As Burckhardt shows, - to the Greeks, the national polis was in, and of itself, the Greek 'religion': Patriotism and religion were one and the same.It is the disease of alien Christianity which has made us late Europeans think that the 'state' and religion are 'separate'.

This totalising Greek Nationalreligion is put into the noblest poetry by Homer;

"Without a sign his sword the brave man draws,And asks no omen but his country's cause".[Iliad, 12 (Pope's translation)]

Nietzsche saw art as the way of "purifying" and "reconsecrating" the Nation in his 'Appeal to the German Nation' of 1873.