ianism but from the great
spiritual and intellectual effort of the fourth century B.C., which
culminated in the _Metaphysics_ and the _De Anima_ and the foundation of
the Stoa and the Garden. Consequently I have added a new chapter at this
point and raised the number of Stages to five.

My friend Mr. E. E. Genner has kindly enabled me to correct two or three
errors in the first edition, and I owe special thanks to my old pupil,
Professor E. R. Dodds, for several interesting observations and
criticisms on points connected with Plotinus and Sallustius. Otherwise I
have altered little. I am only sorry to have left the book so long out
of print.

G. M.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This small book has taken a long time in growing. Though the first two
essays were only put in writing this year for a course of lectures which
I had the honour of delivering at Columbia University in 1912, the
third, which was also used at Columbia, had in its main features
appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_ in 1910, the fourth in part in the
_English Review_ in 1908; the translation of Sallustius was made in 1907
for use with a small class at Oxford. Much of the material is much older
in conception, and all has been reconsidered. I must thank the editors
of both the above-named periodicals for their kind permission to
reprint.

I think it was the writings of my friend Mr. Andrew Lang that first
awoke me, in my undergraduate days, to the importance of anthropology
and primitive religion to a Greek scholar. Certainly I began then to
feel that the great works of the ancient Greek imagination are
penetrated habitually by religious conceptions and postulates which
literary scholars like myself had not observed or understood. In the
meantime the situation has changed. Greek religion is being studied
right and left, and has revealed itself as a surprisingly rich and
attractive, though somewhat controversial, subject. It used to be a
deserted territory; now it is at least a battle-ground. If ever the
present differences resolved themselves into a simple fight with
shillelaghs between the scholars and the anthropologists, I should
without doubt wield my reluctant weapon on the side of the scholars.
Scholarship is the rarer, harder, less popular and perhaps the more
permanently valuable work, and it certainly stands more in need of
defence at the moment. But in the meantime I can h