henician
discoverers and merchants, or whether it came by land along the trade
routes of Asia Minor and across the Egean, is uncertain. It is in any
case traceable to North Syria, where in the early part of the second
millennium B.C. Babylonian and Egyptian influences met and gave rise
to some rude civilisation. Greece was not conquered from the East,
but stirred to new life by the communication of Eastern ideas.

Greek religion was not much assisted, or indeed much modified in any
way, by this movement. The worship of ancestors which went on in the
palaces was not contrary to Greek sentiment, perhaps not even much
more elaborate than that sentiment required. But this part of
religion was not a growing thing in Greece; and the royal practices
did not prevent it from dying gradually away in later times. That any
god was imported into Greece at this time, is not proved. Where
Greeks and Phenicians met, as in some of the islands, a Greek and an
Eastern god might be identified; the worship of Aphrodite and that of
Astarte were fused in this way in Cyprus, and Aphrodite may thus have
acquired some new characteristics even in Greece. This is not
certain. Perhaps the most important thing to notice in this
connection is that the new type of society at the royal courts may
have furnished a model for the arrangement of the heavenly family
when that arrangement came to be made. The Eastern influence came to
an end in time, and the pressure being removed, the monarchies
crumbled away, the court worships were discontinued, and Greece was
left free, after this awaking to fuller life, to pursue her own
thoughts in her own fashion.

Homer was regarded by the Greeks who lived after him as the founder
of their religion. Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod
lived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they who
framed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned to
them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. These
writers accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we know
that their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, and
they thus provided an early bond of national unity.

The Homeric poems are the outcome, whether we regard them as the work
of one singer or of two, or of a whole school, of long processes of
growth. The poetic art which makes them the delight of all mankind is
not a first experiment, but the ripe result of an elaborate method.
The stories a