all tolerable were idealized; those
that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was
impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old
Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth
century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform.

II. _The Religious Value of the Olympians_

Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I
believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at
the Panathenaea, produced what I will venture to call exactly a
religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and
falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work.

In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the
tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal
monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matrilinear customs of
the Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their
agricultural rites, their sex-emblems and fertility goddesses. Contrast
for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the _Iliad_
under the name of Athena with the Kore of Ephesus, strangely called
Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered with innumerable
breasts. That suggests the contrast that I mean.

Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic; they are the
literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superstition. True, the
poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so
often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris,
or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something
like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric
gods and the gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr.
Chadwick[59:1] to the difference between the gods of the Edda and the
historical traces of religion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with
Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or _comitatus_, seem to
be the gods of the kings, distinct from the gods of the peasants,
cleaner and more warlike and lordlier, though in actual religious
quality much less vital.

Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for
many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the
'Urdummheit'. For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition,
in having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians are the descendants
of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their home