ks knew, genealogically, and to give a
complete enumeration of them. Myths are given, some of them of a
horrible character, which do not occur in Homer. The battle of the
gods with the Titans occupies a large part of the poem, and it
concludes with a collection of stories showing the descent of heroes
from alliances between gods and mortals. This work, as we saw, was
considered, along with the Homeric poems, as a standard authority on
the subject of the gods, and was appealed to even in the early
Christian centuries as showing what the Greeks believed.

The Poets and the Working Religion.--The work of these poets proves
that the Greeks in their days were anxious to arrive at clear and
harmonious conceptions about the gods. The movement on which Homer
and Hesiod set their seal, of fixing the characters and attributes of
the various deities, must have been long going on; and it led, as we
see, to different results in different places. That labour when
accomplished endowed Greece with a new religion. The local rite still
went on, which acknowledged no central authority and presented the
spectacle of an infinite diversity. Each city carried on in grave and
solemn fashion the traditional worship of its own gods, on whose
favour its prosperity depended. The other gods of the Pantheon the
city did not need to worship; and moreover local worship was
addressed to a large extent to the Chthonian or earth-gods, as
Demeter and Dionysus, of whom the epic poems know but little. The
poets were of little assistance therefore to the working religion;
but on the other hand the happy and beautiful deities of Homer found
entrance wherever poetry was loved. This was a religion for all
Greece; these gods were national; though some of them belonged
originally to Aeolia, they had become national by being enshrined in
poetry which the whole nation regarded as its own. The Homeric
conception of deity acted therefore on the whole Greek mind; all gods
rose in rank by the example, a subject was set before the mind of the
people, which the closely succeeding development of religious art
shows to have been studied in the noblest way.

Rise of Religious Art.--The seventh century B.C. was a period of
rapid development and of great prosperity in Greece. It was the age
of colonisation; manufacture and trade were active, and though the
Phenicians were not now in the Egean, Greeks sailed to the East and
brought home with them many ideas. It was a time li