Abstract
After two brief studies by Friedrich August Ukert (1850) and Eduard Gerhard (1852) [1], in the great tradition ofAltertumswissenschaft, Joseph-Antoine Hild published a monograph in France in 1881 entitled Étude sur les démons dans la littérature et la religion des Grecs, this is still the only comprehensive work on the subject, and led to the article " Daemon " by the same author in the Dictionnaire des Antiquités grecques et romaines (1896) [2]. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker'sGriechische Götterlehre(1857-1862) and Hermann Usener'sGötternamen (1896) [3] also illustrate the way in which this period approached the question of the origins of Greek religion, and included daimones in a kind of typology of the divine, contrasting the " grands " and the " petits " gods. The daimones are then seen as " minor gods ", and the daimōn in the singular as " the vague symbol of a providence that is not specially embodied in any deity " [4].
