Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/663

 STUDY OF HOMERIC RELIGION 649

their activities along this line are plainly to be made out in Homer — they were far more likely to conceal their religious views or adapt themselves to the religious mores of prospective customers, than to enter even the outermost border of the mis- sionary field. Seymour thinks that any originally foreign ele- ments in the Homeric religious system have become so thoroughly assimilated as to be no longer recognizable.** Looking at this matter in a still broader way, it must be realized that all religions of this early time were much alike, remaining, as they did, so near to the stock primitive form. For this reason they were mutually more tolerant than religious systems could be under the conditions of a more special development. It was only with differentiation and "revelation" to chosen peoples that a sense of superiority and inferiority, calling for the desirability or enforcement of conformity, could come into being.

Taking Homeric religion to be, then, an indigenous system, one of the first things a sociologist wants to know about it is what it can tell him about antecedent stages of Greek evolution. What has this most conservative of societal factors preserved out of the past? This reconstruction of a people's past from the study of its contemporary religious system — a form of sociological method developed above all by Lippert — can easily be overdone, but, with the exercise of due care and sense, its yield is very interesting and important. It would appear, in the case of Homer, that the following simpler inferences could scarcely be astray. In earlier days, goats, sheep, and swine were under domestication before the homed cattle, and the latter before the ass and horse ; of the grains, barley preceded wheat, and the use of honey was very ancient, as would be supposed. Salt seems not to have appeared in sacrifice, and so, at a preceding stage, was apparently unknown ; and in one case where barley and wine were not available for sacrifice, tender oak-leaves and water were the substitutes. The bow was the older and obsolescent weapon,

'"However much the early Greeks may have been affected by the religious beliefs and customs of the Phoenicians and Egyptians and other nations, they so assimilated all these foreign elements that these can no longer be separated clearly from what was native." — Life in the Homeric Age, p. 395.