Elfinspell: Steuding: Gods Determined and Classified; Greek Religion from the Beginning of the Homeric Age, from Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, online text. Includes descriptions of Greek and strictly Roman gods and goddesses.

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From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; pp. 8-9.

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Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend

GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Greek Religion from the Beginning of the Homeric Age

Gods determined and classified. § 13. The pressure of enemies moved the Greek tribes to wander southwards and over the eastern sea to the islands and the coast of Asia Minor; and by these migrations, which took place about a thousand years before our era, a mighty change was brought about in the character of their religion. When the races set forth, the gods they adored indeed accompanied them into their new home and received here new places of worship; and their ritual continued to be practised in their old sanctuaries as well, and was willingly taken over by the conquerors from a fear of making these gods their enemies. But whereas formerly, as it would seem, only one chief deity was worshipped in each spot, the shifting and blending of stems and religious associations now brought many of them together in one and the same district. To make room for all, the sphere of each god’s power had now to be marked out and restricted to a particular department of life; occasionally however, as one might expect from their former more comprehensive character, they overlapped into domains belonging to others.

§ 14. Thus gradually was framed on the human pattern the conception which meets us in Homer — the idea of families of gods and of a patriarchally arranged State of gods, in which each several member exercises only the function apportioned to him. The travelling rhapsodes and later the poets of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves may have had much influence in bringing about a harmony in the mutually conflicting claims of the several deities; but assuredly they did not materially diverge from the faith prevailing in their home, the Ionian cities of the coasts and islands of Asia Minor. In these communities the mixture of different elements of the race must already have been an active cause in thus restricting and equalising different deities’ claims.

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Life After Death.