An Achaian
civilization was the result, full of freshness and power, in which
usage had a great sacredness, religion was a moral spring of no mean
force, slavery though it existed was not associated with cruelty, the
worst extremes of sin had no place in the life of the people, liberty
had an informal but very real place in public institutions, and
manners reached to much refinement; while on the other hand, fierce
passion was not abated by conventional restraints, slaughter and
bondage were the usual results of war, the idea of property was but
very partially defined, and though there were strong indeterminate
sentiments of right there is no word in Homer signifying law. Upon the
whole, though a very imperfect, it was a wonderful and noble nursery
of manhood.

It seems clear that this first civilization of the peninsula was sadly
devastated by the rude hands of the Dorian conquest. Institutions like
those of Lycurgus could not have been grafted upon the Homeric
manners; and centuries elapsed before there emerged from the political
ruin a state of things favorable to refinement and to progress in the
Greece of history; which though in so many respects of an unequalled
splendor, yet had a less firm hold than the Achaian time upon some of
the highest social and moral ideas. For example, the position of women
had greatly declined, liberty was perhaps less largely conceived, and
the tie between religion and morality was more evidently sundered.

After this sketch of the national existence which Homer described, and
to the consolidation of which he powerfully ministered, let us revert
to the state in which he found and left the elements of a national
religion. A close observation of the poems pretty clearly shows us
that the three races which combined to form the nation had each of
them their distinct religious traditions. It is also plain enough that
with this diversity there had been antagonism. As sources illustrative
of these propositions which lie at the base of all true comprehension
of the religion--which may be called Olympian from its central seat--I
will point to the numerous signs of a system of nature-worship as
prevailing among the Pelasgian masses; to the alliance in the war
between the nature-powers and the Trojans as against the loftier
Hellenic mythology; to the legend in Iliad, i., 396-412, of the great
war in heaven, which symbolically describes the collision on earth
between the ideas which were locally