Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/667

 STUDY OF HOMERIC RELIGION 653

prime characteristics of primitive social forms is the ease with which they ignore consistency. This general proposition could be illustrated at length from Homer, entirely apart from the subject of rationalization. For example, the gods are represented as eating with men, as enjoying the savor of sacrifices ; yet it is elsewhere stated that they eat ambrosia (that is immortality), that a fluid called "ichor" supplies for them the place of blood, and so on. Souls are incorporeal and like smoke; yet Odysseus can keep them away from his blood-filled trench at the point of the sword. Returning, however, to the subject of rationalization — for there it is, perhaps, that the divergences of the Homeric religion from type are most remarkable — it seems at times almost as if the spirit of Greek philosophy had here its sporadic germs. Zeus is made to exclaim : "Ah, me, how now do mortals take the gods to task ! For they say that their evils are from us ; while they themselves, because of their own acts of blind folly, suffer woes beyond measure."^ The old and troubled issue between free- will and determinism is here in evidence. This becomes the more striking when the really lofty conception of Fate is appre- hended ; the very gods were bound by Fate, though Fate appears in other cases to be under the control of the gods. Says Leaf, in his Companion to the Iliad,^ "li we ask how .... Zeus him- self is bound by Fate, we come only upon a rough form of the general problem of free-will and determinism, such as certainly would have been unintelligible in an age which had not yet thought out even the relation of cause and effect." It may, indeed, have been but a rough conception, but in the form in which it occurs it is astonishing within its societal setting.

It is of peculiar interest to see a people just beginning to break over the ancient bounds into the region of rationalization. In the case of the ordeal-trial, reason is not yet wholly trusted. Mene- laus and Paris are, in one instance, about to settle the whole Graeco-Trojan dispute by a duel. Both Greeks and Trojans know who is to blame for their woes, as is evident, not only from the logic of the situation, but also from explicit statements. Yet so much confidence was placed in the outcome of the duel

'Odyssey, I, 32-34. 'P. 162.