ploy the scales of
destiny, and in Hesiod appear the three Fates who control the lives of
men independently of the gods. The conception of a controlling fate may
be regarded as an effort to reach an absolutely unitary view of the
world. Above all the divine powers that regulate affairs, after the
manner of the government by a king with his attendant chieftains and
officers, there is a sense of a dim and undefined power of unknown
origin, mysterious, absolute, universal. The question whether this
conception was a reflection of a sense of the controlling power resident
in the universe itself, or merely an endeavor to rise above the
variations of anthropomorphic deities, is important from the point of
view of the genesis of ideas, but its decision will not affect the fact
just stated.[1818] Obviously in the Homeric world there appears this
general conviction that men and gods are bound together in unity and
that some force or power controls all things.[1819]

+999+. This sense of the governmental unity is further developed by the
later great poets who infused into it higher and more definite moral
elements. The polytheistic view continues; to the thinkers of the time
there was no more difficulty in conceiving of a single headship along
with many deities of particular functions than was felt by Hebrew
prophets who recognized the existence of foreign deities, with Yahweh
as a superior god, or by the modern Christian world with its apparatus
of angels, saints, and demons alongside of the supreme God. For Pindar
Zeus is lord of all things and is far removed from the moral impurities
of the popular conception. AEschylus represents him as supreme and in
general as just, though not wholly free from human weaknesses. A real
unity of the world is set forth by Sophocles: there is a divinely
ordered control by immutable law, and the will of Zeus is unquestioned.
The unitary conception is found also in Euripides notwithstanding his
skeptical attitude toward the current mythology. The sense of symmetry
potent in the poets forced them to this unitary conception of
government, and the natural progress of ethical feeling led them to
ascribe the highest ethical qualities to the deities.

+1000+. Similar motives appear in the speculations of the Greek
philosophers: Greek philosophy in seeking to discover the essential
nature of the world moved definitely toward the conception of its
unity--so, for example, as early as the sixth century, in