70 mSTORY OF GREECE. happiness his end. But he deeply feels, and keenly exposes, the manifold wickedness and short-comings of his contemporaries, in reference to this capital standard. Pie turns with displeasure from the present men, not because they are too feeble to hurl either the spear of Achilles or some vast boundary-stone, but because they are rapacious, knavish, and unprincipled. The daemons first introduced into the religious atmosphere of the Grecian world by the author of the " Works and Days," as generically different from the gods, but as essentially good, and as forming the intermediate agents and police between gods and men, are deserving of attention as the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent many changes, and became of great importance, first as one of the constituent elements of pagan faith, then as one of the helps to its subversion. It will be recollected that the buried remnants of the half-wicked silver race, though they are not recognized as daemons, are still considered as having a substantive existence, a name, and dignity, in the under-woi-ld. The step was easy, to treat them as daemons also, but as daemons of a defective and malignant character : this step was made by Empe- docles and Xenocrates, and to a certain extent countenanced by Plato. 1 There came thus to be admitted among the pagan philoso- phers daemons both good and bad, in every degree : and these de- mons were found available as a means of explaining many phe- nomena for which it was not convenient to admit the agency of the gods. They served to relieve the gods from the odium of physical and moral evils, as well as from the necessity of constantly med- dling in small affairs ; and the objectionable ceremonies of the pagan world were defended upon the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of such malignant beings be appeased. They were most frequently noticed as causes of evil, and thus ths name (dtemon) came insensibly to convey with it a bad sense, the idea of an evil being as contrasted with the goodness of a god. So it was found by the Christian writers when they commenced their controversy with paganism. One branch of their argu- ment led them to identify the pagan gods with daemons in the evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the word lent them a specious assistance. For they could easily 1 See this subject further mentioned infra, chap. xvi. p. 565.
