SOCIOLOGY AND HOMER 43
denied that one gets a pretty clear view of the society as a whole. The few mentions of the "men of the people" are, with a recounter of such graphic power and discriminating touch, sig- nificant beyond their mere allotment of space.
There is still another point of attitude of extreme impor- tance as affecting the character of Homer's evidence. Neither an ancient poet nor a monkish chronicler nor, indeed, a modern ethnographer must be allowed to foist upon science conclusions to whose adoption subjective feelings {e.g., of individual or racial superiority) have led. Nor must a civilized, or relatively civilized, authority be permitted, unchallenged, to project his own more developed mentality into the environment of the more primitive society, when he is trying to interpret the latter's life and organi- zation. Neither children's games nor savages' social forms will stand adult or civilized tests of consistency and rationality, though they are perfectly logical when the tortuous course of their development is once apprehended rendered irregular as it is by the introduction of factors, real or imaginary, with which the more developed intelligence no longer reckons. To correctly reflect another society's life, one must make it, at least tempo- rarily, his own. But suppose this life is his own ; how much greater will then be his understanding and sympathy and how much more correct his representation ! This advantage is, of course, not peculiar to Homer among national chroniclers.
The Homeric records, then, are scientifically more than satis- factory as they stand. Few are incompetent to speak of the authenticity of this their present form, but one is inclined to believe, first, that legends, traditions, etc., held in the esteem by later generations in which Homer was held, are not apt to be fundamentally altered even over long periods of time. There is some comparative evidence to support this belief. That the poems had not been materially modified coincidently with mate- rial changes in the temper of the succeeding generations is indi- cated by the attitude of the philosophic age, "when the Greeks were beginning to notice with perplexity and pain that the Homeric poems, become to them a sacred book, agreed but ill with their own experience of life." 1 We of the present day have
1 TYLOR, Anthropology, p. 379.
