ever fails of its end, he has a deep reverence. He
assorts and distributes religious traditions with reference to the
great ends he had to pursue; carefully, for example, separating Apollo
from the sun, with which he bears marks of having been in other
systems identified. Of his other greater gods it may be said that the
dominant idea is in Zeus policy, in Here nationality, and in Poseidon
physical force. His Trinity, which is conventional, and his
Under-world appear to be borrowed from Assyria, and in some degree
from Egypt. One licentious legend appears in Olympus, but this belongs
to the Odyssey, and to a Phoenician, not a Hellenic, circle of ideas.
His Olympian assembly is, indeed, largely representative of human
appetites, tastes, and passions; but in the government of the world it
works as a body on behalf of justice, and the suppliant and the
stranger are peculiarly objects of the care of Zeus. Accordingly, we
find that the cause which is to triumph in the Trojan war is the just
cause; that in the Odyssey the hero is led through suffering to peace
and prosperity, and that the terrible retribution he inflicts has been
merited by crime. At various points of the system we trace the higher
traditions of religion, and on passing down to the classical period we
find that the course of the mythology has been a downward course.

The Troic as compared with the Achaian manners are to a great extent
what we should now call Asiatic as distinguished from European. Of the
great chieftains, Achilles, Diomed, Ajax, Menelaos, and Patroclus
appear chiefly to exhibit the Achaian ideal of humanity; Achilles,
especially, and on a colossal scale. Odysseus, the many-sided man, has
a strong Phoenician tinge, though the dominant color continues to be
Greek. And in his house we find exhibited one of the noblest among the
characteristics of the poems in the sanctity and perpetuity of
marriage. Indeed, the purity and loyalty of Penelope are, like the
humility approaching to penitence of Helen, quite unmatched in
antiquity.

The plot of the Iliad has been the subject of much criticism, on
account of the long absence of Achilles, the hero, from the action of
the poem. But Homer had to bring out Achaian character in its various
forms, and while the vastness of Achilles is on the stage, every other
Achaian hero must be eclipsed. Further, Homer was an itinerant
minstrel, who had to adapt himself to the sympathies and traditions of
the differen