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But we may suppose the early ideas of the Japanese about the dead to have been much like those of the Greeks of the pre-Homeric era. There was an underground world to which spirits descended; but they were supposed to haunt by preference their own graves, or their "ghost-houses." Only by slow degrees did the notion of their power of ubiquity become evolved.
It is the story of Pelops an episode almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the cave of Polyphemus.
Even to this day Shinto belief represents the pre-Homeric stage of imagination as regards the supernatural. Among the Indo-European races likewise there appeared to have been at first no difference between gods and ghosts, nor any ranking of gods as greater and lesser. These distinctions were gradually developed. "The spirits of the dead," says Mr.
We know of no such poem by any of the pre-Homeric poets, though there were probably many such writers among them; instances, however, may be found from Homer downwards, e.g. his Margites, and the similar poems of others.
We are also told that Cyprus furnished the iron breast-plates worn by Demetrius Poliorcetes; and in pre-Homeric times it was a Phoenician Cinyras who gave to Agamemnon his breast-plate of steel, gold, and tin. That more remains of iron arms and implements have not been found on Phoenician sites is probably owing to the rapid oxydisation of the metal, which consequently decays and disappears.
Here, it would seem, in their early voyagings, the Pre-Homeric Greeks first came upon a land where the palm-tree was not only indigenous, but formed a leading and striking characteristic, everywhere along the low sandy shore lifting its tuft of feathery leaves into the bright blue sky, high above the undergrowth of fig, and pomegranate, and alive.
What the theistic conception in the pre-Homeric times was we are unable to say definitely, but presumably in every separate community there was a local deity who had practically the direction of affairs. In process of time, through conditions not known to us, Zeus came to be recognized throughout the Hellenic world as the principal deity.
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