s
of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to
the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we
get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If
northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have
reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full
extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in
building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War.
In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical
transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great
Gods (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of
Europe to unite it.

And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults
which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove
far too much. The open-air gods of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) are
common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are
either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within
walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion,
which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this
labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and
aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like
first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not
Caesar's impression of a Celtic god, or Herodotus' transcript of a
Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and
though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts,
stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most
imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to
the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of
the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic,
not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry
things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten
us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are
terribly provincial and tell their tale with a twang. We can trace our
_Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all that
sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the
_centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the
'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvoelker' as recent e