The "lighthearted" gods · this is the highest adornment which has ever been bestowed upon the world—with the feeling, How difficult it is to live!
138
If the Greeks let their "reason" speak, their life seems to them bitter and terrible. They are not deceived. But they play round life with lies: Simonides advises them to treat life as they would a play; earnestness was only too well known to them in the form of pain. The misery of men is a pleasure to the gods when they hear the poets singing of it. Well did the Greeks know that only through art could even misery itself become a source of pleasure, vide tragœdiam.
139
It is quite untrue to say that the Greeks only took this life into their consideration—they suffered also from thoughts of death and Hell. But no "repentance" or contrition.
140
The incarnate appearance of gods, as in Sappho's invocation to Aphrodite, must not be taken as poetic licence · they are frequently hallucinations. We conceive of a great many things, including the will to die, too superficially as rhetorical.
141
The "martyr" is Hellenic: Prometheus, Hercules. The hero-myth became pan-Hellenic: a poet must have had a hand in that!