“And if thou knewest how difficult it has become to serve thee.  All nobility has disappeared.  The Scythians have conquered the world.  There is no longer a Republic of free citizens; the world is governed by kings whose blood scarcely courses in their veins, and at whose majesty thou wouldst smile.  Heavy hyperboreans denounce thy servants as frivolous....  A formidable Panbaeotia, a league of fools, weighs down upon the world with a pall of lead.  Thou must fain despise even those who pay thee worship.  Dost thou remember the Caledonian who half a century ago broke up thy temple with a hammer to carry it away with him to Thule?  He is no worse than the rest....  I wrote in accordance with some of the rules which thou lovest, O Theonoe, the life of the young god whom I served in my childhood, and for this they beat me like a Euhemerus and wonder what my motives can be, believing only in those things which enrich their trapezite tables.  And why do we write the lives of the gods if it is not to make the reader love what is divine in them, and to show that this divine past yet lives and will ever live in the heart of humanity?

“Dost thou remember the day when, Dionysodorus being archon, an ugly little Jew, speaking the Greek of the Syrians, came hither, passed beneath thy porch without understanding thee, misread thy inscriptions, and imagined that he had discovered within thy walls an altar dedicated to what he called the Unknown God?  Well, this little Jew was believed; for a thousand years thou hast been treated as an idol, O Truth! for a thousand years the world has been a desert in which no flower bloomed.  And all this time thou wert silent, O Salpinx, clarion of thought.  Goddess of order, image of celestial stability, those who loved thee were regarded, as culprits, and now, when by force of conscientious labour we have succeeded in drawing near to thee, we are accused of committing a crime against human intelligence because we have burst the chains which Plato knew not.

“Thou alone art young, O Cora; thou alone art pure, O Virgin; thou alone art healthy, O Hygeia; thou alone art strong, O Victory!  Thou keepest the cities, O Promachos; thou hast the blood of Mars in thee, O Area; peace is thy aim, O Pacifica!  O Legislatress, source of just constitutions; O Democracy[1] thou whose fundamental dogma it is that all good things come from the people, and that where there is no people to fertilise and inspire genius there can be none, teach us to extricate the diamond from among the impure multitudes!  Providence of Jupiter, divine worker, mother of all industry, protectress of labour, O Ergane, thou who ennoblest the labour of the civilised worker and placest him so far above the slothful Scythian; Wisdom, thou whom Jupiter begot with a breath; thou who dwellest within thy father, a part of his very essence; thou who art his companion and his conscience; Energy of Zeus, spark which kindles and keeps aflame the fire in heroes and men of genius, make us perfect