intervention to which Homer resorts so constantly and, to 
     our thinking, often so superfluously. We find it 
     superfluous because the divine machinery seems to us in 
     many cases to do no more than duplicate a natural 
     psychological causation. But ought we not perhaps to 
     say rather that the divine machinery “duplicates” a 
     psychic intervention—that is, presents it in a concrete 
     pictorial form? This was not superfluous; for only in this 
     way could it be made vivid to the imagination of the 
     hearers. The Homeric poets were without the refinements 
     of language which would have been needed to “put 
     across” adequately a purely psychological miracle. What 
     more natural than that they should first supplement, and 
     later replace, an old unexciting threadbare formula like 
     menos embale qnmv by making the god appear as 
     a physical presence and exhort his favorite with the