Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/233

 I90 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. is impossible to arrive at any clear notion in regard to beliefs that we only know by very imperfect simulacra, upon which neither myth nor poetry have shed any light. The only thing which would incline us to believe that some sort of differentiation then began to be made between the gods is the advanced character of the Homeric theocracy. In it the dii majores, in whom the Greeks saw personified the forces of nature, or rather the laws regulating its phenomena, are delineated with great precision and distinctness, each standing out from among his fellows. To have reached such a stage, namely, the division of attributes between the several gods and goddesses whom Zeus takes into his counsels on the Olympian heights, implies centuries of reflection, during which the crude notions of a former age had passed into the abstract phase. It is not unlikely, then, that this silent process was already at work in the Mycenian period, and that some at least of the gods who watch, with no indifferent eye, the battles fought around Troy, were worshipped