PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Summary

It was, I confess, with grave misgivings that I began the revision of Themis. Much water had flowed, was still flowing swiftly under the archaeological bridge. I feared that my work might have to be ‘scrapped,’ or at least—to borrow the drastic phrase of a young reviewer—that ‘nine-tenths of the book would be better away.’ It is difficult justly to appraise one's own work, but I have tried to be dispassionate and I have decided to let Themis stand, substantially unaltered.

I see now what I scarcely realized in the first excitement of writing that, though prompted and indeed forced upon me by a great archaeological discovery, the book is really addressed not so much to the specialist as to the thinker generally. It is in a word a study of herd-suggestion, or, as we now put it, communal psychology. Its object is the analysis of the Eniautos- or Year-Daimon, who lies behind each and every primitive god; of the Eniautos-Daimon and of his ritual. That the gods and rituals examined are Greek is incidental to my own specialism.

My own sobriety and soundness of judgment I might well doubt, but I have confidence in that of Dr Walter Leaf. In his Homer and History he has to my great satisfaction and pleasure accepted the Eniautos-Daimon as an integral factor of pre- and post-Homeric religion.