punished, but it was not everyone who knew what the proper observances
were. Altogether it was a difficult thing to ascertain or to move the
will of the gods, and one must help oneself as best one could. The
Greek, accordingly, helped himself by an elaborate system of sacrifice
and prayer and divination, a system which had no connection with an
internal spiritual life, but the object of which was simply to discover
and if possible to affect the divine purposes. This is what we meant by
saying that the Greek view of the relation of man to the gods was
mechanical. The point will become clearer by illustration.


Section 7. Divination, Omens, Oracles.

Let us take first a question which much exercised the Greek mind--the
difficulty of forecasting the future. Clearly, the notion that the world
was controlled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by human
passions and desires, was incompatible with the idea of fixed law; but
on the other hand it made it possible to suppose that some intimation
might be had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, of what
their intentions and purposes really were. And on this hypothesis we
find developed quite early in Greek history, a complex art of divining
the future by signs. The flight of birds and other phenomena of the
heavens, events encountered on the road, the speech of passers-by, or,
most important of all, the appearance of the entrails of the victims
sacrificed were supposed to indicate the probable course of events. And
this art, already mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we find
flourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing could better indicate
its prevalence and its scope than the following passage from
Aristophanes, where he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries to
see in everything an omen, or, as he puts it, punning on the Greek word,