importance. A real religion is a people's religion. The great complex conception Dionysus-Bacchus was a common folk's god, or rather had united in himself an indefinite number of similar conceptions which were worshipped by common folk all over Greece. We hear of him mostly through Alexandrian and Roman sources, sceptical through and through, in which he is merely the god of wine. But this is degradation by narrowing. He is a wine-god; he is a tree-god; but above all he is one of the personifications of the spirit of ecstasy, the impulse that is above reason, that lifts man beyond himself, gives him power and blessedness, and lets loose the immortal soul from the trammels of the body. The same spirit, in a tamer, saner, and more artistic form, was absorbed in the very different conception of Apollo. This religion doubtless had the most diverse forms. The gods it worshipped varied in names and attributes as they varied in their centres of initiation. But the most important aspects of it seem to have been more or less united in the religious revelations of 'Orpheus.'
Most of the old religious poems belonged to Orpheus or his kinsman Musasus, as the heroic poems to Homer, and the didactic to Hesiod. But we know nothing of them before the great religious revival of the sixth century, associated with the name of Onomacritus. The old separate cults of tribe and family had been disturbed by increasing intercourse. Agglomerated in the Homeric theology, they lost their sanctity; and they could scarcely survive Hesiod and his catalogues. Hence came, on the one hand, scepticism embodied in the Ionian philosophy, and the explanation of the world by natural science; on the other hand, a deeper, more passionate belief. It was all very well for Thales to be
