Such is the general outline of the doctrine. We pass to some of its special applications.
Athletic eminence is a special development of those capacities which are included under prowess. Not every man, therefore, may lawfully seek it; but to seek and to achieve it, proves that the seeker has found his true sphere, and is succeeding in it. The competitions at the great games furnish a test which distinguishes the born champion from the presumptuous charlatan. Concrete victories are, as it were, the fruits by which the tree is known. The gods are careful that the prizes shall fall to no unworthy aspirant. A victory, then, at Olympia or the Isthmus, proves that the winner has found his true sphere, and is exercising within it, at the prompting of a noble ambition, gifts of inborn prowess, which are daily bringing him towards the point where his nearest possible approximation to deity will be realised. Further let him not seek to press. "Seek not to become a god!" [1]
Other and similar capacities of progress are implied in the divine gifts of power and wealth. The culmination of power is kingship; and the ideal king is one whom legitimate ambition carries forward to the attainment of such greatness and magnificence as he may lawfully achieve, and whom, on reaching that point, discretion arrests, and occupies with the consolidation of his power, and the enjoyment of a cultured and dignified leisure. The capacities, again, which the gods give with the gift of wealth, are developed by a generous and public-spirited employment of that
- ↑ Ol. v. 56.
