There is no reason in the world why so great a sennachie as Homer, who knew as many tales from all quarters as Widsith in the Anglo-Saxon poem, should not know a Thracian tale about Lycurgus and Dionysus and his mother, Earth.[18] Nothing prevented Homer from knowing a myth of a people whom he knew--the Thracians--very long before the seventh century. Homer has not a good word for the cowardly Dionysus. Still, Zeus patronises him; he is a god, though he never appears among Homer's Olympians. To his mysteries, as to those of Eleusis (is it not in Attica?) Homer does not allude. He mentions no mysteries, no initiations, no hocus-pocus; these things were for Attica, and for historic Greece. The ethical _religion_ of Homer apart from his mythology is excellent, a good faith to live and die in. His gods, when religiously regarded, sanction all that is best in Achaean morals, and disapprove of all that is evil in human conduct, as a general rule. But Homeric _mythology_ is manifestly another thing: in the stories told of the gods, they practise most of the sins which they punish in mankind. Mythology would cease to be _mythology_ if it became consistent, but religion can never fail to be consistent while it expresses the highest and purest ethical ideas associated with a sense of their approval by a being or beings more than mortal. This note is again and again struck by Homer; and it can never fail to awaken a responsive thrill in all who feel, or have ever felt, the ethico-religious emotion. Let me here give but one example. It is impossible for men to understand the mystery of an omnipotent and loving Being in a world of pain and ruin. Homer is as conscious of the insoluble problem as we are--and Zeus is conscious of it. In the great assembly of all gods, from Apollo and Athene to the nymphs of rivers, well-heads, and grassy water-meadows, at the moment when the final strife is set between Hector and Achilles, Zeus says, "Even in their perishing have I regard unto them."[19] The Father pities but he cannot save--there is some insuperable obstacle between his omnipotence and the end which he desires. Such is the _religious_ thought of Homer, while in his _mythical_ thought Zeus is a humorous hot-tempered father of a family, who delights to tease, and finds as much diversion as Mr. Bennett did in the absurdities of his wife and children.