empire; nay, the mere material aggregation of buildings, the shrine, so to say, of the city-organisation, is all-important, and the territory a mere farm or recruiting ground; the long walls fall to the music of Lysander’s flutes, and Athens becomes an appanage of the Dorians; Carthaginian walls are breached, and the huge Semitic empire becomes a part of the realm of the mightiest city of all. Nowhere is there independence, unity, progress, save where a city knits up the 325 energies and gives form to the aspirations of men, providing an aim for which their virtue (valour) may expend itself.
It may here be noted that during all this time ethics and religion were developing on one line; in the earlier barbarism there was no distinction between society and nature; man was the sole rational type; the gods were wholly anthropomorphous, and even amidst the delicate poetry of Homer at times grotesquely so; man was everything, the rest was homogeneous with him. Nature-gods were the ancestors of society, the heads of gentes and tribes traced their descent quite frankly by mere begettal from the highest. Heracles, Jove, Mavors, Woden were no forces exterior to the life of the existing people of the Hellenes, the Latins, or the Goths, but veritable material ancestors, so many counted generations back. Their most tragic stories, embodied in the noblest poetry which the world has seen, and perhaps will ever see,—looked upon as no chance fictions or literary inventions, but rather as pieces of inspired history,—were but episodes of the great story, blossoms of the genealogical tree of the existing child of Atreus or Wolsmeg. This tendency for the identification of man with everything sensible or insensible, animate or inanimate, is again illustrated by totem worship, necessitated also by the more obvious reason of the early absence of monogamous or 326 even polygamous institutions. The gods themselves change without degradation into the forms of beast and bird, so that the chiefs of the gens could feel no shame in taking their names from the bear, the wolf, or the eagle, and giving them in turn to the whole groups. Amongst the Hebrews, too, it is clear that the so-called patriarchs were really nature-gods;