ctions may be from this statement, but they do not affect its
main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a
craftsman. Yes: a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a
gang of warriors needed to have by them; and they preferred him lame, so
that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of
Admetus; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon.
Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements; but in
any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punishment.
Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on
agriculture and on justice: they destroy the harvests of those who
offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic
Age itself--if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick's convenient title for the Age
of the Migrations--chieftains and gods probably retained some vestiges
of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times;
and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never
meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these
gods are not real people with a real character. They never existed. They
are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in
the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They
change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it
is pronounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any
one god would be mixed up with traditions and associations drawn from
the surrounding populations and their gods; and by the time they come
down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have passed
through the minds of many different ages and places, especially Ionia
and Athens.

The Olympians as described in our text of Homer, or as described in the
Athenian recitations of the sixth century, are _mutatis mutandis_
related to the Olympians of the Heroic Age much as the Hellenes of the
sixth century are to the Hellenes of the Heroic Age. I say '_mutatis
mutandis_', because the historical development of a group of imaginary
concepts shrined in tradition and romance can never be quite the same as
that of the people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is apt both
to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life.
Romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent perfections.
But the gods of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show t