In the old ritual dance the individual was nothing, the choral band, the group, everything, and in this it did but reflect primitive tribal life.  Now in the heroic saga the individual is everything, the mass of the people, the tribe, or the group, are but a shadowy background which throws up the brilliant, clear-cut personality into a more vivid light.  The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, “glorious deeds of men,” of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.  When the armies meet it is the leaders who fight in single combat.  These glorious heroes are for the most part kings, but not kings in the old sense, not hereditary kings bound to the soil and responsible for its fertility.  Rather they are leaders in war and adventure; the homage paid them is a personal devotion for personal character; the leader must win his followers by bravery, he must keep them by personal generosity.  Moreover, heroic wars are oftenest not tribal feuds consequent on tribal raids, more often they arise from personal grievances, personal jealousies; the siege of Troy is undertaken not because the Trojans have raided the cattle of the Achaeans, but because a single Trojan, Paris, has carried off Helen, a single Achaean’s wife.

Another noticeable point is that in heroic poems scarcely any one is safely and quietly at home.  The heroes are fighting in far-off lands or voyaging by sea; hence we hear little of tribal and even of family ties.  The real centre is not the hearth, but the leader’s tent or ship.  Local ties that bind to particular spots of earth are cut, local differences fall into abeyance, a sort of cosmopolitanism, a forecast of pan-Hellenism, begins to arise.  And a curious point—­all this is reflected in the gods.  We hear scarcely anything of local cults, nothing at all of local magical maypoles and Carryings-out of Winter and Bringings-in of Summer, nothing whatever of “Suppers” for the souls, or even of worship paid to particular local heroes.  A man’s ghost when he dies does not abide in its grave ready to rise at springtime and help the seeds to sprout; it goes to a remote and shadowy region, a common, pan-Hellenic Hades.  And so with the gods themselves; they are cut clean from earth and from the local bits of earth out of which they grew—­the sacred trees and holy stones and rivers and still holier beasts.  There is not a holy Bull to be found in all Olympus, only figures of men, bright and vivid and intensely personal, like so many glorified, transfigured Homeric heroes.