* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin
Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the
root of the English "mind."
17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in
religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I
hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the
ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical
nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in
their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility
to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is
one of the most curious errors of modernism,--the peculiar and judicial
blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the
sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language
when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to
a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests,
studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and
especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely
ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two
broad classes of worthy or worthless,--good, and good for nothing.
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