The origin of the Over Lord, as of all kingship, may be traced to a combination of sagacity, courage, and experience in war, in an individual, and to his consequent acquirement of property and influence, _plus_ the survival of the prestige of the medicine man, to whom the ruling supernormal Being of the tribe is supposed to speak. A very low example is the Dieri medicine man inspired by Kutchi; an elevated example is the Homeric Minos, who converses with Zeus. Even the dream of Agamemnon is worthy of respect, says Nestor, ‘because he has seen it who boasts himself to be the best of the Achaeans’; another man’s dream might be disregarded (_Iliad_ ii. 80-83). However, Agamemnon does not lay stress on such communications; Calchas is the regular interpreter of omens and the will of the gods. A divinity doth hedge Agamemnon, though Achilles half draws his sword against him. He has the right to summon the whole host, and to exact fines for absence; he has the lion’s share of all spoils of war; he is war leader, but always consults his peers, the paladins of Charlemagne. From him much that is not easily tolerable is endured, but, if he goes too far in his arrogance, a prince or peer has the recognized right, like Achilles, to throw up his allegiance. By due gifts of atonement, of which the rules are ceremonially minute (_Iliad_ xix. 215-75), the Over Lord may place himself within his right again, and he who refuses the atonement is recognized to be in his wrong. The whole passage about the minutiae of atonement in _Iliad_ xix delays the action, and is censured by critics as ‘late’. But it cannot be late, it could only have been composed for a noble audience keenly interested in the customary laws under which they lived, laws unknown to historic Greece. We are accustomed to similar prolixity and minuteness about points of law in the Icelandic sagas. It has been said that Homer, an Asiatic poet of the ninth century B.C., lived imaginatively in, say, the thirteenth century, B.C. as Mr. William Morris imaginatively ‘lived in’ the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. But Morris came after Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the imaginative archaeological reconstruction of past ages by poets and artists. Shakespeare did not ‘live in’ any age but his own. His Hamlet fights with the Elizabethan long rapier, not with short sword and axe. Homer, too, lives in his own sub-Minoan age, and in that alone. The poets of this age of loose feudalism are always partial to the princes rather than to the Over Lord. The Irish romance writers much prefer the chivalrous Diarmaid, or Oscar, to Fionn, the Over Lord, and the later writers of _chansons de geste_ in France utterly degrade Charlemagne in favour of his paladins.