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. Zeus and his _comitatus_ conquered Cronos and his; conquered and expelled them--sent them migrating beyond the horizon, Heaven knows where. Zeus took the chief dominion and remained a permanent overlord, but he apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and confirmed various of his children and followers in lesser fiefs. Apollo went off on his own adventure and conquered Delphi. Athena conquered the Giants. She gained Athens by a conquest over Poseidon, a point of which we will speak later. And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do they promote agriculture? Do they practise trades and industries? Not a bit of it. Why should they do any honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them. They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war. A few deductions may be from this statement, but they do not affect its main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. Yes: a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a gang of warriors needed to have by them; and they preferred him lame, so that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of Admetus; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon. Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements; but in any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punishment. Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on agriculture and on justice: they destroy the harvests of those who offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic Age itself--if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick's convenient title for the Age of the Migrations--chieftains and gods probably retained some vestiges of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times; and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these gods are not real people with a real character. They never existed. They are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it is pronounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any one god would be mixed up with traditions and associations drawn from the surrounding populations and their gods; and by the time they come down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have passed