orship paid to particular local heroes. A man's ghost when he
dies does not abide in its grave ready to rise at springtime and help
the seeds to sprout; it goes to a remote and shadowy region, a common,
pan-Hellenic Hades. And so with the gods themselves; they are cut clean
from earth and from the local bits of earth out of which they grew--the
sacred trees and holy stones and rivers and still holier beasts. There
is not a holy Bull to be found in all Olympus, only figures of men,
bright and vivid and intensely personal, like so many glorified,
transfigured Homeric heroes.

In a word, the heroic spirit, as seen in heroic poetry, is the outcome
of a society cut loose from its roots, of a time of migrations, of the
shifting of populations.[42] But more is needed, and just this something
more the age that gave birth to Homer had. We know now that before the
northern people whom we call Greeks, and who called themselves Hellenes,
came down into Greece, there had grown up in the basin of the AEgean a
civilization splendid, wealthy, rich in art and already ancient, the
civilization that has come to light at Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and most of
all in Crete. The adventurers from North and South came upon a land
rich in spoils, where a chieftain with a band of hardy followers might
sack a city and dower himself and his men with sudden wealth. Such
conditions, such a contact of new and old, of settled splendour beset by
unbridled adventure, go to the making of a heroic age, its virtues and
its vices, its obvious beauty and its hidden ugliness. In settled,
social conditions, as has been well remarked, "most of the heroes would
sooner or later have found themselves in prison."

A heroic age, happily for society, cannot last long; it has about it
while it does last a sheen of passing and pathetic splendour, such as
that which lights up the figure of Achilles, but it is bound to fade and
pass. A heroic _society_ is almost a contradiction in terms. Heroism is
for individuals. If a society is to go on at all it must strike its
roots deep in some soil, native or alien. The bands of adventurers must
disband and go home, or settle anew on the land they have conquered.
They must beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruning-hooks. Their gallant, glorious leader must become a sober,
home-keeping, law-giving and law-abiding king; his followers must abate
their individuality and make it subserve a common social purpose.

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