Subordinate to this general view, there arises another question: how are we to subdivide the inventive parts of the Homeric mythology? What general statements can be propounded, or criteria supplied, to show how much Greece fabricated or moulded for herself, and what she owed to Egypt, or to Phœnicia, or to other lands in the East, whose traditions she had either inherited or received?
A deep obscurity hangs over this subject. We do not know all that was contained in each of the various religions of the East at any one epoch, much less at all the periods within which they may have contributed materials to the gorgeous fabric of Homer. Many things were probably common to several of them: and where this was so, circumstantial evidence cannot avail for determining the source at which the Poet or his nation borrowed.
But several propositions may be laid down, which will tend towards describing the path of our inquiry.
First, the accounts which, transmitted by Herodotus, represent Egypt as the fountain-head of the Greek religion in its mass, are not sustained by the evidence of Homer. And even with respect to many points where the nucleus of the Greek system has something corresponding with it in the Egyptian, it neither follows that it was originally drawn from Egypt by the Greeks, nor that those from whom the Greeks received it had obtained it there. Yet there remains room for very important communications, such, for example, as the oracle of Dodona, or the worship of Minerva, which may be an historic token of an Egyptian colony at Athens.
Secondly, the correspondences between the Homeric system and the Eastern religions, as we know them, are commonly latent, rather than broad or palpable. This may, in part, be owing to the circumstance that our accounts of these religions are in great part so much later than Homer; and a greater resemblance, than is now to be traced, may have subsisted in his time.
But, thirdly, the differences are not differences of detail or degree. A different spirit pervades the Homeric creed and worship, from that which we find in Egyptian, or Median, or Persian systems. One has grovelling animalism, another has metaphysical aspirations, that we do not find in the Greek: but this is not all. If the Homeric scheme is capable of being described, as to its inventive part, by any one epithet, it will be this, that it is intensely human. I do not speak of the later mythology; nor of Hesiod, whose Theogony so marvellously spoils what it systematizes; but of Homer, in whom the ideal Olympus attained its perfection at a stroke. In his preternatural κοσμὸς there is, as far as I can see, much more of what is truly Divine, much more of the residue of primeval tradition, than we can find collected elsewhere: but there is also much more of what is human. The moral form is corrupt: but I am now also speaking of it as a work of human genius, and certainly as one of the most wonderful and splendid of its products. The deep sympathy with Nature, the refined perception of beauty, the freedom, the buoyancy, the elastic movement of every figure on the scene, the intimate sense of association between the denizens of Olympus and the generations of mortal men, the imposing development of a Polity on high, the vivid nationality that riveted its hold on Greece, the richness and inexhaustible diversity of those embellishments which a vigorous fancy knows how to provide, combine to make good the title I have asserted, and, if we are to believe that Homer, in no small part, made what he described, must place his share in the formation of the system in the very foremost rank even of his achievements.