Homer ignores them almost entirely. His gods are pan-Hellenic, Olympian. In fact, in his picture of the gods, Homer fulfilled most completely his special poetic task of reducing confusion and superfluity to uniformity and symmetry of design--the very task which Greek idealism in art continually set before itself. In his picture Greek beliefs about the gods _appear_ absolutely uniform--as uniform as dialect, political condition, manners, {26} and morals. In reality--of this we may be sure--no such uniformity existed; the main outlines of pan-Hellenism were doubtless there, but only the genius of the poet can have combined and fused them into a purely imaginary whole. Provincial differences in themselves interested him not at all. So, too, in the special question that we are considering, if we find him speaking of a single kingdom of the underworld, the resort of all departed spirits ruled over by a single pair of divinities and removed as far from the world of men and their cities as the Olympian dwelling of the Blessed Ones is in the opposite direction, who shall say how far he represents naive popular belief in such matters? On this side Olympus, the meeting place of all the gods that rule in the daylight;[56\1] on that the realm of Hades that holds in its grasp the unseen spirits that have left this life behind--the parallel is too apparent to be due to anything but the same simplifying and co-ordinating spirit in the one case as in the other. § 2 It would, however, be an equally complete misunderstanding of the relation in which Homer stood to the popular beliefs of his time if we imagined that relation to be one of opposition, or even supposed him to have taken up an attitude resembling that of Pindar or the Attic Tragedians towards the conventional opinions of their time. These later poets often enough allow us to see quite clearly the intentional departure from normal opinion represented by their more advanced conceptions. Homer, on the contrary, is as free from controversy as he is from dogma. He does not offer his pictures of God, the world and fate as anything peculiar to himself; and it is natural, therefore, to suppose that his public recognized them as substantially the same as their own. The poet has not taken over the whole body of popular belief, but what he does say must have belonged to popular belief. The selection and combination of this material into a consistent whole was the poet's real work. If the Homeric creed had not been so constructed in essentials that it corresponded to the beliefs of the time, or, at least, could be made to correspond, then it is impossible to account (even allowing for the poetic tradition of a school) for the uniformity that marks the work of the many poets that had a hand in the composition of the two poems. In this narrow sense it can be truly said that Homer's poems represent the popular belief of their time; not, indeed, the belief