“A trumpet sound
Rang through the air, and shook the Olympian height;
Then terror seized the monarch of the dead,
And springing from his throne he cried aloud
With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder
By Neptune’s mighty arm, forthwith reveal
To mortal and immortal eyes those halls
So drear and dank, which e’en the gods abhor.”[4]

Earth rent from its foundations! Tartarus itself laid bare! The whole
world torn asunder and turned upside down! Why, my dear friend, this is
a perfect hurly-burly, in which the whole universe, heaven and hell,
mortals and immortals, share the conflict and the peril.

[Footnote 4: _Il._ xxi. 388; xx. 61.]

7
A terrible picture, certainly, but (unless perhaps it is to be taken
allegorically) downright impious, and overstepping the bounds of
decency. It seems to me that the strange medley of wounds, quarrels,
revenges, tears, bonds, and other woes which makes up the Homeric
tradition of the gods was designed by its author to degrade his deities,
as far as possible, into men, and exalt his men into deities--or rather,
his gods are worse off than his human characters, since we, when we are
unhappy, have a haven from ills in death, while the gods, according to
him, not only live for ever, but live for ever in misery.

8
Far to be preferred to this description of the Battle of the Gods are
those passages which exhibit the divine nature in its true light, as