tion certainly, and
possibly even more than that. To be sure, considerations of that kind did
not weigh with Anaxagoras; but he was--and that we know on good authority--a
quiet scholar whose ideal of life was to devote himself to problems of
natural science, and he can hardly have wished to be disturbed in this
occupation by affairs in which he took no sort of interest. The question
is then only how far men like Pericles and himself may have ventured in
their criticism. Though all direct tradition is wanting, we have at any
rate circumstantial evidence possessing a certain degree of probability.

To begin with, the attempt to give a natural explanation of prodigies is
not in itself without interest. The mantic art, _i.e._ the ability to
predict the future by signs from the gods or direct divine inspiration,
was throughout antiquity considered one of the surest proofs of the
existence of the gods. Now, it by no means follows that a person who was
not impressed by a deformed ram's head would deny, _e.g._, the ability of
the Delphic Oracle to predict the future, especially not so when the
person in question was a naturalist. But that there was at this time a
general tendency to reject the art of divination is evident from the fact
that Herodotus as well as Sophocles, both of them contemporaries of
Pericles and Anaxagoras, expressly contend against attempts in that
direction, and, be it remarked, as if the theory they attack was commonly
held. Sophocles is in this connexion so far the more interesting of the
two, as, on one hand, he criticises private divination but defends the
Delphic oracle vigorously, while he, on the other hand, identifies denial
of the oracle with denial of the gods. And he does this in such a way as
to make it evident that he has a definite object in mind. That in this
polemic he may have been aiming precisely at Anaxagoras is indicated by
the fact that Diopeithes, who carried the resolution concerning the
accusation of the philosopher, was a soothsayer by profession.

The strongest evidence as to the free-thinking of the Periclean age is,
however, to be met with in the historical writing of Thucydides. In his
work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides completely eliminated the
supernatural element; not only did he throughout ignore omens and
divinations, except in so far as they played a part as a psychological
factor, but he also completely omitted any reference to the gods in his
narrative. Such a p