_Influence of epic and lyric poetry_.--That the contribution of Homeric and of the later Hesiodic literature to the shaping and fixing of Hellenic religion was most fruitful and effective cannot be doubted. Only we must not accept the exaggerating view of Herodotus[58.1] that these two poets were really {59} the founders of the anthropomorphic religion, creating the orthodox Hellenic theogony and determining the names and functions and shapes of the special divinities. By such a statement some scholars have been misled into regarding the Homeric poems as a kind of Greek Bible, which in respect to religious matters it might be heresy to disbelieve. But we know that local temple-legend and local folklore could always maintain its independence of Homeric, or Hesiodic authority, in respect to the titles of the Gods, their relationships and genealogies. Artemis was not everywhere reputed to have the same parentage or Zeus the same spouse. The early epic poets gathered many of the ἱεροὶ λόγοι of shrines, but there was much that they did not gather and which yet survived. There was a noticeable particularism in Greek theology, and no orthodoxy and no heterodoxy in the sense that it was moral to believe or immoral to disbelieve any sacred book. The chief religious achievement of Homer and his fellows was to intensify the anthropomorphic trend in Greek religion, to sharpen and individualise the concepts of divinity, and to diffuse throughout the Hellenic world a certain uniformity of religious imagination. To their work partly, as well as to the higher synthetic power of the Greek mind, we may ascribe the fact that in spite of local varieties of myth and cult-title, in spite of the various elements that the divine personality may have absorbed from earlier cult-figures and cult-forms in the various cult-centres, yet the sense of the individual unity of person was not lost so long as the same name was in vogue; hence Apollo Lykeios of Argos could not be a {60} different person from the Apollo Patroös of Athens, nor could hostility arise between them. That is to say, the higher religious literature imprinted a certain precision and definiteness upon the personal names of the leading divinities and endowed them with a certain essential connotation; for example, the dogma of the virginity of Athena and Artemis, always presented in the higher poetry, prevailed so far as to suppress the maternal character that may have attached to them in the prehistoric period and of which we can still discern a glimmering in certain local cults.[60.1] And to this task of shaping the divine characters the rising lyric poetry, which was growing up with the decay of the epic, and which in obedience to the Hellenic passion for disciplined form was developing fixed types of song and music appropriate to special festivals and worships, must have contributed much. The ‘spondaic’ metre was adapted to the invocation or hymn sung at the libation--the