Among the Greeks there are few traces of monotheism, but we have reason for this in the fact that their earliest literature dates from so late a period.  It began with Homer not earlier than 600 B.C., and direct accounts of the religion of the Greeks are not traced beyond 560 B.C.  But Welcker, whose examinations have been exhaustive, has, in the opinion of Max Mueller, fairly established the primitive monotheism of the Greeks.  Mueller says:  “When we ascend with him to the most distant heights of Greek history the idea of God as the supreme being stands before us as a simple fact.  Next to this adoration of One God the father of men we find in Greece a worship of nature.  The powers of nature, originally worshipped as such, were afterward changed into a family of gods, of which Zeus became the king and father.  The third phase is what is generally called Greek mythology; but it was preceded in time, or at least rendered possible in thought, by the two prior conceptions, a belief in a supreme God and a worship of the powers of nature....  The divine character of Zeus, as distinguished from his mythological character, is most carefully brought out by Welcker.  He avails himself of all the discoveries of comparative philology in order to show more clearly how the same idea which found expression in the ancient religions of the Brahmans, the Sclavs, and the Germans had been preserved under the same simple, clear, and sublime name by the original settlers of Hellas."[154]

The same high authority traces in his own linguistic studies the important fact that all branches of the Aryan race preserve the same name for the Supreme Being, while they show great ramification and variation in the names of their subordinate gods.  If, therefore, the Indo-Aryans give evidence of a monotheistic faith at the time of their dispersion, there is an a priori presumption for the monotheism of the Greeks.  “Herodotus,” says Professor Rawlinson, “speaks of God as if he had never heard of polytheism.”  The testimony of the Greek poets shows that beneath the prevailing polytheism there remained an underlying conception of monotheistic supremacy.  Professor Rawlinson quotes from an Orphic poem the words: 

       “Ares is war, peace
   Soft Aphrodite, wine that God has made
   Is Dionysius, Themis is the right
   Men render to each.  Apollo, too,
   And Phoebus and AEschlepius, who doth heal
   Diseases, are the sun.  All these are one.”

Max Mueller traces to this same element of monotheism the real greatness and power of the Hellenic race when he says:  “What was it, then, that preserved in their hearts (the Greeks), in spite even of the feuds of tribes and the jealousies of states, the deep feeling of that ideal unity which constitutes a people?  It was their primitive religion; it was a dim recollection of the common allegiance they owed from time immemorial to the great father of gods and men; it was their belief in the old Zeus of Dodona