5-16:
cf. especially what St. Augustine says about the disreputable hordes of
would-be martyrs called _Circumcelliones_. See Index to Augustine, vol.
xi in Migne: some passages collected in Seeck, _Gesch. d. Untergangs der
antiken Welt_, vol. iii, Anhang, pp. 503 ff.

II

THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST

I. _Origin of the Olympians_

The historian of early Greece must find himself often on the watch for a
particular cardinal moment, generally impossible to date in time and
sometimes hard even to define in terms of development, when the clear
outline that we call Classical Greece begins to take shape out of the
mist. It is the moment when, as Herodotus puts it, 'the Hellenic race
was marked off from the barbarian, as more intelligent and more
emancipated from silly nonsense'.[39:1] In the eighth century B. C., for
instance, so far as our remains indicate, there cannot have been much to
show that the inhabitants of Attica and Boeotia and the Peloponnese were
markedly superior to those of, say, Lycia or Phrygia, or even Epirus. By
the middle of the fifth century the difference is enormous. On the one
side is Hellas, on the other the motley tribes of 'barbaroi'.

When the change does come and is consciously felt we may notice a
significant fact about it. It does not announce itself as what it was, a
new thing in the world. It professes to be a revival, or rather an
emphatic realization, of something very old. The new spirit of classical
Greece, with all its humanity, its intellectual life, its genius for
poetry and art, describes itself merely as being 'Hellenic'--like the
Hellenes. And the Hellenes were simply, as far as we can make out, much
the same as the Achaioi, one of the many tribes of predatory Northmen
who had swept down on the Aegean kingdoms in the dawn of Greek
history.[40:1]

This claim of a new thing to be old is, in varying degrees, a common
characteristic of great movements. The Reformation professed to be a
return to the Bible, the Evangelical movement in England a return to the
Gospels, the High Church movement a return to the early Church. A large
element even in the French Revolution, the greatest of all breaches with
the past, had for its ideal a return to Roman republican virtue or to
the simplicity of the natural man.[40:2] I noticed quite lately a speech
of an American Progressive leader claiming that his principles were
simply those of Abraham Lincoln. The tendency is due in part to the
almo