The Olympian faith was the religion of the poetry of Hesiod and J. Homer, including the Homeric Hymns, and upon this poetry the thought of all Greeks in the archaic and early classical ages was founded: ‘All men begin their learning with Homer,’ says Xenophanes. Herodotus makes it clear that any Greek of his own day considered Homer and Hesiod canonical:
Whence each of the gods arose, whether all always were, what their individual forms are, the Greeks did not know until the day before yesterday, so to speak. For I think that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years older than me and no more. And they are the ones who constructed divine genealogies for the Greeks, gave the gods their epithets, determined their spheres and functions, and indicated their forms (ii. 53).
page 81 note 1 Fragment 10 Diels–Kranz. ‘What all men learn is shaped by Homer from the beginning’ is Guthrie, W. K. C.'s rendering in his History of Greek Philosophy, i (Cambridge, 1962), 371Google Scholar. Guthrie's way of understanding Olympianism does not do it justice, in my opinion; but he gives proper emphasis to Homer's place in moulding Greek religious thought, both here and in The Greeks and Their Gods (London, 1950).
page 81 note 2 Among the exceptions are Wilamowitz, , Der Glaube der Hellenen, of which I use the third edition (Basel, 1959)Google Scholar, and Otto, W. F., The Homeric Gods (translated by Hadas, Moses, London, 1954)Google Scholar. My conclusions are not those of Otto or Wilamowitz, but my debt to both is enormous.
page 81 note 3 Der Glaube der Hellenen i3. 135.
page 82 note 1 Nilsson, M. P., The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley, 1931), 237.Google Scholar
page 82 note 2 Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, 208.
page 84 note 1 See Eliade, M., The Sacred and the Profane (New York and Evanston, 1961), 118.Google Scholar
page 85 note 1 Eliade, 37–41.
page 87 note 1 The present imperative ἕλκεο used by Athena in line 210 has been taken to mean, ‘Do not continue to draw’; I suppose the present imperative before it, λ⋯γε, is to mean ‘continue to cease’. Still, such explanations are better than dismissals of the whole question of the half-drawn sword on the grounds that oral poets cannot be expected to pay attention to what they are saying. Just complaint over such misuse of Milman Parry's theories may be found in Adam Parry's introduction to Parry, M., The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford, 1971), lvi–lxii.Google Scholar
page 88 note 1 The terms are Eliade's, 20–115; but he confines their use to regular ritual.
page 88 note 2 Whitman, C., Homer and the Homeric Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), 231Google Scholar. Self-realization, in the sense of knowing who you are and therefore doing what you must do because of what you are, is not far from Plato's dikaiosunē. τ⋯ τ⋯ αὑτο⋯ Πράττειν means minding one's own business: but the negative sense of that phrase, ‘not interfering with others’, is far less important than the positive, ‘doing that for which your nature is best suited’—i.e. realizing your self. See Republic 370b, 423d, 433 passim.
page 92 note 1 Plato's forms are not gods, but they resemble gods in many ways, not least in the fact that they are eternal and yet participate in the world of Becoming. Plato does not give Homer the same symbolic interpretation as I—though his Hesiodic treatment of Aphrodite in the Symposium nearly identifies her with Beauty itself (203 c). But Plato of course was aware of allegoric interpretation of Homer (Republic 378 d).
page 93 note 1 A more striking contrast between the athanatoi and an underworld god is drawn in Theogony 775.