A sea-coast broken by numerous indentations, an archipelago with some of the most lovely islands in the world, inspired the Greeks with a taste for maritime life, for geographical discovery, and colonization.  Their ships wandered all over the Black and Mediterranean Seas.  The time-honored wonders that had been glorified in the “Odyssey,” and sacred in public faith, were found to have no existence.  As a better knowledge of Nature was obtained, the sky was shown to be an illusion; it was discovered that there is no Olympus, nothing above but space and stars.  With the vanishing of their habitation, the gods disappeared, both those of the Ionian type of Homer and those of the Doric of Hesiod.

Effects of discovery and criticism.  But this did not take place without resistance.  At first, the public, and particularly its religious portion, denounced the rising doubts as atheism.  They despoiled some of the offenders of their goods, exiled others; some they put to death.  They asserted that what had been believed by pious men in the old times, and had stood the test of ages, must necessarily be true.  Then, as the opposing evidence became irresistible, they were content to admit that these marvels were allegories under which the wisdom of the ancients had concealed many sacred and mysterious things.  They tried to reconcile, what now in their misgivings they feared might be myths, with their advancing intellectual state.  But their efforts were in vain, for there are predestined phases through which on such an occasion public opinion must pass.  What it has received with veneration it begins to doubt, then it offers new interpretations, then subsides into dissent, and ends with a rejection of the whole as a mere fable.

In their secession the philosophers and historians were followed by the poets.  Euripides incurred the odium of heresy.  Aeschylus narrowly escaped being stoned to death for blasphemy.  But the frantic efforts of those who are interested in supporting delusions must always end in defeat.  The demoralization resistlessly extended through every branch of literature, until at length it reached the common people.

The Persian empire.  Greek philosophical criticism had lent its aid to Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the national faith.  It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading unbelief.  It compared the doctrines of the different schools with each other, and showed from their contradictions that man has no criterion of truth; that, since his ideas of what is good and what is evil differ according to the country in which he lives, they can have no foundation in Nature, but must be altogether the result of education; that right and wrong are nothing more than fictions created by society for its own purposes.  In Athens, some of the more advanced classes had reached such a pass that they not only denied the unseen, the supernatural, they even affirmed that the world is only a day-dream, a phantasm, and that nothing at all exists.