[10] Ibid. vi. 209.

[11] Ibid. vii. 260.

[12] Ibid. vii. 228.

[13] Anth. Pal. vii. 555.

[14] Ibid. vii. 340.


IX


"Even this stranger, I suppose, prays to the immortals," says Nestor
in the Odyssey,[1] "since all men have need of gods." When the Homeric
poems were written the Greek temper had already formed and ripened;
and so long as it survived, this recognition of religious duty
remained part of it. The deeper and more violent forms of religious
feeling were indeed always alien, and even to a certain degree
repugnant, to the Greek peoples. Mysticism, as has already been
observed, had no place with them; demons and monsters were rejected
from their humane and rationalised mythology, and no superstitious
terrors forced them into elaboration of ritual. There was no priestly
caste; each city and each citizen approached the gods directly at any
time and place. The religious life, as a life distinct from that of an
ordinary citizen, was unknown in Greece. Even at Rome the perpetual
maidenhood of the Vestals was a unique observance; and they were the
keepers of the hearth-fire of the city, not the intermediaries between