beliefs and practices, but they are exceptional.[1] It has often been noted that Homer never speaks of the primitive custom of purification for homicide. The dead heroes are burned, not buried, as the kings of the older race were. Ghosts play hardly any part. In the Iliad we have, to be sure, the ghost of Patroklos, in close connexion with the solitary instance of human sacrifice in Homer. There is also the Nekyia in the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey.[2] Such things, however, are rare, and we may fairly infer that, at least in a certain society, that of the Achaian princes for whom Homer sang, the traditional view of the world was already discredited at a comparatively early date,[3] though it naturally emerges here and there.
IV.Hesiod. When we come to Hesiod, we seem to be in another world. We hear stories of the gods which are not only irrational but repulsive, and these are told quite seriously. Hesiod makes the Muses say: "We know how to tell many false things that are like the truth; but we know too, when we will, to utter what is true."[4] This means that he was conscious of the difference between the Homeric spirit and his own. The old light-heartedness is gone, and it is important to tell the truth about the gods. Hesiod knows, too, that he belongs to a later and a sadder time than Homer. In describing the Ages of the World, he inserts a fifth age between those of Bronze and Iron. That is the Age of the Heroes, the age Homer sang of. It was better than the Bronze Age which came before it, and far better than that which followed it, the Age of Iron, in which Hesiod
- ↑ There are traces of cosmogonical ideas in the Διὸς ἀπάτη (Il. xiv.).
- ↑ Od. xi. has been referred to a late date because it is supposed to contain Orphic ideas. In the light of our present knowledge, such a hypothesis is quite unnecessary. The ideas in question are primitive, and were probably generally accepted in the Aegean. Orphicism was essentially a revival of primitive beliefs.
- ↑ On all this, see especially Rohde, Psyche2, i. pp. 37 sqq. (=Ps.1 pp. 34 sqq.).
- ↑ Hes. Theog. 27 (the words are borrowed from Od. xix. 203). The Muses are the same as those who inspired Homer, which means that Hesiod wrote in hexameters and used the Epic dialect.
