There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear to us in the Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless common folk.[57:3] And it was not likely that the bards of cultivated and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life. Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and gods of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid adventure. The traits that were at all tolerable were idealized; those that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform. II. _The Religious Value of the Olympians_ Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at the Panathenaea, produced what I will venture to call exactly a religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work. In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matrilinear customs of the Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their agricultural rites, their sex-emblems and fertility goddesses. Contrast for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the _Iliad_ under the name of Athena with the Korê of Ephesus, strangely called Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered with innumerable breasts. That suggests the contrast that I mean. Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic; they are the literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superstition. True, the poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris, or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric gods and the gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr. Chadwick[59:1] to the difference between the gods of the Edda and the historical traces of religion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or _comitatus_, seem to be the gods of the kings, distinct from the gods of the peasants, cleaner and more warlike and lordlier, though in actual religious quality much less vital.