It may seem curious that to find the persecuting spirit in Greece we have to turn to the philosophers.  Plato, the most brilliant disciple of Socrates, constructed in his later years an ideal State.  In this State he instituted

[36] a religion considerably different from the current religion, and proposed to compel all the citizens to believe in his gods on pain of death or imprisonment.  All freedom of discussion was excluded under the cast-iron system which he conceived.  But the point of interest in his attitude is that he did not care much whether a religion was true, but only whether it was morally useful; he was prepared to promote morality by edifying fables; and he condemned the popular mythology not because it was false, but because it did not make for righteousness.

The outcome of the large freedom permitted at Athens was a series of philosophies which had a common source in the conversations of Socrates.  Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Sceptics—­it may be maintained that the efforts of thought represented by these names have had a deeper influence on the progress of man than any other continuous intellectual movement, at least until the rise of modern science in a new epoch of liberty.

The doctrines of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics all aimed at securing peace and guidance for the individual soul.  They were widely propagated throughout the Greek world from the third century B.C., and we may say that from this time onward most

[37] well-educated Greeks were more or less rationalists.  The teaching of Epicurus had a distinct anti-religious tendency.  He considered fear to be the fundamental motive of religion, and to free men’s minds from this fear was a principal object of his teaching.  He was a Materialist, explaining the world by the atomic theory of Democritus and denying any divine government of the universe. [2] He did indeed hold the existence of gods, but, so far as men are concerned, his gods are as if they were not—­living in some remote abode and enjoying a “sacred and everlasting calm.”  They just served as an example of the realization of the ideal Epicurean life.

There was something in this philosophy which had the power to inspire a poet of singular genius to expound it in verse.  The Roman Lucretius (first century B.C.) regarded Epicurus as the great deliverer of the human race and determined to proclaim the glad tidings of his philosophy in a poem On the Nature of the World. [3] With all the fervour

[38] of a religious enthusiast he denounces religion, sounding every note of defiance, loathing, and contempt, and branding in burning words the crimes to which it had urged man on.  He rides forth as a leader of the hosts of atheism against the walls of heaven.  He explains the scientific arguments as if they were the radiant revelation of a new world; and the rapture of his enthusiasm is a strange accompaniment of a doctrine which aimed at perfect calm.  Although