Note 34.1 — Chapter II · Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.

But before beginning the exploration of any large area, whether for the purposes of Comparative Religion, archaeology, or anthropology, we must possess or acquire certain data of ethnography and secular history. We must, for instance, face the chronological question that I mentioned just above, before we can estimate the formative influences at work in the earliest phases of Hellenic development. Recent archaeological evidence, which I cannot here discuss, renders us valuable aid at this critical point of our inquiry. We can no longer relegate the earliest Hellenic invasion of Greece to a very remote period of Mediterranean history. The arguments from the Minoan culture, combined with the still more striking evidence, of which the value is not yet fully appreciated, obtained by the recent excavations of the British School on the soil of Thessaly,34.1 point to the conviction that this, the epoch-making event of the world’s secular and spiritual life, occurred not much earlier than 1500 B.C. On this hypothesis, our quest becomes less vague. We can consider what influences were likely to be radiating from the East upon the opposite shores of the Aegean during those few centuries, in which the Hellenic tribes were passing from barbarism to culture, and the religious beliefs and ritual were developing into that comparatively advanced and complex form of polytheism which is presented about 1000 B.C. in the Homeric poems. By this date we may assert that the Hellenic spirit had evolved certain definite traits and had acquired a certain autonomous power. While continuing always to be quickly responsive to alien influence, it would not henceforth admit the alien product with the submissive and infantine docility of barbarians In fact, when we compare the Homeric religion with that of the fifth century, we feel that in this particular sphere of the social and spiritual life the Hellene in many essentials had already come to his own in the Homeric period. Therefore, in trying to track the earliest streams of influences that moulded his religious consciousness, what was operative before the tenth century is of more primary importance than what was at work upon him afterwards.