Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/669

 STUDY OF HOMERIC RELIGION 655

dreams and omens should ever be questioned by people upon the stage of the Homeric Greeks. If, as some Greek scholars think, the poet really burlesques and makes fun of the gods, our aston- ishment at the anachronism must be the greater.

But the last and greatest, and really inexplicable discrepancy is the emergence of the two epics themselves out of their social setting. I do not see how anybody can regard the Homeric society of the poems as a sort of antiquarian reconstruction; the picture of the society is too perfect, and too unconsciously so, to have been drawn from without. I do not know that this last statement could be proved — not, at least, without a searching of the text for the sources of the accumulation of impressions upon which the personal conviction has been, half-unconsciously, based. For this is the way such an impression must have arisen, just as the belief in the molding influence of a single mind upon these epics forces itself upon the person who reads and rereads Homer, and at length becomes aware of such a conviction through some subtle rolling-up of almost intangible impressions. Here is a society where the mores are not yet fully turned against the use of poisoned arrows ; where human sacrifice upon the funeral pyre is actually practiced ; where doughty heroes shrink in pale terror during a thunder-storm, not daring to drink their wine without pouring a libation; where it is only just becoming an "evil deed" to "dishonor the dumb clay," as in the dragging about of Hec- tor's body in the dust to avenge the death of Patroclus. One only of the host of similes in Homer is drawn from the action of the waking mind.*^ And yet out of this primitive setting comes one of the admittedly greatest examples o| world-litera- ture. The incongruity is too vast to need to be dwelt upon.

This last point does not align itself very evidently with the subject of this essay; but a contemplation of its exceptionality and its bearings cannot fail to enforce upon the student of human societies the futility of generalization unless it is done with the utmost modesty and discretion. The student of man and of human society must never be surprised to see his convenient systems and categories broken down before his eyes; nor yet

"Jebb, Introduction to Homer, p. 31.