knowing. Corresponding expressions of a moral character are hardly to
be found in Homer; but as early as Hesiod and Solon we find, at any rate,
Zeus as the representative of heavenly justice. With such definitions a
large number of customs of public worship and, above all, a number of
stories about the gods, were in violent contradiction; thus we find even
so old and so pious a poet as Pindar occasionally rejecting mythical
stories which he thinks at variance with the sublime nature of the gods.
This form of criticism of popular beliefs is continued through the whole
of antiquity; it is found not only in philosophers and philosophically
educated laymen, but appears spontaneously in everybody of a reflective
mind; its best known representative in earlier times is Euripides. Typical
of its popular form is in the first place its casualness; it is directed
against details which at the moment attract attention, while it leaves
other things alone which in principle are quite as offensive, but either
not very obviously so, or else not relevant to the matter in hand.
Secondly, it is naive: it takes the gods of the popular belief for granted
essentially as they are; it does not raise the crucial question whether
the popular belief is not quite justified in attributing to these higher
beings all kinds of imperfection, and wrong in attributing perfection to
them, and still less if such beings, whether they are defined as perfect
or imperfect, exist at all. It follows that as a whole this form of
criticism is outside the scope of our inquiry.

Still, there is one single personality in early Greek thought who seems to
have proceeded still further on the lines of this naive criticism, namely,
Xenophanes of Colophon. He is generally included amongst the philosophers,
and rightly in so far as he initiated a philosophical speculation which
was of the highest importance in the development of Greek scientific
thought. But in the present connexion it would, nevertheless, be
misleading to place Xenophanes among those philosophers who came into
conflict with the popular belief because their conception of Existence was
based on science. The starting-point for his criticism of the popular
belief is in fact not philosophical, but religious; he ranks with
personalities like Pindar and Euripides--he was also a verse-writer
himself, with considerable poetic gift--and is only distinguished from them
by the greater consistency of his thought. Hence, t