l62 Outlines of European History had now come to believe that in the world of the dead there was punishment for the evil-doer and blessedness for the good. In the temple at Eleusis (Fig. 80) scenes from the mysteri- ous earth life of Demeter and Dionysus, to whom men owe the fruits of the earth, are presented by the priests in dramatic form before the initiated, and he who views them may be received into the Islands of the Blessed, where once only the ancient heroes were admitted. Even the poorest slave is permitted to enter this fellowship and be initiated into the " Mysteries," as they were called. More than ever, also, men now turned to the gods for a knowledge of the future in this world. Everywhere it was believed that the oracle voice of Apollo revealed the outcome of every untried venture, and his shrine at Delphi (Figs. 81, 82) became a national religious center, to which the whole Greek world resorted. On the other hand, some thoughtful men began to reject the beliefs of the earlier day regarding the world and its control by the gods. When Thales of Miletus, from his study of the Baby- lonian astronomical lists (p. 84), correctly predicted an eclipse of the sun in the year 585 B.C. and boldly proclaimed that the movements of the heavenly bodies were due not to the whims of the gods but to fixed laws of nature, he banished the gods from, a whole world of their former domain. Likewise, when the Greeks learned of the enormous age of the oriental peoples, especially of the Egyptians, it was at once perceived that the gods could not have been wandering on earth like men only a few generations earlier. Such men as Thales, therefore, became the founders of natural science and philosophy. At this point in their thinking they entered upon a new world, which had never dawned upon the greatest minds of the early East. This step remains and will forever remain the greatest achievement of the human intellect — an achievement to call forth the rever- ence and admiration of all time. Just at this point, when the Greek was standing on the threshold of a new world, the Persian hosts suddenly advanced
