Homer was regarded by the Greeks who lived after him as the founder of their religion. Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod lived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned to them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. These writers accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we know that their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, and they thus provided an early bond of national unity.
The Homeric poems are the outcome, whether we regard them as the work of one singer or of two, or of a whole school, of long processes of growth. The poetic art which makes them the delight of all mankind is not a first experiment, but the ripe result of an elaborate method. The stories and the wisdom they contain are brought together from many quarters by long accumulation. And in the same way the accounts they give of the gods individually and of their relations to each other are not thrown together at haphazard, but are the result of a work of unconscious art which must have been carried on for centuries before it issued in this form. Homer does not by any means repeat all the stories he knows about the gods. He passes over many local myths, especially those of the more repulsive order, which were known for centuries after, and undoubtedly existed in his day; only what is "worthy of a pious bard" does he reproduce. A pious bard, however, had considerable latitude; and the phrase does not represent all that Homer was. He was an entertainer of the public at royal courts, where a feast was incomplete without him (Odyssey viii.); he had to produce his songs at banquets or in the open air at festivals; what he gave had to be entertaining. This could not but influence his choice of materials even when the gods were his theme. He could not deal in what was most terrible about the gods, nor could he enter into speculations or mysteries, nor could he make use of a legend which, though it had point for the locality it belonged to, was not generally interesting. What was powerful and dramatic, what all men could understand, what was curious and piquant, what met the general sentiment, that he would be led to adopt and to work up into a telling form; he naturally sought after broad pictures, amusing conversations, simple and true emotions, curious incidents connected with well-known characters. Religion, it is plain, could not gain in depth and intensity from the treatment of such poets; many of the thoughts men had about the gods could not find expression in their lines. But, on the other hand, we have the fact that the Greeks accepted the Homeric representation of their religion as the standard one; not till it had existed for centuries were voices raised against it. And this is not strange. Homer took away nothing from the religion of any Greek; no local worship was in any way infringed upon by him; and on the other side he gave to the Greek world, whose belief consisted formerly in a multitude of disconnected or even inconsistent legends, a united system of gods, in which there was at that stage rest for the mind, and for the imagination an inexhaustible spring of ideal beauty.
The Homeric Gods.—What, then, is the religion of Homer? The gods are a set of beings not very unlike men; they present a curious combination of human frailty with superhuman powers and virtues. To speak first of the physical side of their nature, the gods are far stronger than men, their frame is huger, their eye keener, their voice louder; like the sorcerer of savage times, they can assume other shapes to gain their ends, they can become invisible, or they can travel very swiftly through the air. Yet, on the other hand, they can be wounded when they strive even with men; accidents happen to them, they require to eat and drink. They eat, it is true, ambrosia, and drink nectar, which give immortality; and they have in their veins not human blood but divine ichor. It is the fact of their immortality that makes them different from men; it has happened that a man obtained immortality and became thereby a god. The line between gods and men may be crossed; in former times it was crossed more frequently. The gods entered into relations with mortals; many of the heroes are of divine extraction, and the gods are still interested in the royal houses they thus founded. But such unions do not take place in the poet's time. The world is growing less divine.
Homer, however, looks further back than this, and we find in him the belief, found also in India and in Iceland, that an older and more savage race of gods once ruled, whom the present dynasty conquered and dethroned. Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, and the Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost region of all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning of the present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upper world, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus in Thessaly; Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under-world, above Tartarus, to which men go after death.
Zeus rules in Olympus. He presides there over those gods who are at present in power. He summons them to council, he sits at meals with them. They are a very human set of beings. They are moved by ordinary human motives; love and revenge, jealousy and anger, rule in their breasts. They do not act from eternal principles, but as men do, from sudden impulses or from the desire of temporary advantages for themselves or for their favourites. They even indulge in loose amours, and are brought into ridiculous situations. They laugh at each other; the stronger god hurls the weaker out of Olympus to the earth. Taking them together, we do not find the Olympians an impressive set of beings. Taking them, however, one by one, we judge of them quite differently. The individual gods represent lofty ideals and are not unworthy of worship. Whatever they were once, powers of nature, fetishes or men, whatever village legends they have brought with them from their native place, or whatever traits of savage life still cleave to them, to the poet they are the embodiments of various moral excellences. Zeus, father of gods and men, combines in his character the attributes of righteousness and of kindness; he is the founder of social order and the defender of suppliants, he possesses all wisdom. Hera is the matron of fully unfolded beauty and matchless dignity; Apollo is the faithful son who carries out his father's counsel; Athene is the warrior-maiden skilled in battle but equipped with every kind of skill, best counsellor and guide for the mortal whom she favours; Aphrodite is the goddess of love, in whose girdle are contained all charms; Ares is the impetuous warrior, Hermes the trusty messenger, of the heavenly circle; Hephæstus, the lame and awkward smith, is the artificer for the gods of all manner of cunning work in metal. Around and under the Olympians are many other deities; such as Hebe, the budding girl, and Ganymede, the youth born of human race but taken up to heaven for his beauty to minister to the gods at their banquets. Aphrodite is attended by the graces, Apollo by the Muses, and the world is not stripped by Homer of its local deities, although the chief deities now dwell aloft; mountains, rivers, caves and isles of ocean, all have their immortal occupants.
Worship in Homer.—The gods being of such a nature, what relations does man keep up with them, and how do they affect his life? Worship follows the simple practice of the early world. It is not priestly. There are priests, and they offer sacrifices regularly at the shrines of which they have charge, but the king can sacrifice, or the head of the house; and while one or two temples are mentioned in the Iliad, sacrifice may be offered anywhere. Temples first appear in Greece merely as shelters for images, but in the Iliad the god is generally worshipped not by means of an image but as himself directly present; the need of temples has not yet arisen. In the Odyssey temples of the gods are spoken of as buildings no town could be without, but this is less primitive. Sacrifice is a feast in which the god's portion of the viands is first offered to him, and the worshippers then eat and drink to their hearts' content. There is a detailed description of the proceedings in Iliad i. 456 sqq. Here after the feast there is music; "All day long worshipped they the god with music, singing the beautiful pæan to the Fardarter (Apollo); and his heart was glad to hear." "The gods appear manifest amongst us," we read in the seventh book of the Odyssey, "whensoever we offer glorious hecatombs, and they feast by our side, sitting at the same board." There is nothing of the nature of an expiation about such a sacrifice; it is simply the renewal of the bond between the god and those who look for his aid, when a new enterprise is about to be undertaken or a solemn engagement is entered on. Prayers are very simple. Thus prays the wounded Diomede to Athene (Iliad v. 115): "Hear me, daughter of ægis-bearing Zeus, unwearied maiden! If ever in kindly mood thou stoodest by my father in the heat of battle, even so be thou kind to me, Athene! Grant me to slay this man, and bring within my spear-cast him that took advantage to shoot me, and boasteth over me!"
As there are no bad gods, good and evil are considered to be sent by the same beings. Thus there is a great deal of uncertainty in men's relations to the gods. "All men need the gods," we read; the Homeric hero regards the companionship of a god as proper and necessary for his enterprises. But some trouble must be taken in order to secure their favour. They must not be neglected; their signs must be attended to; above all, a man must be reverent and must studiously practise moderation in his conduct and in his ways of thinking; else the gods may easily be offended or made jealous, and withdraw their countenance. And if they are to a certain extent capricious, there is another consideration which impairs confidence in them. They are not all-powerful. There is a point beyond which they cannot give a man any help. Each man has a fate or destiny, which the gods did not fix and with which they cannot interfere. When his hour comes, they must leave him to his doom; indeed they may even deceive him, and lead him into folly so that his fate shall overtake him. The punishment of crime, both in this world and afterwards, is committed to a special set of beings, the Erinnyes. The gods who are most worshipped do not exercise that function; they are not immovably identified with the moral order of the world, but frequently deviate from it themselves. In the Odyssey, it is true, we meet with a deeper feeling. Here Zeus is a kind of providence, in whom a man may trust when he does right, and to all whose dispensations it behoves him humbly to submit. A root of monotheism is present here, as in all the Aryan religions from the first, and in Greece it is destined to have a stately growth. The Homeric pantheon, however, as a whole, shows religion at a stage in which it is rather an external ornament to life than an inner inspiration. Perhaps there was never a set of real men who thought of the gods and addressed them according to the fashion of Homer. If such a religion ever actually existed, it was not a strong one. These gods, with their caprices and infirmities and their limited power, could never exercise any strong moral influence or rouse any passion in their worshippers. They are fair-weather gods; the religion is one of children, in whom conscience is not yet awake and the deeper spiritual needs have not yet appeared. What the mind of the Greek has done up to this stage is to discover that nature is not above him; the powers of nature are human to him; they are divine not because they are essentially different from himself, but because they are matchless ideals of his own qualities. It is a religion of free men. But the Greek has not yet discovered how different he himself is from all that is around him; that element of himself which is above nature will when he discovers it make such a religion as the Homeric for ever impossible to him.
Omens.—As the godhead is never far away from the Homeric Greek, and is an active being who takes an interest in human affairs, signs of his presence are not infrequent. The air is the scene of them; in the flight of birds, in sudden noises, the gods send messages; lightning is a sign from Zeus of approaching rain or hail, it may be of approaching war. There are rules for the interpretation of signs, which, however, are in many cases of doubtful significance. Dreams also are a favourite channel for divine communications, but they also may be interpreted wrongly. There are persons who have a special gift for knowing the divine will; the seer ([Greek: mantis]) is enlightened by the deity not by an outward sign but inwardly; he hears the god's voice, and can declare the divine will directly. This gift may reside in a certain family, and may be attached to a certain spot, where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona we read that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests of ascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, and Agamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before the Trojan war.
The State after Death.—With regard to the state after death, belief is not uniform in Homer. There are elaborate funeral rites which point to the assumption that the spirit of the hero is living somewhere and needs various things. But the life of the departed was not mapped out in Greece as it was in Egypt. The ritual of Mycenæ had little influence, for the funeral celebrations in Homer are very similar to those of other early Aryan peoples, and undoubtedly were not imported. What then is thought of the present existence of the hero? He has ceased to exist. The body is the man, the spirit when it has left the body has but a shadow-life, without any strength or hope; at the most it may revive a little at the taste of blood. But while the worship of the departed is seen from Homer to be decaying among the Greeks, imagination is seen to be occupied in more than one direction with the regions where they are, and to be asserting for them a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed. The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiring clearer shape. The punishments are described which certain great transgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; and other details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conception of the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken by the gods when he dies, and where there is no snow nor storm nor rain.
Homer was not the only poet who furnished the Greeks with a system of their gods; nor was his system everywhere accepted without demur. Hesiod, writing in the latter half of the eighth century B.C., gives a "theogony" or birth of the gods, which is also a genesis or origin of the world, for to the Greek mind the gods and the world came into existence together. He complains of those who on this subject have taught fictions which resemble truths, referring perhaps to Homer. His own system of the world is not a light and airy fabric but a laborious work, due no doubt to professional or priestly industry, in which the attempt is made to treat all the divine figures or half-figured spirits the Greeks knew, genealogically, and to give a complete enumeration of them. Myths are given, some of them of a horrible character, which do not occur in Homer. The battle of the gods with the Titans occupies a large part of the poem, and it concludes with a collection of stories showing the descent of heroes from alliances between gods and mortals. This work, as we saw, was considered, along with the Homeric poems, as a standard authority on the subject of the gods, and was appealed to even in the early Christian centuries as showing what the Greeks believed.