unity, on which to found his hopes and fix his reliance. I therefore assent to the conclusions of Müller, that "the immorality of Olympus, so much complained of, by no means sprang out of the infant state of religious thought, but rather from the extremely combined, intricate, and perplexed condition of the Greek religion, in which things that had originated in different places, and belonged to different epochs of religious thought, were all united into one mass."

"How individuals," he adds, "saved themselves from this confusion, and found religious consolation, is certainly a very interesting inquiry." The assumption that they did so, I hold to be correct; and perhaps we are not without means for the solution of the proposed problem, showing in what manner it was effected. If the confusion described implies a general demoralization of the religious sentiment of the period, a counter revulsion must have taken place by the necessity adverted to; but this never seems, within the limits we are concerned with, to have been the case. The people were content with the poetry as poetry to the very last; and only a small section of philosophers seem to have thought it worth while to grumble. We are therefore reduced to the inference, that these poetical forms, vitiated for all strictly religious purposes, were allowed to continue in life from the indispensible religious compensation being already achieved, and subsisting so far independently of them and superior to them, that they were not only tolerated, but even enjoyed.

The mystery is explained by duly weighing the remarkable circumstance, that precisely those divinities, Demeter and Dionusos, whose truly religious influence was most profound and pervading in Greece, are all but unmentioned by Homer, and may be said in fact to be excluded from his scheme of the divine community. Müller, so far as I understand him, appears to regard the omission as decided simply by taste, and admires in it Homer's "artistic skill, and the feeling for what was right and fitting which was inborn with the Greeks." He is also disposed to conclude that "the mystical element of religion could not have predominated in the Grecian people, for whom Homer sang, to such a degree as to fill the hearts and minds of all: for otherwise the poems of Homer, in which that element is but little regarded, would scarcely have afforded universal pleasure and satisfaction."-Proleg. p. 67. But the prevailing principle of

Greek art, the separate idealization of matters incongruous, is sufficient answer to the latter objection. Had not the feelings connected with the worship of Demeter found full expression in other elaborate forms, more would have been said of her in Homer, and from the sufficiency of historical evidence to establish the influence of her worship at the date of the poems, we have no alternative but to regard the subject as deliberately avoided.

8

The analysis of the evidence by Müller, goes far to establish that Homer was an Ionian Greek, of a family settled first at Ephesus and afterwards at Smyrna, at a time when that city was chiefly occupied by a population of Æolians and Achaians. The expulsion of the Ionians from Smyrna, by causing the settlement of the Homerida at Chios, may have caused the transference of the traditional glories of the poet to that island. This analysis agrees in its chronological results with the opinion of Herodotus, with whom the Alexandrians are also in accord, that Homer flourished 400 years earlier than his own time, that is about B. C. 850, a date which falls in the centuries intervening between the great Ionian colonization of Asia and the commencements of the Olympiads, B. C. 776.

The emigration of the Ionians extended over a considerable period, like the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus, from which it chiefly resulted, and which only gradually arrived at its utmost limit; and scanty as are the records of either event, we may yet elicit from them, that the contrast of Dorian and Ionian Hellenism, which appears so strongly defined on the subsequent course of Greek history, was not entirely a consequence of the collisions, which no doubt aided in deepening it, but also to a great extent its cause, and manifested quite as remarkably in religious characteristics as in those of political constitution and domestic manners.

I allude to the position assumed by the Dorians in regard to the Thesmophorian rites and general worship of Demeter. These mystic rites, according to Herodotus, were introduced in Pelasgic times into Argos; and according to Argive tradition, reported by Pausanias, they passed thence to Eleusis, as well as Peloponnesus generally; the Dorian revolution, how

8 Gesch. d. Griech. Literatur. cap. v.

ever, says the historian, caused the abolition of the rite or initiation, except in Arcadia, which was alone undisturbed by the convulsion.

At Eleusis, the worship received extraordinary development; of its antiquity there, the Homeric hymn to Demeter, founded at least on the traditions of a time when Eleusis was still independent of Athens, is most interesting testimony. From Eleusis, whether independent or Athenian, go forth the hierophants Kaukon and Lykus, who constituted the mysteries, or at least rites of Demeter in Messene, where they were afterwards extended by the Athenian Methapus. (Pausan. IV. 15; ix. 25.) The Messenian ceremonies of the great goddesses were regarded by Pausanias as of equal sanctity to the Eleusinian; and he accordingly scruples to enlarge upon their details. These traditions belong to a numerous class which celebrate the influence on political transactions of religious mystagogues; and which, when examined with a minuteness that is out of the question on the present occasion, are found, with all their divarications, in wonderful harmony with each other, and with recorded monuments and actual historical connections and sympathies. To this connection of religious institution, strengthened by common antagonism to the Dorians, we must ascribe the reception and influence at Athens of the Pylian princes expelled from Messenia.

This, I think, may be inferred from the intimate connection of the Nelid family with the Eleusinian worship, which appears after the refugee Melanthus superseded the Attic Theseid king Thymates. He himself is connected in Dionysiac legend with the origin of the festival of Apatouria, participation in which, according to Herodotus, marked the genuine Ionian states. His descendants, the Codrids, were leaders of the Ionian colonies; and one city, founded independently, Phocæa, was forced to adopt Codrid chiefs to gain admittance to the PanIonic alliance. The importance attached to this point seems to be explained when, remembering how influential religious considerations were in the direction of these movements, we find, even down to a late date, Codrids at Ephesus, exercising the hereditary functions of a priesthood in the worship of Eleusinian Demeter. (Strabo, XIV. p. 633.) A companion again of the

9 Pausan. vII. 2, 2; 3, 4.

Codrid Neleus founded the temple of the same goddess at Mycale. (Herod. IX. 97.) The instance, whether of Melanthus or his descendants, is exactly parallel to the political power acquired in Sicily by the family of Gelon, as hierophants of the orgies of the great mysterious goddesses.10 The same sympathies explain the retirement to Eleusis of the priestly families at the capture of Ithome, the conclusion of the first Messenian war. (Pausan. IV. 14.)

The comparative disappearance of the worship of the great goddesses from Peloponnesus, where they had enjoyed such great influence, that, as avouched by Herodotus, was the result of the Heracleid invasion, is in exact accordance with the prominence assigned to it in the colonies and settlements formed to the east and west of Greece by the dispossessed population. Hence Arcadia and Attica on the one hand, Asia Minor and Sicily on the other, remained the principal seats of the worship of Demeter, with which, in its most impressive forms, that of Dionusos had become most intimately combined. This was the worship to which, whether in its secret and mysterious forms, or in its public manifestations, the contemporary of Homer, the descendant of the Ionian colonist, must have looked for the consolations of religious reliance; and here he doubtless found it as it had been found by his ancestors in the original seats of the race, as it continued to be found for ages afterwards. This was the form in which religion became to the Greeks of this age a sentiment, not an object of taste; and the comparative silence of the poet is sure indication that the management of the sentiment for the highest or lowest ends, was in other hands. Numerous priests are mentioned by Homer; and in the Chryses and Calchas of the Iliad, we have proof of the power, whether for good or evil, that was recognized as pertaining to pretensions of special influence with the divine powers, and the faculty of divination. These qualifications were constantly transmitted hereditarily as sacred traditions or profitable crafts, and with them a vast mass of sacred poetry or hymns, which, whether composed in seriousness or subtlety, must evidently in general tenor have aimed at impressiveness, and doubtless took a form and colour as distinguished by appropriateness as all other Greek productions,

10 Herod. vII. 153, and Cf. Boeckh, Explic. Pindar.

and as little admitting of combination with the exponents of sentiments of contrasted origin and style.

Had Homer, however, taken his poetic stand on another part of Greece, where the awe of these religions was less influential, his poems might have exhibited a system of embellished forms of the myths of Demeter and Dionusos, of which the latter especially flourished so luxuriantly, not to say rankly; the loves of Demeter and Iasion alluded to in the Odyssey, belong to the same class of fictions as those of Aphrodite and Ares, and the dangers and escape of Dionusos succoured by Thetis, are parallel to the rescue of Zeus emperilled by Egæon. These instances at once exhibit how far the embellishment even of these myths had in some quarters proceeded, and how great was the forbearance of the poet. Still even at a date so much posterior as that of the painted vases of the best style, we are surprised to find that the appearance of Demeter in the pictured Pantheon, as compared with all other divinities of equal dignity, is the rarest and most equivocal.

It is a question of great interest, and bearing importantly on the general theory of the Mythus, which as regards antiquity is the theory of historical criticism, to what extent the alterations here ascribed to Homer and the Homeric school, were effected with consciousness. Consciousness is a necessary condition of the irony for which I contend; the story of Ares and Aphrodite might, it is just possible, have been suggested to a poet in the position of Demodocus by its analogy to the incident of the festival, and he not aware of the resemblance that brought it to his mind; such freaks of associated ideas are familiar to the experience of all of us; but from the pointedness of his words, it is clear that Demodocus here, in the poet's intention, knew the application of the moral he inculcated, and was not minded that it should escape the notice of the manycounselled guest, however the attention of the festive Phæacians might be engaged by the sportive embellishments that were its vehicle, and look no farther.

The distinction would be the same, if we were disposed to move back one step farther with the Phæacian bard, and inquire whether he also recognized the true relation of his mythus so cleverly applied, as a travestie of a once revered and significant religious mythus. This is in fact the question which we have to ask respecting Homer, singer of the very similar anecdote of