thorough investigation of the
theistic problem was made by the Greeks, whose leading thinkers, like
the Hebrews, moved steadily toward a unitary conception of the divine
power, but, unlike the Hebrews, did not succeed in impressing their
views on the people at large. What the theistic conception in the
pre-Homeric times was we are unable to say definitely, but presumably in
every separate community there was a local deity who had practically the
direction of affairs. In process of time, through conditions not known
to us, Zeus came to be recognized throughout the Hellenic world as the
principal deity. In the Homeric poems and in Hesiod we find a political
or governmental organization of the gods which followed the lines of the
social organization of the times. As Agamemnon is the head chief over a
group of local chiefs, so Zeus, though not absolutely supreme, is a
divine king, the head over a considerable number of deities who have
their own preferences and plans, and in ordinary matters go their own
way and are not interfered with so long as they mind their own business;
but at critical points Zeus, like Agamemnon, intervenes, and then no god
disputes his decisions.

+997+. This conception of the divine government appears, therefore, to
rest on the Greek demand for political organization; the world was
thought of as divided into various departments which had to be brought
into a unity by the ascription of a quasi-supreme authority to some one
personage. Necessarily, however, larger intellectual and ethical ideas
were incorporated in this political view. Though the popular
anthropomorphic conceptions of the deities appear throughout the Homeric
poems (the gods being sometimes morally low as well as limited in
knowledge and power), yet on the other hand they are said to know
everything. To Zeus in particular lofty qualities are ascribed; he is
the father of men and their savior and the patron of justice. How it
came about that these two sorts of conceptions of a supreme deity are
mingled in the poems is a question that need not be discussed here; a
similar mingling of contradictory ideas is found in the Old Testament,
in which the unmoral god of the people stands alongside of the highly
developed ethical Yahweh of the great prophets.

+998+. In Homer and Hesiod, however, the conception of headship is
complicated by the introduction of the idea of fate. In the Iliad Zeus
is sometimes ignorant of the future and has to em