of great names: in one school of
philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius,
Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by
something very like a mere void. There are practically no complete books
preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently in the
search for information about this age we must throw our nets wide.
Beside books and inscriptions of the Hellenistic period proper I have
drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their
teachers and masters. I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents
and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and the Mithras Liturgy.
Among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches
of Dieterich, Cumont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein.

* * * * *

The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an
inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a
_tabula rasa_, on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers
might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about
life--what Herodotus would call their '_Historie_'. For, as we have seen
in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional
religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt
concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism;
and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's
ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than
elsewhere. Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous
may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any worshipper can
suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a
religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger,
because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not
far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.

This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have
mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a
good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects
for any mythological gods. But the Polis too, as we have seen in the
last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from
any special spiritual fault of its own; it had few faults except its
fatal narrowness; but simply because there now existed another social
whole, which, whether higher or lower in c