he treatise, the title of which has been quoted,
must have been a later forgery.) If, in spite of all, I dare not
absolutely deny the identity of the two Diagorases of tradition, the
reason is that Aristophanes, where he mentions the decree concerning
Diagoras, seems to suggest that his attack on the Mysteries was an old
story which was raked up again in 415. But for our purpose, at any rate,
nothing remains of the copious mass of legend but the fact that one
Diagoras of Melos in 415 was outlawed in Athens on the ground of his
attack on the Mysteries. Such an attack may have been the outcome of
atheism; there was no lack of impiety in Athens at the end of the fifth
century. But whether this was the case or not we cannot possibly tell; and
to throw light on free-thinking tendencies in Athens at this time, we have
other and richer sources than the historical notice of Diagoras.

CHAPTER IV

With the movement in Greek thought which is generally known as sophistic,
a new view of popular belief appears. The criticism of the sophists was
directed against the entire tradition on which Greek society was based,
and principally against the moral conceptions which hitherto had been
unquestioned: good and evil, right and wrong. The criticism was
essentially negative; that which hitherto had been imagined as absolute
was demonstrated to be relative, and the relative was identified with the
invalid. Thus they could not help running up against the popular ideas of
the gods, and treating them in the same way. A leading part was here
played by the sophistic distinction between _nomos_ and _physis_, Law and
Nature, _i.e._ that which is based on human convention, and that which is
founded on the nature of things. The sophists could not help seeing that
the whole public worship and the ideas associated with it belonged to the
former--to the domain of "the law." Not only did the worship and the
conceptions of the gods vary from place to place in the hundreds of small
independent communities into which Hellas was divided--a fact which the
sophists had special opportunity of observing when travelling from town to
town to teach; but it was even officially admitted that the whole
ritual--which, popularly speaking, was almost identical with religion--was
based on convention. If a Greek was asked why a god was to be worshipped
in such and such a way, generally the only answer was: because it is the
law of the State (or the convention; t