however, and to the Greeks, as to the great mass of modern readers, who have no mythological theory to support, the Olympian personages in the Iliad are as distinctly marked off from the terrestrial, as the celestial figures in the upper region of a picture of the old Italian school are separated from the mortals in the lower.1 We shall not therefore trouble ourselves with a formal refutation of the sceptical paradox of the Messenian in this place, who indeed received the just reward of his shallow irreverence by the surname of "Atheist," which he received from the ancient world, and is sufficiently refuted by the question which a profound ancient thinker puts: "If the gods of Homer are only men elevated into godship, whence did the persons who performed this act of deification derive the idea of the gods, into whose fellowship, with such transcendental demonstration of gratitude, they transferred their fellow-mortals?" Let us therefore say plainly, that in Homer there is everywhere present a real worship of real gods, that is, of superhuman personages who

"3

application to the heroes and demigods | it is difficult to distinguish a man from by the fatal facility of human logic, a god and a god from a man. In this often sufficed to give it a show of uni- sense I allow the dictum, but exactly versal validity. It was honoured by a in the same way that I admit a certain translation into Latin from the pen of range of low organic life, in which it the poet Ennius (Cic. Nat. Deor. 1. is impossible to distinguish a plant 42). The influence of the opinions of from an animal. Nevertheless, in the Euhemerus is easily traced in many gross, a plant is a plant and an animal chapters of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is an animal, with a distinctiveness and Diodorus Siculus. The principal which no sophistry can confound. advocates of Euhemerus in moderu times were Banier and Faber.

1 When Mr. Grote says (Part 1. chap. 16,) that "gods and men are undistinguishable in Grecian antiquity," he must either be a Euhemerist, which he certainly is not, or he must mean that there is a certain dim borderland of Hellenic myth in which

2 Even from some of the Fathers (Εὐημέρου τοῦ ἀθεωτάτου.—Theoph. ad Autol. m. 7.), though these writers generally looked with favour on atheists of this class as among their most efficient allies in attacking idolatry.

3 Sextus Empiricns adv. Math. lib. viii. Genev. 1621, p. 314.

really represent divine power in some shape; and we may assert further, with the most perfect truth, and as one leading characteristic of the Homeric poetry, that the attitude of the poet in reference to the national theology, which his works exhibit, was purely receptive, and his function merely representative. No doubt, there have been poets in all ages who have written under an inspiration of polemical hostility to the faith of the people whose language their works have adorned. Lucretius, already mentioned, Byron, Shelley, and Euripides, are familiar examples of this type. But this is neither the natural position of poetry, nor is it a position possible to be held by a truly national and a widely popular poet, such as Homer is on all hands admitted to have been. Poetry, as the general term for purified and culminating emotion, of course comprehends piety, or devout feeling, as the most vital part of itself; and this devout feeling, in a normal state of society, will always attach itself with a kindly and uncritical sympathy to the forms of religious worship and the objects of religious faith acknowledged in the atmosphere to which it belongs. No true poet is naturally a sceptic. Under exceptional circumstances only he may be forced into a sceptical position, but he will never be either comfortable or complete till he has found a faith of some kind or other as the natural keystone of sustainment to the ideal structure of his thoughts. But Homer was not merely a poet composing a poem for himself, as poets now do, and flinging it abroad on the chance of catching a certain set of sympathizing readers; he was a popular minstrel, in an age when books and readers were unknown, wandering from town to town, and singing or reciting his works mostly by independent parts, for popular entertainment. That a poet so circumstanced should do otherwise than simply accept

HOMER'S RELATION TO THE GODS.

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the gods and religious belief of his country, is impossible. He was not at liberty, in those early times, to do even what Pindar sometimes did,' viz., express his disbelief in certain current legends about the gods, because they seemed unworthy, and adopt others more in harmony with his conceptions of the Divine nature. A lyrical poet, speaking in his own person in a literary and philosophical age, might assume such a position; but by an Epic poet in an early stage of society, such a critical freedom with the materials of religious tradition could not be exercised, and, we may rest assured, was never desired. The only freedom that Homer had with regard to the old Hellenic gods, was to give due prominence to those whom the proprieties of his story required to be put in the foreground, and to invest, with the greatest dignity of pictured speech, those who, in the traditional tale which he told, had already received the position of dignity which grew out of the circumstances. The bard of such a poem as the Iliad could neither take away from a prominent god any characteristic which naturally belonged to him, nor add any feature to a portrait which in the popular imagination lived already complete. In the one case his auditors would have missed what was familiar, in the other they would have resented what was strange. If Vulcan had thin shanks, like an earthly smith, he must continue to have them; Juno could not look on Jupiter but with her large, full, and deep cow-eyes; Jove must have his eagle, and Venus her girdle. Only a certain power of amplifying and enlarging and painting out in harmony with what already existed in the popular mind, so much liberty might safely belong to a popular minstrel, and no doubt was largely exercised. In this sense only can we allow the truth of the famous sentence of

1 ἔστι δ' ανδρὶ φάμεν ἐοικὸς ἀμφὶ δαιμόνων καλά -μείων γάρ αἰτία.—Ol. I. Str. 2.

Herodotus,' that "Homer and Hesiod made the gods for the Greeks." Beyond the decorative function of fancy, and the natural infection caught from a lofty imagination, we cannot believe that the gods of Greece derived anything from Homer. Afterwards, no doubt, he became the sacred conservator of the type of celestial personages whose forms he had exhibited with such skill. His works became the Greek Bible, and their author the great Greek theologian; but he was a theologian only accidentally, because he was a great Epic poet, and with the materials of the Bible which he presented to his countrymen--though scarcely with the notion that it ever would become a Bible-be had as little to do as the maid who plaits a wreath for a bride has with the flowers from which it is made.

Our view of the relation of Homer to the religious tradition of his country, is therefore simply this, that his works are a true mirror of the theology and the piety of the Hellenes in his time, and that he himself had a full, honest faith in the Polytheistic creed which he represented, and was neither above nor below it in the religious platform which he personally occupied. Of course it is a difficult thing to look into a man's heart; but there is something in the sincerity of religious conviction which no hypocrite has ever been able to counterfeit; and apart from the obvious necessity of his position, there are other considerations, which may fitly be stated against those who seem inclined to believe, that however true the picture of Heathen theology given by Homer is in the main, there are yet particular passages which prove that he was far elevated above it, and

δόντες καὶ τιμὰς τε καὶ τέχνας διελόντες, καὶ εἴδεα αὐτῶν σημήναντες.

1 II. 53.—Ησίοδον γὰρ καὶ Ομηρον ' Ἕλλησι, καὶ τοῖσι θεοῖσι τὰς ἐπωνυμίας ἡλικίην τετρακοσίοισι ἔτεσι δοκέω μεν πρεσβυτέρους γενέσθαι, καὶ οὐ πλέοσι. οὗτοι δέ εἰσι οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην

HOMER'S RELIGIOUS SINCERITY.

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some, perhaps, through which we seem to see him laughing in his sleeve at the objects of the faith which in the main scope of his book he so reverentially depicts. As to those places in which he has been conceived to play the Lucian,1 I would observe in general how unnatural it is to fling a Voltaire into the position of a Tasso; and with regard to those particular passages where the Homeric mention of divine things excites in our minds a sensation of the ludicrous, it seems sufficient to remark that this sensation is seldom absent from the mind of any person firmly believing in one creed, who steadfastly contemplates the objects in which the adherent of another creed no less firmly believes. The ludicrous, according to Aristotle's well-known remark, lies on the surface; and as most people see only the outside of all foreign forms of faith, they necessarily see them in somewhat of a ludicrous light. Xenophon, Plutarch, Pausanias, and other heathen writers, no less remarkable for piety than for learning and intelligence, are constantly making assertions with reference to points of ancient religious faith, which it is impossible for us, in our strongly contrasted position, to read without a smile. But to conclude that because we laugh at the Homeric gods, in the way that an infidel may laugh, therefore Homer himself laughed at them,

1 Mure, in his Critical History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, 1850 (1. 486), commenting on the "improprieties" exhibited in the conduct of the Olympian personages in Homer, remarks, The only reasonable explanation or vindication of these passages is to assume their object to be satirical. They reflect partly the poet's own disposition to banter the extravagance of the popular theology, partly the inclination of the Greek public of

all ages to extract materials of jest from the objects of gravest interest." This last remark is quite true; an ancient Greek was not like a modern Presbyterian, and could enjoy his theological joke without injury to his devout feeling; but this is quite a different thing from the conscious purpose to satirize the objects of popular faith, supposed to exist in the mind of an epic minstrel belonging to the earliest age of popular culture.