ce of full and authentic information. Plato belongs to those few
among the ancient authors of whom everything that their contemporaries
possessed has been preserved to our own day. There would, however, be no
cause to speak about Plato in an investigation of atheism in antiquity,
had not so eminent a scholar as Zeller roundly asserted that Plato did not
believe in the Greek gods--with the exception of the heavenly bodies, in
the case of which the facts are obvious. On the other hand, it is
impossible here to enter upon a close discussion of so large a question; I
must content myself with giving my views in their main lines, with a brief
statement of my reasons for holding them.

In the mythical portions of his dialogues Plato uses the gods as a given
poetic motive and treats them with poetic licence. Otherwise they play a
very inferior part in the greater portion of his works. In the
_Euthyphron_ he gives a sharp criticism of the popular conception of
piety, and in reality at the same time very seriously questions the
importance and value of the existing form of worship. In his chief ethical
work, the _Gorgias_, he subjects the fundamental problems of individual
ethics to a close discussion without saying one word of their relation to
religion; if we except the mythic part at the end the gods scarcely appear
in the dialogue. Finally, in his _Republic_ he no doubt gives a detailed
criticism of popular mythology as an element of education, and in the
course of this also some positive definitions of the idea of God, but
throughout the construction of his ideal community he entirely disregards
religion and worship, even if he occasionally takes it for granted that a
cult of some sort exists, and in one place quite casually refers to the
Oracle at Delphi as authority for its organisation in details. To this may
further be added the negative point that he never in any of his works made
Socrates define his position in regard to the sophistic treatment of the
popular religion.

In Plato's later works the case is different. In the construction of the
universe described in the _Timaeus_ the gods have a definite and
significant place, and in the _Laws_, Plato's last work, they play a
leading part. Here he not only gives elaborate rules for the organisation
of the worship which permeate the whole life of the community, but even in
the argument of the dialogue the gods are everywhere in evidence in a way
which strongly suggests bigo