Homer. – Homer stands between the end of the Mycenaean age and the beginning of the historical age. His world is that of the Mycenaean civilization transported to the islands and coasts of Asia Minor and transformed there by the contribution of new Greek elements and the contact with oriental civilizations. But this world is not rendered objectively, but idealized by art. Homer’s religion is neither the Mycenaean religion nor that of the Asian colonies. Just as the language in which the Iliad is written was never spoken, so the religion of the Homeric epos never really existed: it existed only in poetry, as a transfiguration of elements of various origins and provenance. The spirit that presides over this transfiguration is not religious: it is profane, courtly and chivalrous. What goes against this spirit is left out. What is accepted is adapted to its needs. In Homer there is not all religion: there is only one part, and even of this only a more splendid than faithful reflection. There is hardly any trace of magic and other elementary forms of religiosity. The cult of the dead, so flourishing in the Mycenaean age, seems to have disappeared. Homer’s gods are not all those of the Greek religion: Demeter and Dionysus are hardly mentioned. These two deities of earth and vegetation, especially adored by the rural populace, do not suit that noble aristocracy devoted to arms and wars, whose exaltation the epos is destined for. For it, the death of one of its members (everything else does not count) is an occasion for solemn funerals and competitive games: afterwards, there is no it is reason that the thought of the dead periodically returns to sadden the living. The myth, which plays so much part in the epos, is not Homer’s invention: it is an ancient tradition formed partly in the Mycenaean age, partly in much more remote times. Here too Homer chooses and transforms. Certain myths found in Hesiod and other later authors do not appear in Homer. Certainly they pre-existed to Homer as to Hesiod. Indeed, they were probably the most ancient, the most archaic, the crudest: precisely for this reason Homer excludes them. If it welcomes them, it eliminates the crudest features, softens them, humanizes them. Even the gods are completely human, all too human. But this anthropomorphism does not want to be irreverent. Even the humorous and comic traits, which are not lacking in the Homeric representation of the gods, are probably a attenuation of repugnant traits dating back to a more archaic conception of the divine and now incompatible with the spirit of the epic. It is true that they too will soon find themselves in conflict with a more advanced and higher conception of the divine. The disappearance of the Mycenaean civilization before the last Protogenic invaders certainly had repercussions also in the development of religious history: in this development it marked a crisis, a fracture. But Homer is not the exponent of this crisis. He is subjectively dependent on it; but objectively he ignores it: his world is outside history because it is outside reality, even religious reality. It is true that they too will soon find themselves in conflict with a more advanced and higher conception of the divine. The disappearance of the Mycenaean civilization before the last Protogenic invaders certainly had repercussions also in the development of religious history: in this development it marked a crisis, a fracture. But Homer is not the exponent of this crisis. He is subjectively dependent on it; but objectively he ignores it: his world is out of history because it is out of reality, even of religious reality. It is true that they too will soon find themselves in conflict with a more advanced and higher conception of the divine. The disappearance of the Mycenaean civilization before the last Protogenic invaders certainly had repercussions also in the development of religious history: in this development it marked a crisis, a fracture. But Homer is not the exponent of this crisis. He is subjectively dependent on it; but objectively he ignores it: his world is out of history because it is out of reality, even of religious reality.
