object of divine jealousy, and declares that, sundering himself from the rest, he is single in his creed[1]—it is crime and not prosperity that provokes the wrath of Heaven. Yet he nowhere assumes a position of consistent scepticism. He does not shrink from following the old legend of Prometheus's sufferings, even when it exhibits in the darkest colours the paltry malevolence of Zeus. And yet he elsewhere speaks of Zeus with the profoundest reverence and the most unflinching loyalty. "Zeus, great Zeus, the stranger's god, I reverence!" [2] "No other power I know to compare with him." [3]
"He who swells to Zeus the triumph-strain
All of wisdom shall obtain." [4]
In short, such quasi-scepticism as is exhibited from time to time by Pindar and Æschylus has in it little or nothing of the sceptical spirit. It is the occasional protest of a religious and earnest nature against the inadequacies of its creed, but it does not go the length of consistently reforming that creed, much less of uncompromisingly rejecting it.
