As to the non-religiousness of the Homeric epics, there is a division of critical opinion. Meyer insists (Gesch. des Alt. ii, 395) that, as contrasted with the earlier religious poetry, "the epic poetry is throughout secular (profan); it aims at charming its hearers, not at propitiating the Gods"; and he further sees in the whole Ionian mood a certain cynical disillusionment (id. ii, 723). Cp. Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 40, citing Hegel. E. Curtius (G. G. i, 126) goes so far as to ascribe a certain irony to the portraiture of the Gods (Ionian Apollo excepted) in Homer, and to trace this to Ionian levity. To the same cause he assigns the lack of any expression of a sense of stigma attaching to murder. This sense he holds the Greek people had, though Homer does not hint it. (Cp. Grote, i, 24, whose inference Curtius implicitly impugns.) Girard (Le Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869), on the contrary, appears to have no suspicion of any problem to solve, treating Homer as unaffectedly religious. The same view is taken by Prof. Paul Decharme. "On chercherait vainement dans l'Iliade et dans l'Odyssée les premières traces du scepticisme grec à l'égard des fables des dieux. C'est avec une foi entière en la réalité des événements mythiques que les poètes chantent les légendes ...; c'est en toute simplicité d'âme aussi que les auditeurs de l'épopée écoutent...." (La critique des traditions religieuses chez les grecs, 1904, p. 1.) Thus we have a kind of balance of contrary opinions, German against French. Any verdict on the problem must recognize on the one hand the possibilities of naïve credulity in an unlettered age, and on the other the probability of critical perception on the part of a great poet. I have seen both among Boers in South Africa. On the general question of the mood of the Homeric poems compare Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 77, and Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 34, 35; and A. Benn, The Philosophy of Greece in Relation to the Character of its People, 1898, pp. 29-30.