si-Homeric dialect and
under a quasi-Olympian system to bring together vast masses of ancient
theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The _Theogony_ attempts
to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods; _The Catalogue of Women_
and the _Eoiai_, preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in
canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and
hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their
descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. The _Works
and Days_ form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus
relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the
most valiant failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity of it
are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty and its extraordinary
historical interest. The Hesiodic system when compared with that of
Homer is much more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less
accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay the lordly
warrior-gods of the Heroic Age, at the back of Hesiod the crude and
tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the mainland. Also the
Hesiodic poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened
atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light of Athens.

The third element in this Homeric reformation is an attempt to make
religion satisfy the needs of a new social order. The earliest Greek
religion was clearly based on the tribe, a band of people, all in some
sense kindred and normally living together, people with the same
customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds and fields. This
tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself
unchanged at the great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.[65:1]
It certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the
heroic age. It bowed its head beneath the sceptre of its own divine
kings and the armed heel of its northern invaders, only to appear again
almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the
invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain.

But it no longer suited its environment. In the age of the migrations
the tribes had been broken, scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased
to exist as important social entities. The social unit which had taken
their place was the political community of men, of whatever tribe or
tribes, who were held together in times of danger and constant war by
means of a common circu