HEIDEL. — Ilepl <j>v<r€(i>s. 83 



outlines the stages in the process of organizing the confused mass of 

 primitive human experience into a unified world of thought. We may 

 be sure, however, that there never was a time when the human mind 

 held even two wholly unrelated experiences ; and there will never come 

 a time when all human experiences shall constitute a perfect Koo-yu-o?. 

 Somewhere between these limits history moves, the mind now energeti- 

 cally striving to achieve a synthesis, now supinely acquiescing in " the 

 cult of odds and ends." 



When the curtain of history rises on the Greeks, we find in Homer 

 a strange condition. In the foreground there is a relatively well or- 

 dered society of gods and men ; while in the shadows of the background 

 lurk remnants of an ancient barbarism. Politically society is in unsta- 

 ble equilibrium, momentarily held together by a common cause : par- 

 ticularism clearly preceded, particularism follows. One can with 

 difficulty banish the thought that the union of the Greeks under the 

 suzerainty of Agamemnon was only a poet's dream, — an ideal never 

 realized and perhaps never to be realized. Homeric religion is in much 

 the same case : Zeus is king of all the gods, but even after his vic- 

 tory over the turbulent sons of Earth, his rule is precarious. The 

 Titans fume ; and the wife of his bosom nurses thoughts of treason. 



As for the occurrences of daily life, they are the expression of divine 

 powers 15 lurking everywhere and acting more or less capriciously. Noth- 

 ing that occurs occasions much surprise, 16 and a ready explanation for 

 even the most unexpected event is suggested by the inscrutable oper- 

 ations of the gods. This is not the atmosphere which surrounds and 

 stimulates the birth of philosophy. But while Homer, on the whole, 

 writes for entertainment and tells such tales as may fitly cheer a pleas- 

 ant feast, there are not wanting in the Iliad passages which show that 

 the Greeks of that age sometimes thought in a less light-hearted vein. 

 Two portions in particular, the Aio? ^Airarrj 1T and the ©co^a^ta, is con . 

 tain unmistakable vestiges of earlier theogonic and cosmogonic poems. 

 The tendency here appearing in Homer finds increasing favor with 

 Hesiod and the cosmogonists of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. 



For reasons hardly intelligible to me it has become common to dis- 



15 Cp. Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 22. If Tliales said iravra irXr/pr] 

 6eQ>v, it was a survival of ' Homeric ' thought out of harmony with the new philo- 

 sophical movement. Such survivals, however, are common in all ages. 



16 Cp. Adam, ibid., p. 24. 

 « E. xiv. 



18 E. xx, xxr. That this passage is cosmological was seen by Theagenes in the 

 sixth century, B.C. (see Schol. II. B on T, 67), and emphasized by Murray, Fuse of 

 the Greek Epic, p. 239 ff., and by Gilbert, Die inetcorologischen Theoricn des griechi- 

 schen A Uertums, p. 25, n. 2. 



