There is indeed one suggestive passage of the Odyssey from which it is open to us to conjecture that there was more of substantive relation between Greece and Egypt than Homer’s purpose as a national poet led him fully to disclose. Menelaus, when he returns to Egypt after hearing from Proteus of the death of Agamemnon, raises in Egypt a mound in honour of his brother[250], ἵν’ ἄσβεστον κλέος εἴη. But this mound could not contribute to the glory of the slain king, unless Greece and its inhabitants were tolerably well known in Egypt. Upon the whole, the evidence of the Homeric poems does not correspond with those later traditions which refer principally to Egypt as the origin of what is Greek. In considering this subject, we ought indeed to bear in mind Homer’s systematic silence as to the channels by which foreign influences found their way into Greece. For it throws us entirely upon such indirect evidence as he may (so to speak) involuntarily afford. And we must also recollect firstly that the Egyptian influence, whatever it may have been, may perhaps have operated more in the Pelasgian period, than in that Achæan age to which the representations of Homer belong. Secondly, that much may have reached Greece, as to religion or otherwise, in a Phœnician dress, which the Phœnicians themselves may have derived from Egypt. There are other features, well known from all history to be Egyptian, though not traced for them by the hand of Homer, which tend strongly to confirm their relationship to the Pelasgian race, partly as it is delineated in the Homeric outlines, and partly as it is known from later tradition. One of these points is the comparatively hard and unimaginative character of its mythology, conforming to that of the race. It is interesting to notice how the Greeks, with their fine sense of beauty, got rid at once, in whatever they derived from Egypt, of the mythological deformities of gods incarnate in beasts, and threw them into the shapes of more graceful fable. A second point of Pelasgian resemblance is the strong ritual and sacerdotal development of religion. A third is the want of the political energies which build and maintain extensive Empire. With all its wealth, and its early civilization, this opulent state could never make acquisitions beyond its own border, and has usually been in subordination to some more masculine Power. A fourth is, the early use of solid masonry in public edifices. The remains in Greece and Italy which are referred to the Pelasgians are indeed of much smaller dimensions than those of Egypt: but the Pelasgians of these countries, so far as we know, had not time to attain any higher political organization than that of small communities, with comparatively contracted means of commanding labour. A fifth is their wealth itself, which causes Egyptian Thebes to be celebrated both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, perhaps the only case in which the poet has thus repeated himself, Il. ix. 381, and Od. iv. 126.