band of spirits, the souls of the departed--probably the relics of an
earlier pure ancestor-worship--who still interest themselves in the
inhabitants of this world. These [Greek: daimones] were certainly
accredited with supernatural power, and were not of necessity either
good or evil in their influence or action. It was to this second class
that foreign deities were assimilated. They found it impossible,
however, to retain even this humble position. The ceremonies of their
worship, and the language in which those ceremonies were performed, were
strange to the inhabitants of the land in which the acclimatization was
attempted; and the incomprehensible is first suspected, then loathed. It
is not surprising, then, that the new-comers soon fell into the ranks of
purely evil spirits, and that those who persisted in exercising their
rites were stigmatized as devil-worshippers, or magicians.

But in process of time this polytheistic system became pre-eminently
unsatisfactory to the thoughtful men whom Greece produced in such
numbers. The tendency towards monotheism which is usually associated
with the name of Plato is hinted at in the writings of other
philosophers who were his predecessors. The effect of this revolution
was to recognize one Supreme Being, the First Cause, and to subordinate
to him all the other deities of the ancient and popular theology--to
co-ordinate them, in fact, with the older class of daemons; the first
step in the descent to the lowest category of all.

21. The history of the neo-Platonic belief is one of elaboration upon
these ideas. The conception of the Supreme Being was complicated in a
manner closely resembling the idea of the Christian Trinity, and all the
subordinate daemons were classified into good and evil geniuses. Thus, a
theoretically monotheistic system was established, with a tremendous
hierarchy of inferior spirits, who frequently bore the names of the