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First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of Greece not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the 'Urdummheit', for the most part, to a romantic memory, and made religion no longer a mortal danger to humanity.
Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the 'Urdummheit'. For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition, in having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians are the descendants of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their homes, tribes, and tribal traditions.
The background is the pre-Hellenic 'Urdummheit'; the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropomorphic Olympian family, as defined in the Homeric epos and, more timidly, in Hesiod. But of Hesiod we must speak later. Now who are these Olympian Gods and where do they come from? Homer did not 'make' them out of nothing. But the understanding of them is beset with problems.
Preuss applies to it the charming word 'Urdummheit', or 'Primal Stupidity'. In some ways characteristically Greek, in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere that one is tempted to regard it as the normal beginning of all religion, or almost as the normal raw material out of which religion is made.
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