Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/180

166 But even here he need not lose liis reverence for the nobler aspects of the gods of Greece. Like the archæologist and excavator, he must touch with careful hand these—

"Strange clouded fragments of the ancient glory,    Late lingerers of the company divine;     For even in ruin of their marble limbs     They breathe of that far world wherefrom they came,     Of liquid light and harmonies serene,     Lost halls of heaven and far Olympian air."

"Homer and Hesiod named the gods for the Greeks;" so Herodotus thought, and constructed the divine genealogies. Though the gods were infinitely older than Homer, though a few of them probably date from before the separation of the Indo-Aryan and Hellenic stocks, it is certain that Homer and Hesiod stereotyped, to some extent, the opinions about the deities which were current in their time. Hesiod codified certain priestly