Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/97

 CONTRAST WITH HISTORICAL TIMES. gj by votive presents, such as that of the hair of Achilles, which ho has pledged to the river-god Spercheius, 1 and such as the con- stant dedicated offerings which men who stand in urgent need of the divine aid first promise and afterwards fulfil. But the feel- ing towards the gods also appears, and that not less frequently, as mingling itself with and enforcing obligations towards some particular human person. The tie which binds a man to his father, his kinsman, his guest, or any special promisee towards whom he has taken the engagement of an oath, is conceived in conjunction with the idea of Zeus, as witness and guarantee ; and the intimacy of the association is attested by some surname or special appellation of the god. 2 Such personal feelings com- posed all the moral influences of which a Greek of that day was susceptible, a state of mind which we can best appreciate by contrasting it with that of the subsequent citizen of historical Athens. In the view of the latter, the great impersonal authority, called " The Laws," stood out separately, both as guide and sanc- tion, distinct from religious duty or private sympathies : but of this discriminated conception of positive law and positive morali- ty^ the germ only can be detected in the Homeric poems. The appropriate Greek word for human laws never occurs. Amidst a very wavering phraseology, 4 we can detect a gradual transition 1 Iliad, xxiii. 142. "Odyss. xiv. 389. Oil yap TOVVEK? eyj <? altisaao/iat, ovSe Qrf.Tjffu, 'AA/lu Ata S;iviov tieiaae, avrlv 6 J ifaaipuv. 3 Nftgelsbach (Homerische Theologie, Abschn. v. s. 23) gives a just and well-sustained view of the Homeric ethics : " Es ist der charakteristische Standpunkt der Homerischen Ethik, dass die Spharen des Rechts, der Sitt- lichkeit, und Religiositat, bey dem Dichter, durchaus noch nicht auseinander fallen, so dass der Mensch z. B. 6'iKatoe seyn konnte ohne i?eov(% zu seyn sondern in unentwickelter Einheit beysammen sind." 4 No/ioi, laws, is not an Homeric word ; vo//oc, law, in the singular, occurs twice in the Hesiodic "Works and Days (276, 388). The employment of the words diia], diicai, $f//ff, tfe/wffrer, in Homer, is curious as illustrating the early moral associations, but would require faf more space than can be given to it in a note ; we see that the sense of each of these words was essentially fluctuating. Themis, in Homer, is sometimes decidedly a person, who exercises the important function of opening and closing the agora, both of gods and men (Iliad, xx. 4 : Odyss. ii. 68), and 4* 6oc.