Note 296 — Chapter XXIII · THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART.

I have already touched on this point in the chapters on the Attic drama. It is, indeed, very interesting to trace the growth of the morality of Nemesis and the divine φθόνος in the earlier Greek authors—its purification by Æschylus, and still further subsequent refinement by Sophocles; finally its rejection by Plato, who says emphatically: "Envy has no place in the heavenly choir." A childish fear of the divine government pervaded the Greeks of the age of Herodotus. This by the dramatists was exalted to a conception of the holy and the jealous God. But the good sense of the Greeks led the philosophers to eliminate from their theory of the world even the sublime theosophy of Æschylus. The soul of man, as analyzed by Plato in the Republic, has only to suffer from the inevitable consequences of its own passions. Plato theorizes the humanity implicit in Homer.