Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.