Note 60.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

The chief religious achievement of Homer and his fellows was to intensify the anthropomorphic trend in Greek religion, to sharpen and individualise the concepts of divinity, and to diffuse throughout the Hellenic world a certain uniformity of religious imagination. To their work partly, as well as to the higher synthetic power of the Greek mind, we may ascribe the fact that in spite of local varieties of myth and cult-title, in spite of the various elements that the divine personality may have absorbed from earlier cult-figures and cult-forms in the various cult-centres, yet the sense of the individual unity of person was not lost so long as the same name was in vogue; hence Apollo Lykeios of Argos could not be a different person from the Apollo Patroös of Athens, nor could hostility arise between them. That is to say, the higher religious literature imprinted a certain precision and definiteness upon the personal names of the leading divinities and endowed them with a certain essential connotation; for example, the dogma of the virginity of Athena and Artemis, always presented in the higher poetry, prevailed so far as to suppress the maternal character that may have attached to them in the prehistoric period and of which we can still discern a glimmering in certain local cults.60.1 And to this task of shaping the divine characters the rising lyric poetry, which was growing up with the decay of the epic, and which in obedience to the Hellenic passion for disciplined form was developing fixed types of song and music appropriate to special festivals and worships, must have contributed much. The ‘spondaic’ metre was adapted to the invocation or hymn sung at the libation—the σπονδή—to Zeus, and the solemn gravity of the spondaic fragment attributed to Terpander fittingly expresses the majesty of the high God, “the primal cause of all things, the Leader of the world.”60.2 The pæan and the ‘nomos’ became instinct with the Apolline, the Dithyrambos with the Dionysiac spirit,60.3 the spirit of order and self-restraint on the one hand, the spirit of ecstasy and passion on the other. The earlier Greek lyric was in fact mainly religious, being composed for public or private occasions of worship; its vogue was therefore wide and in some communities, as in Arcadia, the singing of these compositions formed part of the national training of the young.61.1