We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not notably different from the Homeric. Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are {20} general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the cause of all their evils. Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism. We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe; it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear. This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a product of a much later period, and that the religion which they enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of Peisistratos certain {21} religious forces were rife, and certain religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.