thrown a cloud over him; if Achilles, on the very point of drawing his sword against his king, feels something within warn and check him, it seems to be a divine hand and voice. Later on the gods come in as mere ornaments; they thwart one another; they become ordinary characters in the poems. The more divine interference we get, the later is the work, until at last we reach the positively-marring masquerades of Athena in the Odyssey, and the offensive scenes of the gods fighting in E and Y. Not that any original state of the poems can have done without the gods altogether. The gods were not created in Asia; they are 'Olympian,' and have their characters and their formal epithets from the old home of the Achaioi.
The treatment of individual gods, too, has its significance—though a local, not a chronological one. Zeus and Hera meet with little respect. Iris is rather unpleasant, as in Euripides. Ares is frankly detested for a bloodthirsty Thracian coward. Aphrodite, who fights because of some echo in her of the Phœnician Ashtaroth, a really formidable warrior, is ridiculed and rebuked for her fighting. Only two gods are respectfully handled—Apollo, who, though an ally of Troy, is a figure genuinely divine; and Poseidon, who moves in a kind of rolling splendour. The reason is not far to seek: they are the real gods of the Ionian. The rest are, of course, gods; but they are 'other peoples' gods,' and our view of them depends a good deal on our view of their worshippers. Athena comes a good third to the two Ionians; in the Odyssey and K she outstrips them. Athens could manage so much, but not more: she could not make the Ionian poetry accept her stern goddess in her real grandeur; Athena remained in the epos a fighting woman, treache-
