The _Odyssey_ is calmer, more reflective, more _religious_ than the _Iliad_, being a poem of peace. The _Iliad_, a poem of war, is more _mythological_ than the _Odyssey_: the gods in the _Iliad_ are excited, like the men, by the great war and behave accordingly. That neither gods nor men show any real sense of the moral weakness of Agamemnon or Achilles, or of the moral superiority of Hector, is an unacceptable statement. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 336.] Even Achilles and Agamemnon are judged by men and by the poet according to their own standard of ethics and of customary law. There is really no doubt on this point. Too much (2) is made of the supposed different views of Olympus--a mountain in Thessaly in the _Iliad_; a snowless, windless, supra-mundane place in _Odyssey_, V. 41-47. [Footnote: _Ibid_., ii. 396.] Of the Odyssean passage Mr. Merry justly says, "the actual description is not irreconcilable with the general Homeric picture of Olympus." It is "an idealised mountain," and conceptions of it vary, with the variations which are essential to and inseparable from all mythological ideas. As Mr. Leaf says, [Footnote: Note to _Iliad_, V. 750.] "heaven, _ouranos_ and Olympus, if not identical, are at least closely connected." In V. 753, the poet "regarded the summit of Olympus as a half-way stage between heaven and earth," thus "departing from the oldest Homeric tradition, which made the earthly mountain Olympus, and not any aerial region, the dwelling of the gods." But precisely the same confusion of mythical ideas occurs among a people so backward as the Australian south-eastern tribes, whose All Father is now seated on a hill-top and now "above the sky." In _ILIAD_, VIII. 25, 26, the poet is again said to have "entirely lost the real Epic conception of Olympus as a mountain in Thessaly," and to "follow the later conception, which removed it from earth to heaven." In _Iliad_, XI. 184, "from heaven" means "from the summit of Olympus, which, though Homer does not identify it with _oupavos_, still, as a mountain, reached into heaven" (Leaf). The poet of Iliad, XI. 184, says plainly that Zeus descended "_from_ heaven" to Mount Ida. In fact, all that is said of Olympus, of heaven, of the home of the gods, is poetical, is mythical, and so is necessarily subject to the variations of conception inseparable from mythology. This is certain if there be any certainty in mythological science, and here no hard and fast line can be drawn between _ODYSSEY_ and _Iliad_.