Furthermore every reader of the Homeric epics is struck by the freshness of the treatment; indeed, scholars of an earlier day thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the first fruits of European poetic inspiration. Today we know that Homer represents the culmination of a long fine of bards, that his artistry was won by effort and was not simply the incredible inspiration of one untaught; but this knowledge does not diminish in the slightest degree our appreciation of the freshness and directness of treatment which that art realized. These qualities are obtained in part by a freedom from reflection, by a lack of self-consciousness in the poems. They do not deal with the origin of the gods, they present no theogonies, any more than they concern themselves with the descent of man. It is true that Zeus is the son of Cronos, as Hera is the daughter of Cronos and Rhea, and that it is said that Zeus drove Cronos beneath the earth and sea, but we have no account of the rule of the elder gods or of the struggle by which Zeus won his place. For the epic poet the world of gods, men, and nature simply is; he does not indulge in speculation himself nor does he make his heroes debate questions of whence or whither; the living present with its actions, its struggles, victories, and defeats filled the compass of the poet’s thought and of his audience’s desire. The Iliad and the Odyssey then must not be considered as treatises or as reflective and philosophical works. This elementary point must be emphasized here, for there is always danger of losing the true perspective when we are considering a single theme. The poems derive their great significance for the history of Greek religion from the fact that through recitations they became the chief popular literature of Greece, and that from the sixth century they were the basis of education, as I have already said. Thus they were universally known and universally influential; they created a common Olympic religion beside the local religions; and through the individualities which they gave the gods they fixed the types which poets were to recall and which artists were to embody in marble or in wood, ivory, and gold at the centers of the Greek world.