Only from us, they presume, comes evil, but in their
folly,
Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their own disaster."
Yet the reader will note and observe that this Olympian
spectator and judge is far from being angry with them
and thinking evil of them on this score. "How foolish they are," so thinks he of the misdeeds of mortals—and "folly," "imprudence," "a little brain disturbance," and nothing more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest period, have admitted to be the ground of much that is evil and fatal.—Folly, not sin, do you understand? . . .
But even this brain disturbance was a problem—"Come,
how is it even possible? How could it have really got in
brains like ours, the brains of men of aristocratic ancestry,
of men of fortune, of men of good natural endowments,
of men of the best society, of men of nobility and virtue?"
This was the question that for century on century the
aristocratic Greek put to himself when confronted with
every (to him incomprehensible) outrage and sacrilege
with which one of his peers had polluted himself. "It
must be that a god had infatuated him," he would say at
last, nodding his head.—This solution is typical of the Greeks, . . . accordingly the gods in those times subserved the functions of justifying man to a certain extent even in evil—in those days they took upon themselves not the punishment, but, what is more noble, the guilt.
24.
I conclude with three queries, as you will see. "Is an
