s,
tribes, and tribal traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the
imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic
sepulchres of unknown kings, which the fugitives to Asia had left behind
them and half forgotten.[59:2]

Again, when the Ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no
doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the
barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said,
of something that was Hellenic, as distinct from something else that was
barbaric, and the Hellenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck
them as superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember
that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative
and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in
knowledge and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the
self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its
rise in Ionia.

Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious
reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it? We are again
reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the 'beggarly elements'
towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as
neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the
incursions of _mana_ snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters,
but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers,
wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably
higher.

For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has
perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs
of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods
against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants
and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe
in their houses like storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was
full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of
human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first
the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas
against the brute world.[61:1]

The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man over beast: that was the
aim, but was it ever accomplished? The Olympian gods as we see them in
art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of
acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving