Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/34

12 they appear in the Homeric poems. The description given by Homer of the life of the gods in the palace of Zeus on Olympus is doubtless as different from the feeling and the conception with which the ancient Pelasgian lifted up his hands and voice to the Zeus of Dodona, whose dwelling was in the oak of the forest, as the palace of a Priam or Agamemnon from the hut which one of the original settlers constructed of unhewn trunks in a solitary pasture, in the midst of his flocks and herds.

§ 2. The conceptions of the gods, as manifested in the Homeric poems, are perfectly suited to a time when the most distinguished and prominent part of the people devoted their lives to the occupation of arms and to the transaction of public business in common; which time was the period in which the heroic spirit was developed. On Olympus, lying near the northern boundary of Greece, the highest mountain of this country, whose summit seems to touch the heavens, there rules an assembly or family of gods; the chief of which, Zeus, summons at his pleasure the other gods to council, as Agamemnon summons the other princes. He is acquainted with the decrees of fate, and is able to guide them; and, as being himself king among the gods, he gives the kings of the earth their power and dignity. By his side is a wife, whose station entitles her to a large share of his rank and dominion; and a daughter of a masculine complexion, a leader of battles, and a protectress of citadels, who by her wise counsels deserves the confidence which her father bestows on her; besides these a number of gods, with various degrees of kindred, who have each their proper place and allotted duty in the divine palace. On the whole, however, the attention of this divine council is chiefly turned to the fortunes of nations and cities, and especially to the adventures and enterprises of the heroes, who, being themselves for the most part sprung from the blood of the gods, form the connecting link between them and the ordinary herd of mankind.

§ 3. Doubtless such a notion of the gods as we have just described was entirely satisfactory to the princes of Ithaca, or any other Greek territory, who assembled in the hall of the chief king at the common meal, and to whom some bard sung the newest song of the bold adventures of heroes. But how could this religion satisfy the mere countryman, who wished to believe that in seed-time and in harvest, in winter and in summer, the divine protection was thrown over him; who anxiously sought to offer his thanks to the gods for all kinds of rural prosperity, for the warding off of all danger from the seed and from the cattle? As the heroic age of the Greek nation was preceded by another, in which the cultivation of the land, and the nature of the different districts, occupied the chief attention of the inhabitants (which may be called the Pelasgian period), so likewise there are sufficient traces and remnants of a state of the Grecian religion, in which the gods were considered as exhibiting their power chiefly in the operations of outward nature, in the changes of the seasons, and the phenomena of the year.