h means that it had sunk into their
daily life and permeated their enjoyment of it, as our religion
certainly does not affect _our_ life to enhance it as amusing or
pleasurable. We go to Church on Sunday, and write it off as an
observance; but if eager to be happy with a free heart, we close
early and steal a few hours from the working-day. We antagonise
religion and enjoyment, worship and holiday. Nature being too
strong for any convention of ours, courtship has asserted
itself as permissible on the Sabbath, if not as a Sabbatical
institution.

Now the Greeks were just as much slaves to the letter of their
Homer as any Auld Licht Elder to the letter of St Paul. No one
will accuse Plato of being overfriendly to poetry. Yet I believe
you will find in Plato some 150 direct citations from Homer, not
to speak of allusions scattered broadcast through the dialogues,
often as texts for long argument. Of these citations and
allusions an inordinate number seem to us laboriously trivial--
that is to say, unless we put ourselves into the Hellenic mind.
On the other hand Plato uses others to enforce or illustrate his
profoundest doctrines. For an instance, in "Phaedo" (Sec. 96)
Socrates is arguing that the soul cannot be one with the harmony
of the bodily affections, being herself the master-player who
commands the strings:

'--almost always' [he says] opposing and coercing them in all
sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the
pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently;--
threatening, and also reprimanding the desires, passions, fears,
as if talking to a thing which is not herself; as Homer in the
Odyssey represents Odysseus doing in the words

[Greek: stethos de plexas kradien enipape mutho:
tetlathi de, kradie; kai kynteron allo pot etles]

He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart:
Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured.

Do you think [asks Socrates] that Homer wrote this under the idea
that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affections
of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead and
master them--herself a far diviner thing than any harmony?

A Greek, then, will use Homer--_his_ Bible--minutely on niceties
of conduct or broadly on first principles of philosophy or
religion. But equally, since it is poetry all the time to him, he
will take--or to instance particular writers, Aristotle and the
late Greek, Longinus will take--a sin