beliefs which Homer had discarded proved to have persisted, half buried, throughout the
classical period. This fact explains many things that would otherwise seem inconsistent and
surprising.
Primitive religion, everywhere, was tribal rather than personal. Certain rites were performed,
which were intended, by sympathetic magic, to further the interests of the tribe, especially in
respect of fertility, vegetable, animal, and human. The winter solstice was a time when the sun
had to be encouraged not to go on diminishing in strength; spring and harvest also called for
appropriate ceremonies. These were often such as to generate a great collective excitement, in
which individuals lost their sense of separateness and felt themselves at one with the whole
tribe. All over, the world, at a certain stage of religious evolution, sacred animals and human
beings were ceremonially killed and eaten. In different regions, this stage occurred at very
different dates. Human sacrifice usually lasted longer than the sacrificial eating of human
victims; in Greece it was not yet extinct at the beginning of historical times. Fertility rites
without such cruel aspects were common throughout Greece; the Eleusinian mysteries, in
particular, were essentially agricultural in their symbolism.
It must be admitted that religion, in Homer, is not very religious. The gods are completely
human, differing from men only in being immortal and possessed of superhuman powers.
Morally, there is nothing to be said for them, and it is difficult to see how they can have
inspired much awe. In some passages, supposed to be late, they are treated with Voltairean
irreverence. Such genuine religious feeling as is to be found in Homer is less concerned with
the gods of Olympus than with more shadowy beings such as Fate or Necessity or Destiny, to
whom even Zeus is subject. Fate exercised a great influence on all Greek thought, and perhaps
was one of the sources from which science derived the belief in natural law.
The Homeric gods were the gods of a conquering aristocracy, not the useful fertility gods of
those who actually tilled the soil. As Gilbert Murray says: *
"The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim.
The most they ever did was to conquer it.... And when they have conquered their kingdoms,
what do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do they promote
* Five Stages of Greek Religion, p. 67.