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                         THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
                             OF THE GREEKS

                       FROM HOMER TO THE TRIUMPH
                            OF CHRISTIANITY

                                   BY
                        CLIFFORD HERSCHEL MOORE
                PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

                             [Illustration]

                               CAMBRIDGE
                        HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
                        LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
                        OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
                                  1916

                            COPYRIGHT, 1916
                        HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

                 First impression issued November, 1916
                Second impression issued December, 1916

TO MY WIFE




PREFACE


In this book eight lectures given before the Lowell Institute in
Boston during the late autumn of 1914 are combined with material drawn
from a course of lectures delivered the previous spring before the
Western Colleges with which Harvard University maintains an annual
exchange—Beloit, Carleton, Colorado, Grinnell, and Knox. The lecture
form has been kept, even at the cost of occasional repetition.

The purpose of these lectures is to present within a moderate compass
an historical account of the progress of Greek religious thought
through something over a thousand years. No attempt has been made
to give a general treatment of Greek religion, or to deal with
pre-Hellenic origins, with religious antiquities, or with mythology.
The discussions are confined rather to the Greeks’ ideas about the
nature of the gods, and to their concepts of the relations between
gods and men and of men’s obligations toward the divine. The lectures
therefore deal with the higher ranges of Greek thought and at times
have much to do with philosophy and theology.

Yet I have felt free to interpret my subject liberally, and,