τυχών· ὅταν δὲ μὴ τύχῃ, διοίχεται.
The mind of man had travelled far onward in its career, and great changes had passed upon his moral tone, before the place of the Prophet, in the estimation of the public, could be so strikingly reversed as we find from these quotations.
In the Homeric age, religion was a real power; and the veneration paid to deity extended so far, at least, to the persons of its ministers, that scarce any human thought could conceive the possibility of their falsifying the awful communications of which they were the vehicles.
But it will be replied, if religion was a power, if whatever it covered with its mantle was accepted and held in honour, then what a deluge of corruption must have spread over Greece from a religion of which Jupiter was the head, and which had Venus for one of its recognised divinities!
Now the age of Homer shows us the religion of Olympus in a state, in which it had not yet become sufficiently the object of scrutiny to suggest, on a large scale, either the depraved imitation which was to be its too speedy result, or the unbelief which formed, in the moral chain of cause and effect, its necessary consummation.
Corruptions of the gods not yet fully felt.
In fact, we do not find that the corrupting influence of the Greek mythology on manners had been fully felt in the time of Homer. Though vices are in particular cases represented as the gifts of particular deities to particular individuals, it does not appear that these were yet regarded as examples for general imitation[726]. But the beginnings of mischief, so vigorous and abundant, did not fail in time to produce their fruit: and in the historic ages of Greece, the models supplied by the conduct of deities were freely pleaded in defence of debauchery and crime[727].
This is in conformity with ordinary experience. The vices of the great are first passed by, as if it were profane to suffer the eye to rest upon them; then they are regarded for a time with depraved admiration; and when the last stage is reached, they are too faithfully copied by the small.
It was hardly possible that men could be effectually swayed for a length of time by the moral government of deities, themselves privileged by human invention for unbounded immorality: but it was naturally the first stage of the destructive process to vitiate the character of the gods, and the next and later one to break down the credit of their administration of human affairs, which only became incredible even to the enlightened part of the community after their moral worthlessness had been fully and long developed.
The Homeric poems expose to our view two standards not mutually accordant, the objective and the subjective. If we pay attention to the impressions current among men respecting the gods, they are the guardians of some moral and social principles of the highest order. But if we take their own word for it, the mere Olympian deities seem ordinarily to appreciate no quality or conduct, except the practice of offering up numerous and well fed animals in sacrifice, each with the accompanying tribute of the appointed portion; that so they may draw, not a moral but a physical, though a comparatively refined, gratification from the savour and the taste[728].