With these facts in mind we may ask what are the nature and characteristics of the gods in Homer. Excavations have shown us that the Mycenaean Age had already passed beyond the ruder stages and had conceived some at least of its divinities in anthropomorphic fashion. In Homer the gods are frankly made in man’s image. They are beings larger, wiser, and stronger than mortals; they have a superhuman but not complete control over nature and mankind. Their chief preëminence over man lies in this superior power and in the possession of immortality as well as of that eternal youth and beauty which is appropriate to immortals. In their veins flows a divine ichor instead of blood; their food and drink are not the bread and wine which mortals need. Yet for all this they are hardly more independent of physical needs than men: they must sleep and eat, and they need the light of the sun. The passions hold sway over them to such an extent that the morality of the gods, of Zeus in particular, is distinctly inferior to that of mortal princes. The divinities can suffer pain and indignities. Diomedes was able to wound both Aphrodite and Ares, whereat the valiant god of war bawled out as loud, the poet says, “as nine or ten thousand men shout in battle,” and fled into the broad heaven to appeal to Zeus.[2] In the twenty-first book of the Iliad Athena hits Ares in the neck with a large boundary stone and overthrows him, adding insult to injury by laughing merrily at the god’s discomfiture; then when Aphrodite would lead him off groaning, Athena hurries after and with a blow of her stout hand lays goddess and god prostrate on the ground.[3] Nor are the gods more just and honorable than men; they are moved by caprice; and their godhead does not prevent their quarreling or making up their differences in very human fashion, as the domestic jar between Zeus and Hera in the first book of the Iliad shows.[4]