Were the Greeks, then, always so untroubled by such fears of the souls of the dead? Was there never any _cult_ of disembodied spirits, such as was not only known to all primitive peoples throughout the world, but was also quite familiar to nations belonging to the same family as the Greeks, for instance, the Indians and the Persians? The question and its answer have more than a passing interest. In later times--long subsequent to Homer--we find in Greece itself a lively worship of ancestors and a general cult of the departed. Were it demonstrable--as it is generally assumed without proof--that the Greeks only at this late period first began to pay a religious cult to the souls of the dead, this fact would give very strong support to the oft-repeated theory that the cult of the dead arose from the ruins of a previous worship of the gods. Anthropologists are accustomed to deny this and to regard the worship of disembodied souls as one of the earliest forms (if not as originally the only form) of the reverence paid to unseen powers. The peoples, however, upon whose conditions of life and mental conceptions such views are generally based, have indeed behind them a long past, but no history. What is to prevent pure speculation and theorizing in conformity with the preconceived idea just mentioned (which is almost elevated to the position of a doctrine of faith by some comparative religionists) from introducing into the dim past of such savage peoples the primitive worship of gods, out of which the worship of the dead may then subsequently arise? But _Greek_ religious development can be traced from Homer onwards for a long period; and there we find the certainly remarkable fact that a cult of the dead, unknown to Homer, only appears later, in the course of a long and vigorous expansion of religious ideas in after times; or, at least, then shows itself more plainly--but not, it is important to notice, as the precipitate of a dying belief in gods and worship of the gods, but rather as a collateral development by the side of that highly developed form of piety. Are we, then, really to believe that the cult of disembodied {11} spirits was absolutely unknown to the Greeks of pre-Homeric times? Such an assertion, if made without due qualification, is contradicted by a closer study of the Homeric poems themselves.