track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly clear that {23} Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the special tribal deity of the Minyai. We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness. Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically. Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky was also in the first period--so far as we can reconstruct it--Zeus ‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him. Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.[23.1] We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived from the life of the {24} family could be applied to them; although we can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine relationships--the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance--do not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.