Note 108.1 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

Again, each of these poets, while accepting and in certain points purifying the traditional polytheism, was capable of religious thought that worked on other lines than anthropomorphism. The High God, Zeus, is generally for them a definite personal Being; but once at least Æschylus transcends this apprehension of him and defines Zeus pantheistically as a supreme cosmic force; a fragment of his ‘Heliades’ speaks of him thus: “Zeus is air, earth, heaven; Zeus is the whole of things, and whatsoever is higher still than these.” Moreover, the other divine forces that shape our lives are presented by him and his fellow-poets, not always as θεοί, but as moral powers that are only half-personal, not as concrete individual deities, but as emanations of the divinity. We may call them ‘personifications of moral ideas,’ and some are no more than what this phrase implies, such as those for instance with which Euripides capriciously plays. But some may be rather described as the Soul-powers of the High God, like, in some ways, to the Persian Fravashi; such are Pindar’s Σώτειρα Διὸς Ξενίου Θέμις,108.1 the Dike of Æschylus, “Justice, the Maiden Daughter of God,”108.2 who “shines in the poor man’s smoke-dimmed cabin”;108.3 Mercy in the verse of Sophocles,108.4 “Mercy shares the throne of God to deal with all the deeds of men.” While Pindar’s genius inclines to the brighter of these emanations, Æschylus broods rather over the gloomy forces of the shadowy world, which he might at times be constrained to present in palpable concrete form for stage purposes and yet his own deeper thought could grasp as half-outlined spiritual powers, not the less real because impalpable. The ordinary Hellene in his religious perceptions laid too much stress on personal individuality, as if this were the only criterion of ideal reality; from his point of view if Eros was to be a real power of the divine world, then Eros must be imagined as a beautiful youth. But Kypris or Aphrodite in a striking Sophoclean fragment is no longer presented as a personal goddess, but as a diffused pantheistic force.108.5 And the Attic drama may have enlarged the mental outlook of the succeeding generations in this matter; for the author of the speech against Aristogeiton in the fourth century must have been sure that his audience would understand him when he said, “all mankind have altars dedicated to Justice, Law-abidingness and Pity, the fairest and holiest (being those) in the very soul and the nature of each individual.”109.1 This is just how Euripides might speak.