Note 29.1 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

Ethical religion.—The theistic system had been turned to good account in other directions than the political before it appeared on the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical religious spirit of Homer—unless we regard him as a man or as a group of men to whom a special revelation had been made—must reflect in some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him. We see then that current conceptions about the Gods had ceased to be inspired merely by fear; a milder sentiment had come to tinge religious thought; the Deity was regarded not only as a righteous God of vengeance, but as loving mercy and compassion and as a defender of the weak and destitute. Only once, and only in regard to the wild sea-god Poseidon, does a Homeric phrase suggest that the deity might have been regarded as in his own nature malevolent.29.1 The cult of Zeus Ξείνιος, the guardian of the stranger and the wanderer, had already arisen. And the sanctity of the oath taken in the name of the deities of the upper and the lower world was the basis of much private and communal morality.