In a word, we are in the old Greek mainland, the land of Boeotian peasants and urban farmers, among a stay-at-home race which neither knows nor desires to know of the seafaring life that tempts men to foreign lands whence they bring back so much that is new and strange. Here in the central uplands vestiges of ancient custom and belief remained that had been forgotten in the maritime cities of new Greece on the Asiatic coast. Even here, however, the new learning had penetrated to this extent: the structure of ancient belief, transported into the distant past, interwoven with fanciful tales of the earliest state of mankind, like the expiring echo of half-forgotten song lives on only in memory. But the cult of Souls, is not yet quite dead; the possibility remains that it may yet renew its strength and expand into fresh life when once the magic influence of the Homeric view of the world shall have been broken. NOTES TO CHAPTER II [1\2: It is not for nothing that what is here said of the "climate", if one may so call it, of the Elysian plain, ~d~ 566-8, reminds us so strikingly of the description of the abode of the Gods on Olympos, ~z~ 43-5.] [2\2: The announcement of the fate of Menelaos is quite superfluous; it is not necessitated (and not even justified) by his first request (468 ff.), or by his further questions (486 ff.; 551 ff.). Nitzsch already regarded the lines 561-8 as a later addition: _Anm. z. Od._ iii, p. 352--though indeed on grounds that I cannot regard as conclusive. Others have done the same since.] [3\2: The following are made invisible (by envelopment in a cloud) and carried away--this, though not always stated, is most probably to be understood in most cases: Paris, by Aphrodite, ~G~ 380 ff.; Aeneas, by Apollo, ~E~ 344 f.; Idaios, son of Dares, the priest of Hephaistos, by Heph., ~E~ 23; Hektor, by Apollo, ~U~ 443 f.; Aeneas, by Poseidon, ~U~ 325 ff.; Agenor, by Apollo, ~Ph~ 596 ff.--this last appears to be the original copied twice over in the story of this one day of fighting by later poets (in the above-mentioned cases of the use of the motif, ~U~ 325 ff.; 443 f.). It is remarkable (for no special reason for it suggests itself) that all these cases of translation are found on the _Trojan_ side. Otherwise we only have one instance (and that only in the narrative of a long past adventure, the translation of the Anaktoriones by their father Poseidon, ~L~ 750 ff. Lastly, a case that hardly goes beyond those already mentioned: Zeus could have translated alive his son Sarpedon out of the fray and placed him in his Lykian home (~P~ 436), but refrains owing to the warning of Hera (440 ff.).]