Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/33

Rh them for a disposition to carry a spirit of austerity and of reverence for ancient custom through the entire frame of civil and private society. The Ionians, on the other hand, show even in their dialect a strong tendency to modify ancient forms according to their taste and humour, together with a constant endeavour to polish and refine, which was doubtless the cause why this dialect, although of later date and of secondary origin, was first employed in finished poetical compositions.





§ 1. The earliest form of the Greek religion not portrayed in the Homeric poems.—§ 2. The Olympic deities, as described by Homer.—§ 3. Earlier form of worship in Greece directed to the outward objects of Nature.—§ 4. Character and attributes of the several Greek deities, as personifications of the powers and objects of Nature.—§ 5. Subsequent modification of these ideas, as displayed in the Homeric description of the same deities.

§ 1. to the formation of language, religion is the earliest object of attention to mankind, and therefore exercises a most important influence on all the productions of the human intellect. Although poetry has arisen at a very early date among many nations, and ages which were as yet quite unskilled in the other fine arts have been distinguished for their poetical enthusiasm, yet the development of religious notions and usages is always prior, in point of time, to poetry. No nation has ever been found entirely destitute of notions of a superior race of beings exercising an influence on mankind; but tribes have existed without songs, or compositions of any kind which could be considered as poetry. Providence has evidently first given mankind that knowledge of which they are most in need; and has, from the beginning, scattered among the nations of the entire world a glimmering of that light which was, at a later period, to be manifested in brighter effulgence.

This consideration must make it evident that, although the Homeric poems belong to the first age of the Greek poetry, they nevertheless cannot be viewed as monuments of the first period of the development of the Greek religion. Indeed, it is plain that the notions concerning the gods must have undergone many changes before (partly, indeed, by means of the poets themselves) they assumed that form under which 