Note 1015 — SECT. X. The office of the Homeric Poems in relation to that of the early Books of Holy Scripture.

In the Roman History of Mommsen is contained a masterly comparison between those two rival developments of human life, the collective and the individual, which are represented by Rome, and by later or historic Greece, respectively. (Mommsen Röm. Gesch. I. 2. pp. 18–21.) Both of them are open to criticism. In the one we may notice and brand the characteristic of an iron repression, in the other that of a lawless freedom. But the age which ended with the war of Troy, and cast the reflection of its dying beams upon its noble but chequered epilogue in the Odyssey, appears to make no fundamental deviation from the mean of wisdom in either direction: on the whole, it united reverence with independence, the restraint of discipline with the expansion of freedom: and it stood alike removed, in the plenitude of its natural elasticity, from those extremes which in modern religion have, on the one side, absorbed the individual, and on the other (so to speak) excommunicated him by isolation.