ft may reside in a certain family, and may be attached to a certain
spot, where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona we
read that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests of
ascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, and
Agamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before the
Trojan war.

The State after Death.--With regard to the state after death, belief
is not uniform in Homer. There are elaborate funeral rites which
point to the assumption that the spirit of the hero is living
somewhere and needs various things. But the life of the departed was
not mapped out in Greece as it was in Egypt. The ritual of Mycenae had
little influence, for the funeral celebrations in Homer are very
similar to those of other early Aryan peoples, and undoubtedly were
not imported. What then is thought of the present existence of the
hero? He has ceased to exist. The body is the man, the spirit when it
has left the body has but a shadow-life, without any strength or
hope; at the most it may revive a little at the taste of blood. But
while the worship of the departed is seen from Homer to be decaying
among the Greeks, imagination is seen to be occupied in more than one
direction with the regions where they are, and to be asserting for
them a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed.
The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiring
clearer shape. The punishments are described which certain great
transgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; and
other details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conception
of the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken by
the gods when he dies, and where there is no snow nor storm nor rain.

Homer was not the only poet who furnished the Greeks with a system of
their gods; nor was his system everywhere accepted without demur.
Hesiod, writing in the latter half of the eighth century B.C., gives
a "theogony" or birth of the gods, which is also a genesis or origin
of the world, for to the Greek mind the gods and the world came into
existence together. He complains of those who on this subject have
taught fictions which resemble truths, referring perhaps to Homer.
His own system of the world is not a light and airy fabric but a
laborious work, due no doubt to professional or priestly industry, in
which the attempt is made to treat all the divine figures or
half-figured spirits the Gree