The separation from the land of their forefathers, and habituation to the use of cremation, the new direction taken by religious thought, the tendency to turn the once material forces of man's inner life into attractions--all these things contributed to weaken the belief in a powerful and significant life of the disembodied soul and its connexion with the affairs of this world. And at the same time it caused the decline of the cult of the Souls. So much, I think, we may safely assert. The deepest and most fundamental reasons for this decline in both belief and cult may elude our search, just as it is impossible for us to be sure how far in detail the Homeric poems reflect the beliefs of the people who first listened to them, and where the free invention of the poet begins. But the combination of the various elements of belief into a whole which, though far from being a dogmatically closed system, may yet not unfairly be called the Homeric Theology--this, we may say, is most probably the work of the poet. The poet has a free hand in the picture he gives of the gods and never comes into conflict with any popular doctrine because Greek {32} religion then, as always, consisted essentially in the right honouring of the gods of the country and not in any particular set of dogmas. There could hardly be any general conception of godhead and divinity with which the poet might come into conflict. That the popular mind absorbed thoroughly that picture of the world of gods which the Homeric poems had given, is shown by the whole future development of Greek culture and religion. If divergent conceptions did, in fact, also maintain themselves, they derived their strength not so much from a different religious theory, as from the postulates of a different religious _cult_ that had not been influenced by any poet's imagination. They might also more particularly have had the effect of causing an incidental obscurity within the epic itself, in the poet's vision of the Unseen World and its life. III