion
must pass. What it has received with veneration it begins to doubt, then
it offers new interpretations, then subsides into dissent, and ends with
a rejection of the whole as a mere fable.

In their secession the philosophers and historians were followed by
the poets. Euripides incurred the odium of heresy. Aeschylus narrowly
escaped being stoned to death for blasphemy. But the frantic efforts
of those who are interested in supporting delusions must always end in
defeat. The demoralization resistlessly extended through every branch of
literature, until at length it reached the common people.

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Greek philosophical criticism had lent its aid to
Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the national faith.
It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading unbelief. It compared
the doctrines of the different schools with each other, and showed from
their contradictions that man has no criterion of truth; that, since his
ideas of what is good and what is evil differ according to the country
in which he lives, they can have no foundation in Nature, but must be
altogether the result of education; that right and wrong are nothing
more than fictions created by society for its own purposes. In Athens,
some of the more advanced classes had reached such a pass that they not
only denied the unseen, the supernatural, they even affirmed that the
world is only a day-dream, a phantasm, and that nothing at all exists.

The topographical configuration of Greece gave an impress to her
political condition. It divided her people into distinct communities
having conflicting interests, and made them incapable of centralization.
Incessant domestic wars between the rival states checked her
advancement. She was poor, her leading men had become corrupt. They were
ever ready to barter patriotic considerations for foreign gold, to sell
themselves for Persian bribes. Possessing a perception of the beautiful
as manifested in sculpture and architecture to a degree never
attained elsewhere either before or since, Greece had lost a practical
appreciation of the Good and the True.

While European Greece, full of ideas of liberty and independence,
rejected the sovereignty of Persia, Asiatic Greece acknowledged it
without reluctance. At that time the Persian Empire in territorial
extent was equal to half of modern Europe. It touched the waters of
the Mediterranean,