Surely it is an error in historical method to reason as if pre-Homeric Greeks were as addicted to divinising men, building their shrines, and sacrificing to them, as the post-Homeric Greeks were in the seventh and all later centuries. We might as well argue that the apostolic Christians practised mediaeval saint-worship, and adored and built innumerable chapels to dead Saints, because this was the custom of mediaeval Christianity.
To sum up, we have proved that our Homer, in his treatment of old tradition, is a noble poet, that he stands aloof from all the others of Greece in his refusal (save in the Odyssey, a romance) to introduce the wild elements of Märchen, the childish miracles; while he is equally remote from the methods of the pseudo-historians like Eumelus as known to us, and all the Hesiodic genealogisers and inventors of eponymous heroes; and from the manie cyclique of the Ionian Cyclic poets. Really no fact can be more certain; and this fact, even if it were not corroborated by all the others, would prove our Homer to be "alone, aloof, sublime."
[1] Castren, Ethnol. Vorlesungen, pp. 164-169.
[2] Von Hahn, Griechische Märchen, 1.
[3] Pausanias, i. 19, ii. 34.
[4] Child, English and Scottish Ballads, vol. i., "Riddles wisely Answered."
[5] Yen. A., Iliad, ii. 336. Rzach, Hesiod, p. 326.
[6] For many cases in Märchen, see Mr. Crookes' Folk-Lore, vol. xix. p. 156.
[7] Roscher's Lexikon, vol ii. p. 2594.