s.
Greece to-day lies buried with her gods. She has been dead for twenty
centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed
before death did and survived her.

To Homer beauty was an article of faith. But not the divinities that
radiated it. He laughed at them. Pythagoras found him expiating his mirth
in hell. A later echo of it bubbled in the farce of Aristophanes. It
reverberated in the verses of Euripides. It rippled through the gardens of
Epicurus. It amused sceptics to whom the story of the gods and their
amours was but gossip concerning the elements. They believed in them no
more than we do. But they lived among a people that did. To the Greeks the
gods were real, they were neighborly, they were careless and caressing,
subject like mortals to fate. From them gifts came, desires as well. The
latter idea, precocious in its naive psychology, eliminated human
responsibility and made sin descend from above.

Olympus was not severe. Greece was not, either. The solemnity of other
faiths had no place in her creed, which was free, too, of their baseness.
It was not Homer only, but the inherent Hellenic love of the beautiful
that, in emancipating her from Orientalisms, maintained her in an attitude
which, while never ascetic, occasionally was sublime. The tradition of
Orpheus and Eurydice, the fable of Psyche and her god, had in them love,
which nowhere else was known. They had, too, something of the high
morality which the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ depict.

In the _Iliad_ a thousand ships are launched for the recovery of an
abducted wife. The subject is equivocal, but concerning it there is not a
dubious remark. In the _Iliad_ as in the _Odyssey_ love rested on two
distinct principles: First, the respect of natural law; second, the
respect of lawful marriage. These principles, the gods, if they willed,
could abolish. When they did, their victims were not blamed, they were
pitied. Christianity could not do better. Frequently it failed to do as
well. But the patricists were not psychologists and the theory of
determinism had not come.

Aphrodite had. With love for herald, with pleasure for page, with the
Graces and the Hours for handmaids, she had come among the dazzled
immortals. Hesiod told about it. So did de Musset.

Regrettez-vous le temps ou le Ciel, sur la terre,
Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?
Ou Venus Astarte, fille de l'onde amere,
Secouait, vierge encor,