Note 23.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically. Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky was also in the first period—so far as we can reconstruct it—Zeus ‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him. Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.23.1