Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/399

COMMENCEMENT OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 36? ing harmony of fraternal states. While Thucydides treats the habitual and licensed piracy, so coolly alluded to in the Homeric poems, as an obsolete enormity, many of the acts described in the old heroic and Theogonic legends were found not less repug- nant to this improved tone of feeling. The battles of the gods with the Giants and Titans, the castration of Uranus by his son Kronus, the cruelty, deceit and licentiousness, often sup- posed both in the gods and heroes, provoked strong disapproba- tion. And the language of the philosopher Xenophanes, who composed both elegiac and iambic poems for the express purpose of denouncing such tales, is as vehement and unsparing as that of the Christian writers, who, eight centuries afterwards, attack- ed the whole scheme of paganism. 1 Nor was it alone as an ethical and social critic that Xeno- phanes stood distinguished. He was one of a great and eminent triad Thales and Pythagoras being the others who, in the sixth century before the Christian aera, first opened up those veins of speculative philosophy which occupied afterwards so large a portion of Grecian intellectual energy. Of the material differences between the three I do not here speak ; I regard them only in reference to the Homeric and Hesiodic philosophy which preceded them, and from which all three deviated by a step, perhaps the most remarkable in all the history of philosophy. In the scheme of ideas common to Homer and to the Hesiodic Theogony (as has been already stated), we find nature distribut- ed into a variety of personal agencies, administered according to the free-will of different Beings more or less analogous to man each of these Beings having his own character, attributes and powers, his own sources of pain and pleasure, and his own espe- cial sympathies or antipathies with human individuals ; each being determined to act or forbear, to grant favor or inflict injury in his own department of phenomena, according as men, or perhaps other Beings analogous to himself, might conciliate or offend him. The Gods, properly so called, (those who bore a proper name and received some public or family worship,) were the most com- manding and capital members amidst this vast network of agents 1 Xenophan. ap. Sext. Empiric, adv. Mathemat. ix. 193 Fragm. 1. Poet Gnsc. cd. Schneidewin. Diogen. Laert. ix. 18.