Let me now attempt to divide the principal deities of Homer with reference to their origin, or to the channel of their introduction into Greece; premising, however, that all such classification of them is admitted to be founded upon evidence, at best presumptive, and often also slight.

The classes will be as follows:

1. Of those who were worshipped by the Hellenic and Pelasgian races, and probably by all others known in the inner Homeric world.

These were,

• 1. Jupiter.
• 2. Minerva.
• 3. Apollo.
• 4. Latona.
• 5. Diana.
• 6. Neptune.

The three first of these may be considered as deities of immemorial and universal worship. Neptune was far more Hellenic than Pelasgian: and indeed his place in the list is doubtful.

2. Of immemorial Hellenic worship.

• 1. Juno.
• 2. Persephone.
• 3. Pluto or Aidoneus.

3. Of established Pelasgian worship.

• 1. Demeter or Ceres.
• 2. Venus, more recent than the former.

4. Of worship introduced to the Greek races within the memory of man.

a. Brought in from Phœnicia, or through the channel of the Phœnicians.

• 1. Hermes, or Mercury.
• 2. Hephæstus, or Vulcan.
• 3. Dionysus, or Bacchus.

b. From Thrace.

• Mars.

c. Paieon has no note of country, except in so far as he may be connected with Egypt by the declaration that the Egyptians were of his race.

Ἠέλιος, the Sun, appears to be placed in connection, by the various notes he bears, both with Egypt and with the Persian name.

All these deities were, with some others, more or less naturalized among the Greeks within Homer’s lifetime. Themis was probably a pure Hellenic creation, as Vesta seems to have been Pelasgian: the latter exhibiting the genius of domestic order, the former, its fuller development in political society. But Vesta is, though an Homeric idea, not an Homeric goddess.

Now while Homer fails, or more probably avoids, to give us any direct information about the derivation of the Greek races or deities, he notwithstanding establishes by partial and incidental notices many traces of exterior affinity, not always the less secure and trustworthy because they are negative.

While going through the divinities in detail, I have remarked upon such traits of their character, history, or worship, as appeared to connect them with any particular origin; but the question remains, can we find, through however rude a resemblance, any general model abroad for the Olympian system, or, in the absence of such a model, any presumptive evidence from Homer, which may serve to connect it with any national or local root or roots in particular?

It is well worthy of remark, that he has associated the body of the Greek deities, as a body, with one, and one only, point, exterior to the Greek nation. That point is the country of the Ethiopians.

Homer has shown a peculiar interest in these Ethiopians. They are ἀμύμονες: an epithet which he appears to connect especially with purity of blood. In the First Iliad, the whole body of the gods are absent from Olympus for eleven days, to enjoy the sacrifices offered by that people. In the Twenty-second Iliad, the statement is less express as to time; but again they are apparently enjoying themselves in the same quarter, during the funeral rites of Patroclus, and Iris is in haste to go thither, that she may not lose her share. In the First Odyssey, Neptune is among the same people for the same purpose, while the other deities are in Olympus. In the Fifth Odyssey, he is coming from among them, when he espies Ulysses on his raft. The time intervening is so considerable, that we must presume the two last-mentioned passages to refer to two separate visits.

The following points may be considered as established:

1. The Ethiopians, visited as above, must be supposed by Homer in the main to worship the same body of deities as the Greeks.

2. The Ethiopians extend from the rising to the setting sun; but those Ethiopians of whom Homer speaks particularly, are in connection with sacrifices in the East; for the Solyman mountains[767], as conceived by him, probably border upon Lycia, and they are on Neptune’s route[768], from the Ethiopian country back to the sea, which, as I hope to show elsewhere, runs along the double line of the Mediterranean and the Euxine.

3. They are further fixed in a southern country by their name, which indicates darkness or swarthiness of countenance, and by the visit of Menelaus to them in the course of his adventures, which lay exclusively to the southward.

4. They are evidently distinguished by great liberality or high favour in the sacrificial service of the gods.

5. They are defined to be by the Ocean, and thus in the farthest situation to the South-east that was conceived of by Homer and the Greeks.

6. At the same time, although they are the farthest men in that direction[769], they are nowhere described as lying at a very great absolute distance. They are simply τηλόθ’ ἐόντες.

Now it is not only possible, but on every ground likely, that in his conception of the South-eastern Ethiopians, Homer mixed up together various traditions, belonging to different places and nations. Even as, in his conception of the Mouth of Ocean, which is with him always one single mouth, he seems to have blended and amalgamated geographical reports founded upon more than one original, or prototype, in nature.

The Solyman name has suggested to some critics a connection with the Salem of the Hebrews. But the name is much more likely to be derived from the Soliman Koh, a ridge of mountains running to the south-west from Caubul, and sometimes defined as extending into Persia. The liberality in sacrifice ill accords with the early Persian religion, but finds a probable original in that of the Medes with their order of Magians. But upon the whole, it would seem that Homer must have had a reason for the peculiar prominence he has given to these South-eastern Ethiopians, in connection with the gods of Olympus; for the association, unless suggested by a reason, is neither natural, nor in the manner of the Poet. Could it have been any other than this, that he regarded their country, however indeterminate its place in his imagination, as the original seat of the religion of his own, and that he therefore referred it thither bodily without notice of details? Now this would mean as the original seat, also, of the ancestors of the Hellenic tribes. We are not, in the event of accepting such a supposition, to imagine that he intended to make the assertion that the Olympian system had been derived from Persia and Media as it stood, but only to imply that there, according to national tradition, lay its root. The Trojans, it will be remembered, have their not Olympian but Idæan Jove: and the Ethiopians are the only foreign race, with whom he associates Olympus and its band of Immortals.

I have already stated elsewhere grounds for supposing that the Achæans, as they were immediately an Hellenic, were also primarily, as well as the other Hellenes, a Persian race. We have seen the existence of the Persian name in Greece, and its connection, according to Homer, with what Homer thought the remotest East, by the shore of Ocean. We have also seen its connection with the Sun, the prime deity of the Persians. This visible head of creation, standing next to the Supreme Being, we find that the Greeks speedily identify with their Apollo, who is so prominent as the son of Jupiter, in dignity, in obedience, and in his father’s favour, as to stand in a class entirely distinct from that of his other sons.

On the one hand, we seem to find here matter confirmatory of the Persian origin of the Hellenic tribes; and on the other, a general indication of the derivation of the earliest Greek religion from a certain part of the East. But still we must beware of any over-broad inference. The religion, it is likely, grew largely as it travelled, and was developed freely after it had reached its home in the Greek peninsula. And it would be contrary to all reason to suppose that Homer was in a condition to refer back to each of the Eastern races their proper contribution towards the aggregate, though we may justly suppose him able to draw some kind of line between the system as it was flourishing in Greece, with all its additions, elaborations and refinements, and the crude undigested materials as they had been imported from abroad; perhaps we might say, between the system as he found it, and the same system as he left it.

Considering, however, that Homer had a quasi-geographical knowledge of Egypt, I do not suppose that that country enters at all into his conception of the Ethiopians. If so, then the representation of an unity of religion with the Ethiopians, affords a presumption, conformable undoubtedly to such other presumptions as we have been able to gather from the poems, that Homer did not regard Egypt as the principal source of the religious system of Greece.

I do not pretend to find, in any ancient system handed down to us, even a skeleton of the Olympian scheme; and I conclude it to be most probable, that the Greeks had to form, or to reform, various members of it, as well as merely to clothe and embellish them. Yet it appears well worth while to refer to the account of the Scythian religion given by Herodotus, whose works form the great depository of knowledge of this kind beyond the borders of Greece.

The ordinary Scythians, it will be remembered, seem to be of the same race with the Medes, and to form the stock from which the Pelasgians separated to turn towards the south of Europe for settlements. They lived in that pastoral state, anterior to tillage, which Mommsen observes, through the forms of the Latin language, to have marked the point before the severance[770]. From the sign of feeding on milk, the Glactophagi and Hippemolgi of Il. xiii. 5, 6, would appear to belong to them, and the peaceful habits of the Pelasgians are also represented in the character that Homer gives, in the same passage, to their neighbours the Abians.

The gods of the Scythians, according to Herodotus[771], were:

• 1. Vesta.
• 2. Jupiter.
• 3. Earth, the supposed wife of Jupiter.
• 4. Apollo.
• 5. Celestial Venus.
• 6. Hercules.
• 7. Mars.

Even in this very late picture, we find a strong resemblance to what, from the Homeric text, would appear to have been the primitive cluster of the Pelasgian divinities. Earth is represented in Demeter, (Γῆ μήτηρ,) who appears in Il. xiv. 326 as one of the wives of Jupiter. The Celestial Venus may include traditions of Minerva, and of Artemis,—for the Scythians called her Artimpasa,—along with those which came to be represented in the Greek Ἀφροδίτη. All the deities, which from Homer’s text have appeared to be especially Hellenic, are also, it will be observed, absent from this list: Juno, Neptune, Aidoneus, Persephone, Vulcan, and Mercury.

But there were among these Scythians a tribe, called the Βασιλήϊοι Σκύθαι. It would seem plain from the name, that these must have held among the Scythians a position, in great measure analogous to that of the Hellenic tribes among the mass of the Pelasgian population. And certainly it is not a little curious, that these kingly Scythians added to the list of properly Pelasgian deities the worship of Thamimasidas, a god of the sea, apparently equivalent to the Hellenic Poseidon.

Again, let us take the account given by Herodotus of the information he obtained in Egypt about the Greek mythology. He states to us that, with certain exceptions, the names of the Greek deities had been known in Egypt from time immemorial. His exceptions are, Neptune and Juno, the Dioscuri, Vesta, Themis, the Graces and the Nereids. The statement may at least be accepted as good to this extent, that the deities here named were not drawn from Egypt. They include, as will be seen, only one personification of an idea which we have found cause to consider Pelasgian, namely, Ἱστίη or home; with this Neptune and Juno, who were Hellic deities; the Dioscouroi, representing in an early stage the deification of national heroes; the Graces, or the impersonations of ideas; and the Nereids, or the personification of natural objects. All of these persons and processes we have already referred to the influence of the Hellic tribes.

Upon the whole, we appear to have in these accounts a much clearer representation of the contribution made by the Pelasgian part of the nation to the Olympian system than we can find gathered elsewhere. The Egyptian resemblances are chiefly isolated, though it may have been from that quarter that Pelasgian Attica learned the name and worship of the deity, which was afterwards developed into the Homeric Pallas-Athene: but among these Scythians we appear to find a group, who exhibit to us in combination nearly all that we have reason to believe specially Pelasgian, and, with the obscure exception of Hercules, nothing besides. While this group, as being Scythian, would have the Arian country for its point of origin, it may still be probable that other parts of the Olympian religion, besides the worship of Neptune, such as the Juno and the Persephone in particular, had come from the ‘Kingly’ Arians of the hills.

Thus far as to the relation between the Homeric theo-mythology and any religious system or combination to be found elsewhere. Let us now consider how it stands with reference to each of the principal elements, out of which the religions of the world were habitually formed.

There appear to be four leading forms in which, either single or combined, religion has attracted, and more or less commanded, the mind of man. It is scarcely needful to add that one alone of these is genuine, and that the three others are essentially depraved, and finally self-destructive.

The first is the worship of the Divine Being: of which the Holy Scriptures form, down to the period with which they close, the principal record.

The second is the worship of man; founded, of course, upon his deification. Of this the Greek mythology affords the most conspicuous and weighty instance.

The third is the worship of external and inanimate nature, which I mention next, not because of its place in the order of ideas, but because of its great extension and influence over races of vast numerical strength, antiquity, and importance.

The fourth is the worship of the inferior creation, or of animate nature in its lower ranks.

We have considered, in a former section, how far the Greek mythology was indebted to the first of these sources, the true and pure one.

The second, or anthropophuism, appears to have formed its most proper and distinctive characteristic. Further, it was the intellectual rather than the carnal nature of man, which originally determined a law for the construction of the Olympian system. The great traditive deities were remodelled according to what Scripture calls the ‘lust of the mind,’ long before the ‘lust of the flesh’ had touched them. We see, too, that, of the deities of invention, those which were purely Hellenic, such as Juno and Themis in particular, represent either noble and commanding, or else pure, ideas, connected with the development of human life and society; while it is generally in deities that have not undergone a full Hellenic remodelling, that we see animal passion prevail; such as Mars, Venus, Ceres, and Aurora.

The third basis of religion is admirably described, together with its apology, and its condemnation, in the Book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon[772]:

And then the Wise Man proceeds to show, that far inferior, again, to this, is the worship of mere images as gods.

The worship of the elemental powers enters, I think, only as a very secondary ingredient into the Homeric or Olympian system: it is everywhere surmounted and circumscribed by developments drawn from tradition or from the principle of anthropophuism.

It is true that most of the great physical agents are either personified by him, or else are in immediate connection with some one of his deities: but there is every appearance that the Greeks sometimes expelled, sometimes reduced and depressed the principle of Nature-worship, in their adaptation of foreign materials to Hellenic uses.

1. Jupiter and Neptune, as we have seen, preside over elements, but they are not elemental. Their relations to air and sea are entirely different from those of Vulcan to fire, and yet even he very greatly transcends the dimensions of a merely elemental god. Their brotherhood with Aidoneus, who is not elemental at all, indicates, together with all other signs, that the air and sea are their respective territories, and are not the basis of their divinity.

2. It seems quite impossible but that, if Nature-worship had been the basis of the system, the Sun, as the visible king of nature, must have had a prominent and commanding position in the system; whereas his place in Homer is even less than secondary. Looking at the realm of nature, to search out a varied organism, which would supply a powerful apparatus of instruments operative upon man to a presiding intelligence, the Greek naturally made Ζεὺς the king of Air. But had he merely wanted a symbol by which nature itself was to speak, how could he have forborne to choose the Sun?

3. There is, indeed, an extended use in Homer of the imagery of Nature-Powers. But however prominent as poetry, this is altogether subordinate as religion. His Nymphs and River-gods people the unseen, adorn his verse, and even supply a kind of drapery to the scheme of religious observances; but it is not by them that the world is governed. And with them may very well be classed, as far as the present argument is concerned, the crowd of Homer’s metaphysical impersonations.

4. That Neptune in particular is not properly an elemental power, seems to be made clear by three things at the least:

a. He can act by land as well as sea; witness his building the wall of Troy, and appearing as a warrior on the battle-field.

b. The θάλασσα, with which he is connected, is decidedly inferior, in its merely elemental character, to Oceanus; yet Oceanus has no share in the government of the world, and no moral personality, while Neptune has equal dignity with Jupiter, and is not far behind him in strength.

c. The true elemental gods of the θάλασσα, it is plain, according to Homer, are Nereus and Amphitrite; of whom the first is locally confined to the depths of the sea, and the other is scarcely a person, and cannot ideally be disengaged from the curly-headed billows.

5. In the Olympian Court, which is the real centre, according to Homer, of the government of the world, there is scarcely to be found a pure example of a Nature-power; there is no one leading deity, in whom that idea is not wholly subordinate; and in many of the leading deities, such as Minerva, Apollo, and even Juno, it is hardly to be perceived at all.

6. As to Juno in particular. When we compare the Greek with the Eastern religions, it appears that, if the former had been conceived in the same spirit as the latter, Juno ought to have been the earth, continually impregnated by the heaven, and yielding those fruits which would then stand as the proper results of her maternity.

But instead of this, in the great lottery of the universe, earth is actually left out, and remains undisposed of. It never appears in Homer, except in a formula of adjuration, in which we may naturally enough look to find antique ideas; and this seems like a stray vestige of another system, really founded on Nature-worship. But there Γαῖα remains, so far as the Greeks are concerned, isolated and undeveloped.

Meantime, for the vegetative life of Earth, wedded to the Heavens, and bearing herbs and fruits, the Greek mind substitutes the intelligent life of a Queen-divinity, who with her husband becomes the nucleus of the Olympian order, and marks the transition from elemental religion to anthropophuism.

There is then a greatly qualified sense, in which assent may be given to the proposition, that the Olympian dynasty of Homer sits enthroned upon the ruins of a more ancient Nature-worship, and the sense is this: that, before Hellenism had an historical existence, there were systems founded on Nature-worship in the east; that these systems were tributary to the religion of Olympus, and that its framers made such use of them as they found convenient.

But from Homer we are not authorized to believe that such a system of Nature-worship ever preceded in Greece the Olympian system. On the contrary, the Κρόνος and Ῥέα, the Oceanus and Tethys of Homer, appear to be younger and not older than his chief Olympian gods; that is, they appear to be metaphysical creations, called into being to supply an ideal basis, a matrix or mould, walled in with time and space, for Jupiter and his wife and brothers to be cast in.

It is not before, but after the time of Homer, namely, in Hesiod, that we see such development given to this pseudo-archaic system as can alone allow it to be taken for the image of something that had really existed as a religion. For example, it would be quite out of keeping with the tone of Homer were we to find in him the sentiment which is contained in a fragment of Euripides[773];

We have still to consider the relation of the Olympian scheme to the last of the four στοιχεῖα. The principle of brute-worship was so marked a characteristic of the Egyptian idolatry, that it seems to lie at the very foundation of the system. Perhaps we should be justified in associating with this principle the inability of the Egyptians to attain to any high conceptions of beauty. They scarcely could soar in this respect above the standard of that which they regarded as a tabernacle meet for divinity to dwell in.

The same principle appears to have found its way into Persia probably at a late date, and from the Median, not the Eteo-persian, source of the religious traditions of the country. Malcolm[774] has given us the copies, from remains found in the country, of the Persian representations, probably however late ones, of their divinities, exhibiting strange mixtures of human form with that of the brute.

It would therefore be wonderful if we failed to find in the Greek mythology some traces, however faint, of an element that not only existed in Asia, but displayed so much vigour there, as to have entered deeply into the religion that even now sways a considerable portion of its population, if not, indeed, to form the one really capital and operative article of that religion.

Döllinger[775] has noted the points connected with the state and being of animals, which might suggest ideas capable of being developed into this repulsive system. Such are the unity and tranquillity of animal life—it being borne in mind that domesticated animals were those which supplied the chief type of deity. Such, again, is the instinct of the future, bearing a nearer outward resemblance to foreknowledge than would any anticipations founded on forethought, reasoning, and experience. Above all, there seems to be force in the remark that man, by his marked individuality, and by the freedom of the will, is, as it were, disabled from becoming the mere organ of another existence. The gods in assuming human form, assumed in a great degree human nature also. But the passive and neutral nature of animals offered itself as a medium without taste or colour, such as needed not in any manner to alter or modify the powers of which it was to be the vehicle.

Had the idea been in its origin that of an inherent sacredness of animals as such, it is not probable that we should have seen such extraordinary anomalies in its development as those which permitted the same animal to be adored in one province of Egypt, and immolated in the next[776].

The grossness of brute-worship was completely refined away by the Greeks during the process of transfer to their own mythology. The vestiges of the system, and they are no more than vestiges, still traceable in the Homeric poems, are apparently as follows:

1. I find the chief note of it in the extraordinary sacredness of the oxen of the Sun: a sacredness inconsistent and inexplicable, if it be tried only by the circumjacent incidents of the Odyssey, and by the laws of the Greek mythology.

The offence of the crew of Ulysses consisted simply in this; that[777], after exhausting every effort to maintain themselves, when they have at length no alternative before them except that of starving, they consumed some of the best among these oxen for food. They observed, as far as they could, all the proper religious rites, but they used leaves instead of barley, and water for wine, inasmuch as neither of the usual requisites were forthcoming. They promised a temple also to the Sun, to be built on their return, and to be enriched with abundant votive offerings. Lastly, I think, any one who reads the manly and just speech of Eurylochus, in which he proposes the sacrilege, will judge that the sympathies of the Poet are with him. In this speech, he states the necessity; he next proceeds to vow the erection of a temple, and dedication of its ornaments in the event of safe return. Then he concludes by declaring, that if vengeance is, notwithstanding, to be taken on them, he for his part would far rather die once for all like a man than famish in the solitary island. There is not in the tone of the speech the slightest indication of impiety[778].

The terrible punishment inflicted was prefigured by extraordinary portents. The empty hides of the animals crawled about[779], and the flesh lowed on the very spits. Here we see at its climax the fine Greek imagination, working upon the foundation supplied by the Egyptian superstition, and extracting from the coarsest earthy matter the means of true poetical sublimity.

It is impossible to conceive a case, in which the offence committed is more exclusively of the kind termed positive, or more entirely severed from moral guilt, until we include the element to which the poems do not expressly refer, of the elevated sanctity attaching to the animal itself. The Homeric fiction is[780], that they were the playthings of the Sun in his leisure hours. But to forbid the use of any of these animals for food, even under the direst necessity, would have been simply to caricature the nature of positive commands, in the very same spirit as that which would have had, not the sabbath made for man, but man made for the sabbath. Still, when once we let in the assumption that these animals had essentially sacred lives, which might not be taken away, then the offence becomes a moral one of frightful profanation, and the vengeance so rigorously exacted is intelligible.

I do not mean that Homer recognises that dogma which the Egyptians then affirmed, and which at this present epoch, after the lapse of three thousand years, has wrought myriads of Hindoos to madness. The religion of Greece included no such idea, and the religious practice of the Greeks wholly precluded it. But in this instance we see a part of the Egyptian religion in transitu, in the very process of transmutation that it was to undergo when passing into the Greek mythology, which utterly repudiated its substance, but strove to retain an image of it under poetic forms, betraying by their inconsistency their exotic origin.

The consummation of the whole tale lies in this: that the vengeance is not the mere personal act of the Sun, but is inflicted by Jupiter himself on behalf of the whole Olympian Court, to which the appeal had been already made[781].

2. Another instance, confirmatory of the statement of Döllinger as to the rationale of brute-worship, is to be found in the curious passage of the Iliad where Xanthus, the horse of Achilles, is endowed with speech. The gift is from Juno, but the limit of the gift is carefully defined[782]:

It was utterance that Juno gave, not intelligence. The matter to be spoken was not a gift. The horse proceeds, evidently by a native insight into the future, to intimate to Achilles his coming fate; at first more darkly (v. 409); but when he comes nearer the point and glances at a man as the ordained instrument of doom (416),

then, I suppose lest the animal should proceed to particularize, and, though prophetic yet unwise, should break the current of the hero’s thought and action at the critical moment by naming Paris—the Ἐρινύες are made to interfere; they restore the order of nature, and stay the exercise of Juno’s irregular and abnormal gift.

3. The immortality of these horses is probably conceived in the same spirit. We may the more easily understand it to be a poetical rendering of the Egyptian belief in the divinity of many animals, when we recollect that exemption from death is, with Homer, the one and perhaps only essential characteristic of deity, so that his gods are ordinarily defined by it as ἀθάνατοι.

4. We have another indication of relation to the same ideas, in the assumption by deities of the forms of various birds: namely, by Minerva, as Od. i. 320; iii. 372; Il. vii. 59; Od. xxii. 240; by Apollo, Il. vii. 59; by Sleep, Il. xiv. 290; and by Ino Leucothee, Od. v. 353. In this instance we again see the refining power of the Greek imagination. It is only the forms of birds which are assumed by Homeric deities: creatures more ethereal, though not more intellectual, than the other brute races; and whose figure, when assumed, at once bestows in visible form an attribute of high superiority to man, namely, the increased facility and speed of locomotion.

5. One or two other traces may be suggested, but they are slighter and more dubious. It is possible that Homer drew from this source the Olympian horses of Juno (Il. v. 720, 768–72) and the sea-horses of Neptune (Il. xiii. 23). A similar notion may be involved, when the Poet makes Apollo stoop to feed the horses of Admetus in Pieria, and the oxen of Laomedon on Ida (Il. ii. 766, and xxi. 448). The serpent (δρακὼν) appears in Homeric portents as a symbol, but without peculiar meaning.

The horse was not one of the sacred animals of Egypt; and when Homer placed it in such near relations with deity, as he has done in these places and elsewhere, he may not only have indulged a personal predilection, but he also may have been converting the crudity of Egyptian material to the form and uses of the Greek religion, in the normal exercise of his vocation.

One concluding word may be said in extenuation of the indignity which, according to our ideas, attaches to the worship of the inferior animals. In the worship of the elemental powers we see error, but in the worship of beasts we see shame, and even brutality. Perhaps this distinction may be due as much to pride as to pious susceptibility.

Over animals, man has thoroughly obtained the mastery; but Elemental powers are still in many cases masters over us, and we lie like babes in the lap of their strength and vastness. It does not appear clear why we should consider the worship of that which is more highly organized, and which comes half-way to intelligence, as essentially more shameful than the worship of inferior organizations without life or instinct of any kind. If it be said that, by its negations, inanimate Nature becomes a fitter shrine of deity than the brutes, the same argument applied to the brutes, compared with man, might equally avail to give claims to brute-worship as compared with anthropophuism, against which, notwithstanding, nature summarily revolts.