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Title: Outline-history of Greek religion

Author: Lewis Richard Farnell

Release Date: August 14, 2023 [eBook #71402]

Language: English

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTLINE-HISTORY OF GREEK
RELIGION ***





 OUTLINE-HISTORY OF
 GREEK RELIGION

 BY
 LEWIS RICHARD FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.
 RECTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; GIFFORD LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
 ST. ANDREWS; FORMERLY WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE
 RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; HIBBERT LECTURER; HON. D.
 LITT. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, AND
 UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS; AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK
 STATES,” “THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION,” “HIGHER ASPECTS
 OF GREEK RELIGION,” “GREECE AND BABYLON”




 LONDON
 DUCKWORTH & CO.
 3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN




 [IMPRINT]

_First issued 1920_

_New Edition 1921_




_All rights reserved_




 CONTENTS

 I. The Sources and the Evidence
 II. The Prehistoric Period
 III. The Second Period, 900-500 B.C.
 IV. The Third Period, 500-338 B.C.
 V. The Period after Alexander
 Literature
 Endnotes



 OUTLINE-HISTORY OF
 GREEK RELIGION

{7}

 CHAPTER I.
 THE SOURCES AND THE EVIDENCE

The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion,
as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to
have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is
only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and
imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be
recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of
religion.

The history of Greek religion means, partly, the account and the
interpretation of the various rites, cults and cult-ideas of the
various Greek families, tribes and communities; partly the estimate of
the religious temperament, both of the masses and of the individuals
who emerged from among them and of whom some record has been
preserved.

Now as the Greek world in the long period of its independence was
never organised as a single State, the attempt to give a summary and
general account of its religion is confronted with the perplexity
arising from the often incalculable diversity of {8} religious forms
and ideas in the different centres of its social life, which was in
the highest degree centrifugal. Nevertheless, as will be shown, we
find in the midst of manifold local variation certain uniformity of
religious psychology, making for uniformity of practice, which enables
us to deliver certain general pronouncements about the whole.

_Ancient Sources: Literary_.--Our real knowledge of any ancient
religion depends obviously on the copiousness and variety of our
records. And it is likely to be more luminous, if the society in
question expressed its religious life not only in surviving
literature, but also in surviving art. Of both these kinds the student
of Greek religion has an unusually rich material.

For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement,
Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in
its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with
religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying
penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental
life. This is obviously true of the epic period, which produced the
two types of the chivalrous and the theologic epic, and which has left
us most valuable material for the religious history of the tenth and
ninth centuries in the Homeric poems, and of the eighth and seventh
centuries in the poems of Hesiod and in the ‘Homeric’ hymns. It is
none the less true of the great lyric movement that followed upon
that, when the greatest poets devoted themselves to the composition of
songs for festal-religious occasions or of hymns for the service of
temple or altar; and besides these whose great names and fragments of
{9} whose great works survive, there was another less distinguished
group of special ‘hieratic’ poets, such as Pamphos and Mousaios, who
composed hymns for the service of certain mystery-cults, and whose
compositions were preserved as liturgical documents by the priestly
families that administered them.

The sententious ethical-political poetry of the sixth century, the
elegiacs of Theognis and Solon, is instinct with religious emotion and
reflection. And the greatest product of the poetic genius of Hellas,
the tragic drama, is of a religious character, both in respect of its
origin and much of its subject-matter. Finally, the later learned
poetry of the Ptolemaic period, the Kassandra of Lycophron, the hymns
and other works of Kallimachos, the epic poem of Apollonios Rhodios,
are full of antiquarian religious lore.

At the same time, our knowledge is much indebted to the great
prose-writers of Greece, the philosophers, historians and orators;
among the philosophers, especially to Plato, who more copiously than
any of the others reveals to us, however much he idealises, the
religious psychology and cult-phenomena of his period; among the
historians, especially to Herodotus, who is the intellectual ancestor
of the modern anthropologist and student of comparative religion and
whose presentation of the facts is coloured with religious conviction.
The works of the Attic orators are of special value for our purpose,
first because the classical orator was far more apt than the modern to
dilate on religious themes and appeal to religious sentiments, as
religion was far more closely interfused with political and social
life; secondly, because we are more sure of the orator than we can be
of the poetic or philosophic {10} writer that his words are attuned to
the average pitch of popular belief and sentiment.

It is true then that all the great fields of Greek literature make
their several contributions to the material of our subject. And
besides the works of the great masters, the student has to reckon with
the secondary and parasitic work of the later scholiasts, compilers
and commentators, which is even more replete with the special
information upon which the history of Greek religion can be built. The
study of it is, in fact, almost coextensive with the whole study of
Greek literature.

But amidst this profusion of material we must specially mark the works
of those ancients who wrote direct treatises on the various religious
phenomena, on the Gods, the cult-practices, the theologic and
mythologic systems of the Hellenic societies. The earliest of such
works that have come down to us are the poems of Hesiod and the
Hesiodic school, the Works and Days and the Theogony, while of parts
of the ‘Homeric’ hymns the special theme is the attributes and
functions of the various divinities. But it was not till the period of
scientific activity after Aristotle that definite treatises in prose
on different departments of the national religion began to be rife. A
chapter on sacrifice by Theophrastos is mainly preserved for us by
Porphyry. The writers of ‘Atthides’ or Attic history and antiquities,
who belonged mainly to the third century, were special workers in this
field; Philochoros, the chief of them, wrote ‘on festivals,’ ‘on
sacred days,’ ‘on divination,’ ‘on the Attic mysteries’; Istros, the
slave and friend of Kallimachos, on the ‘manifestations of Apollo’ and
on {11} ‘the Cretan sacrifices’; while the ‘exegetic work’ of
Kleidemos was, if we may judge from the fragments that remain,
occupied with the problems of religion and mythology. Outside this
circle we hear of other contributions to the history of Greek
religion, such as the treatises of Herakleides, probably the pupil of
Aristotle, usually called ‘Pontikos,’ on ‘the foundations of temples,’
and ‘on oracles’; and a work by an unknown Sokrates of Kos on the
important subject of ‘Invocation-titles of the Gods.’ Lastly may be
mentioned here a treatise of Apollodoros, ‘περι Θεῶν,’ which, if he is
to be identified with the author of the ‘Bibliotheca,’ was probably a
learned account of the popular religion rather than a metaphysical
enquiry.

Of nearly all this scientific post-Aristotelian literature only
isolated fragments survive in quotations by later writers,
lexicographers, and scholiasts, who were no doubt more deeply indebted
to it than they always acknowledged; but it is some compensation for
our loss that the work last mentioned, the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros,
has been preserved, a rich storehouse of myth and folklore with some
infusion of actual cult-record. Among the later literature our subject
is indebted to the geographer, Strabo, for many incidental
observations of local cults and ritual; still more to the philosophic
moralist and _littérateur_, Plutarch, a man of earnest religious
interest and some power of original thought, who knew the religion of
his country at first hand and at a time when it was yet alive, and who
devoted to it much attention and literary industry; hence we must rank
high among our ancient authorities his _Quæstiones Græcæ_ and his
{12} treatises ‘on the Pythian Oracle’ and on ‘the cessation of
oracles.’ Again, much desultory but varied information is afforded by
the compilers Athenæus, in his _Deipnosophistæ_, and Stobæus, in
his _Florilegium_. But of higher value than all these, or in fact than
any work that has been bequeathed to us from antiquity, is the
_Descriptio Græciæ_, by Pausanias, composed about 180 A.D.; for he
travelled somewhat as a modern anthropologist, relying partly on
earlier literature, yet using his own eyes and ears and his own notes;
and his ruling passion was the study of the folk-religion and the
religious monuments; so that it is due mainly to him that we know
something of the village-religion of Hellas as distinct from that of
the great cities, and can frame working theories of the evolution
through immemorial ages of various growths of the polytheism.

The lexicographers Harpokration, Hesychios and Suidas contribute facts
of value, especially in their citation of cult-appellatives, which
owing to the magic value of the special name or title whereby the
deity was invoked throw a revealing light on the significance and
power of many a worship, and help to frame our conception of the
complex character of many a divinity. Again, the various collections
of ‘Scholia’ on the classical texts are a rich quarry for our
reconstruction of the fabric of Hellenic religion; and of chief value
among these are the Scholia on Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides,
Aristophanes and Theocritus, while Servius’ _Commentary on Vergil_
tells us even more about Greek cult and mythology than about Roman;
and high in this class of our authorities we must rank a work of late
Byzantine {13} learning, the _Commentary of Tzetzes_ on Lykophron’s
poem, ‘Kassandra,’ for his scholia are charged with remote antiquarian
lore derived from good sources.

Finally, we gather much of our knowledge from the controversial
treatises of the early Christian Fathers, written with propagandist
zeal in the heat of their struggle against Paganism. They reveal to us
much of the religion that they strove to overthrow by the exposure of
its viciousness and its absurdities. But their statements must be used
with cautious criticism. Their knowledge was by no means always at
first hand, unless--which we rarely know to have been the case--they
were, like Clemens of Alexandria, converted Pagans who had been bred
up in the Græco-Roman polytheism. Their statements, for instance,
about the Greek mysteries are often vague and unconvincing, while in
their desire to include them all in one general condemnation they
confuse Anatolian rites with Eleusinian. And they are pardonably blind
to the often beautiful ritual, the nobler ideas and the higher moral
elements in the older Mediterranean religions. Nevertheless, if we
make due allowance for prejudice and exaggeration, works such as the
_Protreptica_ of Clemens, the treatise of Arnobius, _Adversus Gentes_,
of Firmicus Maternus, _De Errore Profanarum Gentium_, Eusebius’
_Præparatio Evangelica_, Augustine’s _De Civitate Dei_, Athenagoras’
_Legatio_, must be ranked among the primary sources of our history.

A special but very important chapter in the later history of Greek
religion is the account of the growth and diffusion of the religious
brotherhoods, especially the Orphic Dionysiac societies. For these we
have something of direct liturgical evidence in the {14} collection of
Orphic hymns, mainly the products of the later theosophic period, but
throwing light on the theology and ritual of these sects. But our
knowledge of this mystic religion which was engrafted upon Hellenism
has been in recent times enriched by the priceless discovery of an
ancient poetical Orphic liturgy engraved upon gold-leaf found in tombs
of Crete and South Italy and probably a product of the fifth century
B.C.

_Monumental_.--The above is a sketch of our more important literary
sources. The knowledge to be derived from them would, on the whole and
in many important details, remain vague and uncertain, were it not
supplemented and secured by the evidence coming from another source
which we may term semi-literary, the evidence from inscriptions. These
have been accumulated in vast profusion during the last thirty years,
and have been, and are still being, reduced to order for our special
purpose. The public inscriptions, being dry state-documents, do not
reveal to us the heart of any mystery or the religious soul of the
people, but rather the State-organisation and the exact minutiæ of
ritual and sacrifice from which we can sometimes reconstruct an image
of the inward religious thought. And many a local cult of value for
our total impression that was unrecorded by any writer is revealed to
us by these monuments. But the needs and aspirations of the private
man are better attested by the private inscriptions attached to
ex-voto dedications or commemorating divine benefits received.

Yet amidst all this wealth of evidence there seems one thing lacking.
Of actual temple-liturgies, of formal prayers proffered round the
altars, of the {15} hymns chanted in the public service, of all that
might constitute a text of Greek church-service there is comparatively
little preserved. One or two hymns and a few fragments of the
religious lyric of the seventh century--to which we may now add the
important recent find of the pæans of Pindar--a strophe of an ancient
hymn to Dionysos sung by the Elean women, a fourth-century pæan to
Dionysos composed for the Delphic service, the newly discovered hymn
of the Kouretes in Crete, a few formulæ of prayers quoted or
paraphrased by later writers--all this appears meagre material when we
compare it with the profusion of documents of the public and private
religion that are streaming in from Babylon.

But in respect of another source of the history of religion, our Greek
material is unique, namely, the monuments of art. For the greatest art
of Hellas was mainly religious, the greatest artists working for the
religious service of the State. And the surviving works of sculpture,
painting and glyptic, wrought either for public or private purposes,
present us often not only with facts of religion and ritual unrecorded
in literature, but also with an impression hard to gain otherwise of
the religious consciousness of the people and serve also as witnesses
to the strength of the religious feeling. For instance, the knowledge
and appreciation of Athena’s personality that we derive from Attic
monuments is deeper and more vivid than any that we gain from the
literature. Therefore the study of Greek religion is concerned as much
with the art and archæology as with the literature.




 CHAPTER II.
 THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

{16}

A summary sketch of so manifold a theme as that with which this
short handbook deals will be of more value if it can present the facts
in some kind of chronologic sequence.

We may conveniently distinguish four periods: the first, the
prehistoric, falling mainly in the second millennium B.C. and closing
with the epoch marked by the Homeric poems; the second, extending from
900 to 500 B.C., beginning with the colonial expansion of Hellas and
ending before the Persian invasion; the third, from 500 to 338 B.C.,
including the greatest century of Greek history and closing with the
battle of Chæronea and the establishment of Macedonian supremacy; the
fourth and last, the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period.

The chronologic statement is embarrassed by the absence of any record
of date for the institution and diffusion of most of the cults and for
the growth of certain religious ideas; nor can we safely date a
religious fact by the date of the author who first mentions it; a
detail of ritual, a myth, a religious concept, only attested by
Pausanias or a late scholiast, may descend from an age centuries
before the Homeric. And our earliest inscriptions do not {17} as yet
reach back to a period earlier than the beginning of the seventh
century.

For determining our view of Greek religion in the second millennium
B.C., when Hellenism was in the making, the poems of Homer and Hesiod
are of priceless value if they are used with cautious and trained
criticism. We depend greatly also on the general inductions of
comparative religion and anthropology, which may sometimes guide us
rightly in this matter, especially if the anthropological comparison
is drawn from more or less adjacent communities rather than from the
Antipodes. We depend also on the evidence of the monuments of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion, revealing glimpses of the practices and
faith of a people of high culture, whom no one would dare now to call,
at least in the earlier stage of their life, Hellenic, but from whom
the earliest Hellenes doubtless adopted much into their own religion.

_Sketch of Homeric religion_.--The poems of Homer present us with an
advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already
correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family
under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or
‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and
dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather
concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined
personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance
and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. The anthropomorphic
bias is dominant in the poems, plastically shaping the figures of all
the divinities, except occasionally some of the lower grade, such as
{18} the river-god Skamandros. Even the vague group of nymphs, female
‘daimones’ of the rill and the mountain, while lacking individual
characterisation, bear the anthropomorphic name, ‘Brides,’ or ‘young
women,’ which is the root-meaning of Νύμφη. Though the gods and
goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves
in the form of any animal--birds by choice--yet their abiding type is
human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera,
still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera
βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’--the term is a complimentary
epithet of women--and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing
eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions
and ethical as well as artistic emotions. The highest among them are
not imagined as Nature-powers, bound up with or immanent in the forces
and departments of the natural world, for such a description applies
only to his wind-Gods and nymphs and gods of river and sea; also,
though more loosely, to his Helios, the God of the Sun; to beings in
fact that count little in his religious world. It scarcely applies to
Poseidon, for though his province is the sea, and some of his
functions and appellatives ‘the girdler of the earth,’ ‘the
earth-shaker,’ ‘he of the dark blue locks’ are derived from it, he is
also the builder of the walls of Troy, the family deity of the house
of Nestor, and the God of horses. It does not describe at all his mode
of imagining and presenting Apollo, Hera, Athena, Hermes and others.
There is no hint that these divinities were conceived by him as
nature-powers or as evolved from any part of the natural world. {19}
The High God, Zeus, though specially responsible for the atmospheric
and celestial phenomena, is not identified with the thunder or even
with the sky, though a few phrases may reveal the influence of an
earlier animistic conception of the divine sky. His religious world,
in short, is morphologically neither a system of polydaimonism nor one
of pantheism in which a divine force is regarded as universally
immanent in the world of things; but is constructed on the lines of
personal theism.

We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in
regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced
beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the
Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the
Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that
is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric
Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the
Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully
developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not
notably different from the Homeric.

Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the
religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important
respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous
and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the
side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those
who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or
even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are
{20} general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the
lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the
oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as
mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the
Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to
men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the
cause of all their evils.

Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism.
We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination
of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe;
it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is
solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with
altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a
rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear.

This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief
that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion
of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based
on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing
near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still
maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a
product of a much later period, and that the religion which they
enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of
Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology
are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may
be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of
Peisistratos certain {21} religious forces were rife, and certain
religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.

Still less reasonable is it to imagine that Homer constructs a
religious world out of his own brain. We must suppose that he reflects
something real and contemporary. Only we must guard ourselves from the
serious error of supposing that he reflects the whole. Much is
doubtless missing in his account which we may be able to supply from
Hesiod and other sources by means of reasonable hypotheses.

The assumption is, then, that the Homeric poems present us with a
part-picture of the religion that prevailed among some of the leading
Greek communities before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and
the Ionic colonisation of Asia Minor.

_Pre-Homeric period of religion_.--Now when we consider how slow of
growth and enduring are the forms and the moral and metaphysical
concepts of religion we have the right to believe that part of what
Homer records on these matters is the inherited tradition of an age
some centuries earlier than his own. It is probable that those
earliest Aryan immigrants from the north, Achæans, Dryopes, Minyai
and others--who by mingling with peoples of aboriginal Mediterranean
stock and of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture constituted the happy blend
that we call the Hellenic race--had already arrived at the stage of
personal theism; and that Hellenic religion proper does not start with
a ‘godless period’[21.1] when the unseen powers were only dimly
outlined in the vaguer and more fleeting characters of what is {22}
called animism. We now know from the valuable discovery of a cuneiform
inscription that the Iranian people had evolved such personal deities
as Mitra and Varuna before 1400 B.C.[22.1] And we have the right to
suppose that their western kinsfolk, who were forcing their way
through the Balkans, probably only a century earlier, were at least at
the same level of religious imagination. We can best understand the
picture of the religious world of Homer and also the later
cult-records, if we believe that the kindred tribes coming from the
north brought in certain personal deities, some of whom were common to
more than one stock, and one at least may have been common to them
all. This would best explain the supremacy of Zeus, the Sky-God, the
diffusion of his name Olympios, derived from the mountain that
dominates the northern frontier, near to which the people that were to
lead the history of Greece had at one time temporary settlements and
which they regarded as the throne of their high God. The wide
geographical area of his cult cannot be naturally explained on the
assumption that at any period in Hellenic history he had been merely
the special deity of one particular tribe. Also as regards two other
high Gods at least, Apollo and Poseidon, we may be reasonably sure
that already in the pre-Homeric period certain tribes other than the
Achæans had these cult-figures. In the Hyperborean ritual, which
reflects at points the earliest days of Hellenism, we can follow the
track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly
clear that {23} Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the
special tribal deity of the Minyai.

We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the
formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had
already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the
spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier
periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having
the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding
strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships
by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness.

Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the
conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically.
Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky
was also in the first period--so far as we can reconstruct it--Zeus
‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the
earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him.
Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε
Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an
older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a
phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.[23.1]

We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal
deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted
itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early
Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived
from the life of the {24} family could be applied to them; although we
can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine
relationships--the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance--do
not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.

_Minoan-Mycenæan religion_.--But any account of the Hellenic
polytheism of the second millennium demands a critical study of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion as well, and before we can decide what part
of the Homeric and later systems belongs to the aboriginal
Aryan-Hellenic tradition, we must know what the northerners found
indigenous in the lands that they conquered or occupied. We know now
that they found in many centres a culture superior to their own and a
religion of an advanced theistic type with elaborate, though mainly
aniconic, ritual, devoted pre-eminently to a Great Goddess, by whose
side a God was only the subordinate partner. It has been pointed
out[24.1] that where we find in historic Greece the Goddess-cult
predominant, and especially the prevalence of a virgin-goddess, we
should recognise the Minoan-Mycenæan tradition in antagonism to the
‘Aryan,’ the latter invariably maintaining the predominance of the
God. We may therefore believe the cults of Artemis in Arcadia and
Attica, of Athena in Attica, the cult--though not the name--of Hera in
Argos[24.2] and Samos, to have been inherited from the former rather
than to have been brought in by the latter. And sometimes linguistic
science will be able to assign the different personalities of the
polytheism to its different {25} ethnic strains, by determining the
group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those
that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or
Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece
from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos,
probably Poseidon and Apollo. On the other hand, ‘Athena,’ ‘Artemis,’
‘Aphrodite,’ ‘Hephaistos’ defy explanation on these lines, and
probably belong to a primitive Ægean language. We may be doubtful
about ‘Hermes,’ though elsewhere I have argued for his ‘non-Hellenic’
origin. That philology has not yet brought us nearer to the solution
of many of these problems is due to the lacunæ in our knowledge of
the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean languages, and especially to our
ignorance of the Minoan script for which we have masses of material
but as yet no interpreter. Finally, the evidence of the early
geographical area of a certain cult may sometimes be decisive in
itself; this is the case in regard to the cults of the ‘Mother of the
Gods’ and of Aphrodite, who are aboriginally connected with Crete and
Cyprus respectively, that is, with the centres of the Minoan culture.

We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a
blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer
may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion
was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena,
Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already
‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic
cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to
the Olympian family, are {26} equally warm on the side of Troy and are
treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position
of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding
him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan
poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his
pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were
composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he
was therefore supposed to guard.

But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of
details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of
the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must
often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of
the composite whole.

_Proto-Hellenic period_.--The very high development of this
Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its
own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the
advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism
affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in
the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful
analysis of the later cult-records.

_Family religion_.--Society in the latter half of the second
millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had
evolved the monogamic family. Demeter--whose Aryan descent is proved
by her name--was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes
as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the
Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the
religion of the family, which was the life-source {27} of much of the
private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest
period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the
garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the
kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life
in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the
hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its
sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great
antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the
personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.

Again, the wider kinship-groups of the φρατρίαι and γένη are obviously
pre-Homeric, and doubtless these had been consecrated by aboriginal
religion, though we cannot date precisely the emergence of such
cult-forms as Zeus Φράτριος and Athena Φρατρία, the deities who were
specially concerned with the constitution and rights of the
kindred-group.

_Political religion_.--Further, it is fairly clear that already in
this first stage the religion had become closely interfused with the
higher political and social life. Although the greater part of the
population lived still under the tribal system in scattered
villages--κωμηδόν--yet the ‘polis’ had already arisen; and in certain
cases we may surmise for it a religious origin, where its name is
derived from the personal name or the shrine of some divinity.
Examples are ‘Athenai,’ Alalkomenai, Potniai, perhaps Megara. In these
cases the temple must have been the nucleus around which grew up the
secular habitations; and the deity of the temple would become supreme
in the political religion. {28} Athena had won this position at Athens
and probably elsewhere in the immemorial pre-Homeric past; and this
explains her character in the Homeric poem as the divinity who more
than all others inspires political wisdom and counsel. Various
indications point in fact to the belief that the earliest development
of the city life was closely bound up with the cults of Zeus and
Athena; for no other divinity was ever styled Polieus or Polias by any
Greek State; and this agrees mainly with the presentation of them in
the Homeric poems. The unanimity of the tradition points back to the
second millennium, as the period when this political characterisation
of the two deities was determined. And this view is strikingly
confirmed by the records concerning the ritual and the establishment
of the cult of Zeus ‘Polieus’ on the Athenian Akropolis, an
institution attributed to Kekrops and marking probably the
Hellenisation of Attica; the singular features of the ritual and the
association preserved in its legend of Attica with Crete indicate a
high antiquity, when agriculture was the economic basis of the
political as well as the religious life.

We may believe that other cults besides the two just mentioned played
their part in the political growth of the pre-Homeric world. The
marketplace, the cradle of political oratory, had become sacred
ground, as Homer himself attests; and this consecration was probably
marked by the presence of some ‘agalma,’ a sacred stone of Hermes, for
instance. Apollo, also, had early divested himself of the aboriginal
character of the god of the wood and of the homeless migratory host,
had become a builder of cities, and had established himself in the
{29} city’s streets with a change in the meaning of his title,
Αγυιεύς, once an appellative of the Way-God who guided the host
through the wild, now of the deity who guarded the ways of the city.
And already, before Homer, his shrine at Pytho was beginning to
acquire wealth and political importance as an oracular centre of
consultation.

_Ethical religion_.--The theistic system had been turned to good
account in other directions than the political before it appeared on
the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been
nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical
religious spirit of Homer--unless we regard him as a man or as a group
of men to whom a special revelation had been made--must reflect in
some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him.
We see then that current conceptions about the Gods had ceased to be
inspired merely by fear; a milder sentiment had come to tinge
religious thought; the Deity was regarded not only as a righteous God
of vengeance, but as loving mercy and compassion and as a defender of
the weak and destitute. Only once, and only in regard to the wild
sea-god Poseidon, does a Homeric phrase suggest that the deity might
have been regarded as in his own nature malevolent.[29.1] The cult of
Zeus Ξείνιος, the guardian of the stranger and the wanderer, had
already arisen. And the sanctity of the oath taken in the name of the
deities of the upper and the lower world was the basis of much private
and communal morality.

_Art an aspect of religion_.--And other parts of the higher activity
of man had been consecrated by the {30} polytheism of which Homer
inherits and develops the tradition. The earliest imagination of the
Hellenes appears to have perceived a daimoniac potency--a ‘numen’ as
we may say--in the arts of song and music; and this had sometimes
crystallised into the personal forms of divinities, into such
interesting embodiments as the Muses or the Charites, who must have
belonged to the pre-Homeric popular theism. The latter group had grown
up at the Bœotian Orchomenos, an old centre of the Minoan-Mycenæan
culture. It may be that at one time they had no other than the purely
physical significance of vegetation-powers; but we only understand
their value for Homer if we suppose that before his time they had come
to be associated with the arts and the delight of human life. We
discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no
means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the
special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the
earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the
Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic
spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher
and lower religions it was unique in this.

_Proto-Hellenic ritual_.--It seems, then, that even in the earliest
period the polytheism was no longer on the most primitive plane. And
we gather the same impression from what is revealed to us of the
earliest forms of Greek ritual. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are
full of information concerning the liturgy or cult-service with which
the poets were familiar; what they tell us avails first of all for the
period of the eleventh to the eighth century. But {31} ritual takes
long to develop, and once fixed is the most abiding element in
religion. It is not too bold, then, to take the Homeric account as
vouching for a tradition that goes back at least to the later
centuries of the second millennium.

The sacred place of worship might be a natural cave, or a ‘temenos,’ a
fenced clearing in a grove, containing as the ἄγαλμα of the deity a
tree-trunk or holy pillar or heap of stones, whence gradually an
artificial altar might be evolved; the latter had become, some time
before Homer, the usual receptacle of sacrifice and was a prominent
figure in the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, which usually associated it
with a sacred tree or pillar, the token of the deity’s presence or a
magnet for attracting it, but not with any iconic statue or idol.
Personal religion could content itself with such equipment, but, if
the anthropomorphic instinct is strong in it, it prompts the
construction of the temple or the house of God. And temples must have
been found in the land in the pre-Homeric period; the few that have as
yet been revealed in the area of Minoan-Mycenæan culture were built,
with one exception,[31.1] within the royal palaces, and must be
regarded as domestic chapels of the king, marking his sacred character
as head of the religion of the State, the character with which the
legends invest King Minos and King Aiakos. The earliest that have been
excavated on free sites are the temples of Hera at Argos and Olympia,
and these are now dated not earlier than the ninth century B.C. But
the traditions of the earliest temple at Delphi, and of that of Athena
on the {32} Athenian Acropolis, suggest a greater antiquity than this.

With the multiplication of temples special priesthoods must also have
multiplied. But the professional priest had already arisen in
pre-Homeric times; Homer knows of the brotherhood called the
Selloi,[32.1] who tended the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, “who
slept on the ground and never washed their feet,” and he mentions
others who were attached to special deities, and two of these at least
administered cults without a temple, the priest of Zeus of Mount
Ida,[32.2] and the priest of the river Skamandros,[32.3] of each of
whom he says, “he was honoured like a god among the people.” These
words suggest a high and sacrosanct position; yet these two priests
are also warriors fighting in the ranks, which is the mark of a
secular priesthood; and there is no legend nor any hint of evidence
suggesting that a professional priesthood enjoyed a political and
social power in the prehistoric that we know was never achieved by
them in the historic period of Greece. For the evolution of many of
the earliest Hellenic institutions evidence is almost wholly lacking.
But on general comparative grounds we can surmise that the religious
character of the monarchy was most prominent in the earliest times and
that as its secular power and functions developed, the priest-expert
was attached to him to assist in the national cults, over which the
Basileus retained a general supervision. We have scarcely a hint,
either in the earliest or later days of Greece, of any conflict
between Church and State; we know that, at least, historic Greece
escaped sacerdotalism; {33} and its earliest societies, whatever their
danger or their struggles may have been, had escaped it by the days of
Homer.[33.1] Bearing on this point is the other negative fact, that
for this earliest age we have little or no evidence of the prevalence
of what is called ‘Shamanism,’ divine seizures, ecstatic outbursts of
wild prophesying, by which a society can be terrified and captured.
The professional ‘Mantis,’ the prophet or soothsayer, existed as
distinct from the priest; but his methods generally--so far as our
earliest witness informs us--were cool and quasi-scientific.[33.2]

The ritual at the altar in the early period with which we are at
present dealing consisted of an oblation to the deity of an animal
victim or an offering of fruits and cereals; the sacrifice might be
accompanied with wine or might be wineless, a ‘sober’ sacrifice which
was called νηφάλια, the latter being perhaps the more ancient
tradition. We may interpret the earliest form of Hellenic
animal-sacrifice as in some sense a simple tribal or family
communion-meal with the deity, whereby the sense of comradeship and
clan-feeling between man and God was strengthened and nourished. This
is the view that Homer has inherited, and it endures throughout the
later history of the ritual; and it expresses the general genial
temper of Hellenic religion, a trait which Robertson Smith marked as
characteristic of other religions of the same social type.[33.3]
Similarly the description given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias of
the ancient ritual of Zeus {34} Polieus on the Athenian Akropolis
reveals to us a typical example of the civic communion feast.[34.1]
Such a sacrifice is merely a transference into the divine circle of
the practice of the common feast of the tribesmen. But we can also
discern a mystic element in the Homeric ritual text, which is
evidently based on a tradition indefinitely older than the poems; the
sacrificial victim, usually the ox, is first consecrated by being
touched with the barley-stalks, which had been placed on the altar and
which fill him by their contact with the altar’s divine spirit: then
when he has been immolated and cut up, the sacrificers are specially
said “to taste the entrails”[34.2] invariably before the real sacred
meal begins; as the entrails are the inner seat of the life which has
been consecrated by the hallowing contact of the altar, we are
justified in supposing that the object of this solemn act was to
establish the real and corporeal communion of the worshipper with the
divinity.[34.2]

_Chthonian worship_.--The important distinction which is well attested
of the later ages between the ‘chthonian’ and the ‘Olympian’
ritual--to use these two conventional terms for convenience--may
already have been in vogue in the earliest period of the polytheism.
In the first type of sacrifice, where the offering was made to the
nether divinities, the victim’s head was held down above a hole in the
ground--a βόθρος--and the blood from the severed throat was shed into
it. In the second, where the upper powers, whose region was the air or
{35} the sky, were the recipients, the victim was held up erect off
the ground, his face lifted towards the sky, and in this attitude his
throat was cut. Homer shows himself aware of this form of sacrifice;
and that the other, the chthonian, was also in vogue in his time is to
be inferred from his account of the ritual performed by Odysseus in
honour of the shades, where he mentions the βόθρος, the sacrifice of
black sheep, with their heads turned downwards towards the lower
world, and the triple libation of honey, wine and water.[35.1] For
the ritual of the dead in the Greek religious tradition was closely
modelled on the service of the nether divinities. The triple libation
is known to have been part of Minoan-Cretan cult, as the altar table
found in the cave of Mount Dikte attests.[35.2] And a shrine with a
βόθρος in the middle of the cella has been found at Priniá in Crete,
consecrated to a chthonian goddess, of which the foundation is
ascribed to the ninth century.[35.3]

From these indications and from the prevalence of chthonian cults
attested by later records, in which we can discern features of great
antiquity, we can gather that the earliest period of Greek religion
was not wholly characterised by the brightness of ritual and the
geniality of religious feeling that appear on the surface of Homeric
poetry. The Homeric sacrifice was often accompanied by a sense of
sin,[35.4] though the poet shows no cognisance of any peculiar ritual
of a specially piacular type. Also he was aware of the dark world of
powers who avenged {36} the broken oath and punished sinners even
after death. Long before his time, we may suppose, gloomy worship,
such as that of the Θεοὶ Μειλίχιοι described by Pausanias at Myonia in
Lokris,[36.1] of which the rites were performed by night, was in
vogue in parts of Greece. Mother-Earth, prophesying through
phantom-dreams, had held rule at Delphi before Apollo came, and that
was long before Homer’s work began.[36.2]

There are strong reasons also for believing that the cult of
hero-ancestors was already a part of the pre-Homeric religion, as it
was a prominent part of the post-Homeric. The elaborate tendance of
the dead attested of the Mycenæan period by the graves discovered at
Tiryns and Mycenæ, could easily develop into actual worship if it was
maintained through many generations, as it was at Menidi in Attica.
Doubtless, the common and promiscuous worship of the dead was a morbid
development of the later polytheism. But Homer, who is generally
silent about such cults, and in a well-known passage about the
Twin-Brethren[36.3] seems to ignore deliberately their divine or
semi-divine character, almost reveals his knowledge of the worship of
Herakles,[36.4] and certainly was aware of the Attic cult of
Erechtheus, unless the passage that refers to it was the work of the
interpolator.[36.5]

It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can
trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even
if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised
{37} no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they
found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled.

It is important to emphasise this gloomier side of Greek religion; but
it is detrimental to exaggerate it, as has been the tendency of some
modern writers in a pardonable revolt from the old shallow theories of
orthodox classicism. We ought to recognise that at no period of his
history was the ordinary Hellene ghost-ridden, worried and dismayed by
demoniac terrors, or by morbid anxiety about the other world or his
destiny after death; at least he will not appear so, when we compare
his religious and mythologic records with those of Babylon, Egypt, and
Christendom.[37.1] Nor dare we affirm that the prehistoric Hellene
was weaker-minded and more timorous in respect of such matters than
the later. He may even have been stronger-minded, and at least as
willing to eat a sacramental meal in company with the ‘Theoi
Meilichioi’ (shadowy powers of the lower world), or with the
Nether-Zeus, or the Nether Earth-Mother, and with his departed
family-spirits, as were his later descendants at Lokris, Mykonos and
other places.[37.2] The earliest myths have little of the goblin
element. Homer indeed himself was cognisant of such forms of terror as
a black ‘Ker’--Penelope likens Antinoos to one;[37.3] the ancient
folklore of Argolis was aware of a bad spirit that once ravaged its
homes.[37.4] The early popular imagination was sure to have inherited
or to have evolved such creations of fear; and a black Earth-Goddess
with a horse’s {38} head and snake-locks, who lived in a dark cave at
Phigaleia, almost certainly in the pre-Homeric period, was a
sufficiently terrifying personality.[38.1]

But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of
death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions
of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely
called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or
Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the
Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of
terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac
personages such as Medousa--identical in form and perhaps in character
with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter--may have loomed large and
terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual
worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet
the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the
religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the
Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at
some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the
function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views
of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that
Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The
earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the
departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which
came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as
yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may
have been that of a secret {39} society organised for agrarian
purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive
mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at
all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times
he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the
later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the
elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly
dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed,
was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.

_Earliest ritual of purification_.--It has been even said that the
very idea of the need of purification on special occasions was unknown
to Homer. This is demonstrably false; it is enough to mention one
passage alone: at the close of the first book of the _Iliad_, the
Achæans at Agamemnon’s bidding, purify themselves from the plague,
and throw the infected media of purification into the sea; this is a
religious lustration. And when Hesiod mentions the rule that a man
returning from an ‘ill-omened’ funeral could not without peril attempt
to beget a child on that day,[39.1] he happens to be the first
literary witness to the Greek tabu of death; but we may be sure that
he is giving us a tradition of indefinite age, and that the ‘Achæan’
society, of which Homer is supposed to be the spokesman, had some of
the Kathartic rules and superstitions that are found broadcast in
later Greece. It may not have elaborated or laid marked stress on
them; it may have had no strong sense of the impurity of homicide nor
devised any special code for its expiation. But if it was entirely
without any instinctive feeling for the {40} impurity of birth and
death, and for the danger of the ‘miasma’ arising from certain acts
and states, it was almost unique among the races of man. Only, a
progressive people does not overstrain such feelings.

Such a religion as has been sketched might accord with a high social
and political morality. On the other hand, it would not be likely to
foster and consecrate certain mental moods, ennobled by Christian
ethic, such as ‘fear of God,’ humility, faith. Never in the free
periods of Greek history was ‘deisidaimonia’ (‘fear of divine powers’)
regarded as a virtue, but rather as a vice or weakness. The Hellene
was humble in his attitude to God only in the sense that he disliked
overweening acts and speech of self-glorification; the phrase, δοῦλος
τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘slave of God,’ common in early Christian documents, would
be as repugnant to the Hellene as would be the ecstasy of
self-abasement congenial to the Babylonian and the Christian
religions. As for the Pauline use of the word πίστις, ‘faith,’ its
value for religious morality would have been unintelligible for the
earlier Greek.[40.1]

_Cruder religious conceptions in the earliest period_.--So far, the
religious phenomena discoverable with some certainty or some
probability in the earliest period of Greek history indicate a
theistic system of a somewhat advanced type. But doubtless we must
reckon with the presence of much else that was cruder and more savage.
When we find in the later records ample evidence of the lower products
of the religious imagination, the products of ‘animism’ or ‘fetichism’
or ‘theriomorphism’ or ‘polydaimonism,’ {41} more inarticulate and
uncouth embodiments of the concept of divinity, or darker and more
cruel ritual than that which Homer describes, such as human sacrifice,
the driving out of the scapegoat, blood-magic for controlling winds or
finding water, no reasonable critic will call all these things
post-Homeric because they may not be mentioned in Homer, or suppose
that the pure-minded Hellenes were seduced into borrowing them from
the Orientals, or that they were spontaneous products of a later
degenerate age. The view taken of them by those who have in recent
times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is
the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a
surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper
to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial
indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is
no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach
with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a
higher enlightenment; no fanatic prophet arose, and the protests of
philosophy were comparatively gentle and ineffective. Only a few
religious forms of an undeveloped society that might shock a more
civilised conscience were gradually abandoned; most of them were
tolerated, some in a moribund condition, under a more advanced
religion, with which they might be seen to clash if any one cared to
reason about them. Therefore a chapter or a statement in Pausanias may
really be a record of the pre-Homeric age; and in this way we can
supplement the partial picture that has been given above.

_Animal-Gods and Animal-worship_.--The anthropomorphic {42} principle,
which is not necessarily the highest upon which a personal theism
could be constructed, is the main force of the higher life of Hellenic
polytheism. We may believe that it had begun to work before Homer, but
not predominantly or with sufficient effect to produce a stable
anthropomorphism in religion. Some worship of animals which is called
‘theriolatry,’ some beliefs in the animal-incarnations of the
divinity, were certainly in vogue. A few of the more ancient
cult-titles would be evidence sufficient, apart from the later
records. One of the most significant and oldest is Λύκειος, an epithet
of Apollo marking his association with wolves; we find also that in
many legends and even occasionally in ritual the wolf appears as his
sacred animal. These facts point back to a period when Apollo was
still the hunter-god of the wild wood, and was regarded as
occasionally incarnate in the beast of the wild. We have also a few
indications of direct reverence being paid to the wolf, apart from its
connection with any god.[42.1] Another salient example either of
theriolatry or theriomorphic god-cult is snake-worship, proved to have
existed in the earliest epoch of the Delphic religion, and in vogue
according to later records in Epirus and Macedonia. It may have been
reverenced in its own right, or as the incarnation of some personal
divinity or hero, as we find it later attached to the chthonian
deities, to the Earth-Mother, Zeus Κτήσιος and Μειλίχιος,[42.2]
Asklepios, and to the buried hero or heroine, such as Erechtheus,
Kychreus. We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a
Bear-Artemis in {43} Attica[43.1] and Arcadia; and many other
examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the
subject by De Visser.[43.2] Later Arcadia was full of the products
and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination;
besides the horse-headed Demeter at Thigaleia, we hear of the worship
at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as
half-woman, half-fish; and bronze figures, belonging to the Roman
period, have been found at Lykosoura in Arcadia, apparently
representations of divinities partly theriomorphic.[43.3]

The first anthropologists who dealt with the primitive forms of
Hellenic religion read this special set of phenomena in the light of
totemism; but progressive students have now abandoned the totemistic
hypothesis, on the ground that there is little or no trace of Totemism
in any Greek or any Aryan Society, and that theriolatry, or the direct
worship of animals, needs no such explanation. Also, as I have
recently pointed out elsewhere,[43.4] the theriomorphic concept of
divinity can and frequently does co-exist at certain periods and in
certain peoples with the anthropomorphic; nor can we say with
assurance that in the mental history of our race the former is prior
to the latter, or that generally the anthropomorphic was evolved from
the animal-god.

_Functional Deities: polydæmonism_.--In attempting to penetrate the
pre-Homeric past, we have to reckon with another phenomenon which,
though {44} revealed in later records only, has certainly a primitive
character and has been regarded as belonging to an age when the
concept of definite complex personalities, such as θεοί, had not yet
arisen. It was Usener[44.1] who first called attention to a large
number of local cults of personages unknown to myth or general
literature and designated, not by what are called proper names, such
as Hermes, Apollo, Zeus, but by transparent adjectival names,
expressing a particular quality or function or activity, to which the
essence of the divine power in each case was limited: such, for
instance, are Ἔχετλος Ἐχετλαῖος ἤρως, Κυαμίτης, Εὔνοστος, being
nothing more, respectively, than the hero of the ploughshare at
Marathon, the ‘hero who makes the beans grow’ on the sacred way to
Eleusis, ‘the hero who gives the good return of corn’ at Tanagra; for
these he invented the term, ‘Sonder-Götter,’ meaning deities of a
single function only; and to those of them to whom only a momentary
function and therefore only a momentary existence seemed to appertain,
he applied the term ‘Augenblick-Götter,’ ‘Momentary Gods’; an
Hellenic example of this type might be ‘Μυίαγρος,’ ‘Fly-chaser,’ in
Arcadia, and Elis, who at the sacrifice to Athena or Zeus was called
upon to chase away the flies that would worry the sacrificers, and who
only existed for the purpose and at the time of that call.

We may compare also, for vagueness and inchoateness of personality,
certain aggregates of deities having no definite single existence, but
grouped by some adjectival functional name, such as θεοὶ Ἀποτροπαῖοι,
‘the deities that avert evil,’ at Sikyon,[44.2] {45} θεαὶ
Γενετυλλίδες, the goddesses of birth, in Attica,[45.1] the θεαὶ
Πραξιδίκαι, the goddesses of just requital, at Haliartos.[45.2] Such
forms seem to hover on the confines of ‘polydaimonism,’ and to be the
products of an embryonic perception of divinity, cruder and dimmer
than the robust and bright creations of the Hellenic polytheism, to
which so rich a mythology and so manifold a personality attached. And
another fact seems to fall into line with these; in some cult-centres
the deity, though personally and anthropomorphically conceived, might
only be designated by some vague descriptive title, like ὁ θεός and ἡ
θεά, as occasionally at Eleusis, or ‘Despoina,’ ‘the Mistress,’ the
Goddess of Arcadia, or ‘Παρθένος’, the ‘Virgin,’ on the coast of
Caria, and in the Chersonnese; even as late as the time of Pausanias
the men of Boulis in Phokis never called their highest God[45.3] by
any other name than ὁ Μέγιστος, ‘the Greatest.’ And it has been
thought that the well-known statement of Herodotus that the Pelasgians
had no names for their divinities was based on some such facts as
these.

The importance of these phenomena would be all the greater if Usener’s
theory were true that they represent the crude material out of which
much of Greek polytheism has grown.[45.4] But in any case they claim
mention here, because they are the products of a mental operation or
instinct that must have {46} been operative in the earliest period of
Hellenic religion.

_Animism or animatism_.--In another set of facts, also attested by
later records, we may discern the surviving addition of an animistic
period. A large part of the Hellenic, as of other religions, reflects
man’s relation and feeling towards the world of nature, his dependence
on the fruits of the earth, the winds, the waters, and the phenomena
of the sky. The trend of the higher polytheism in the Hellenic mind
was to set the personal divinity above and outside these things, which
he or she directs as an intellectual will-power. But we have
sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more
primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially
immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and
separable from it. The Arcadians who worshipped ‘Zeus
Keraunos,’[46.1] or ‘Zeus-Thunder,’ at Mantineia, or the people at
Gythion in Laconia, who called a sacred meteoric stone, ‘Zeus
Καππώτας,’[46.2] ‘the fallen Zeus,’ or the Athenians who worshipped
‘Demeter χλόη,’ ‘Demeter Green Verdure,’[46.3] reveal in these
strange titles an attitude of mind that is midway between ‘animatism,’
that religious perception of each striking thing or phenomenon in
nature as in itself mysteriously alive and divine, and ‘theism’ which
imagines it controlled by a personal deity. At the stage when Demeter
could be named and perceived as ‘Chloe,’ ‘Verdure,’ the
anthropomorphic conception of divinity, though certainly existing, was
not yet stable or crystallised.

{47}

But there are other cult-facts reported to us of a still cruder type
that seem to reveal animatism pure and simple and the infancy of the
Hellenic mind. The Arcadians,[47.1] always the most conservative and
backward among the Hellenes, in their colony of Trapezus, ‘offered
sacrifice to the lightning and thunder and storms’; it seems that for
them these things were animate and divine directly, just as the
Air--Bedu--was for the Macedonians. Again, through all the periods of
Hellenic religion, the worship of rivers and springs only at certain
points approached the borders of theism; sometimes offerings were
flung directly into the water, and prayer might be made ‘into the
water’--we must not say ‘to the river-god,’ but to the divine
water.[47.2]

We discern these two different ways of imagining divinity in the
worship and ideas attaching to Helios, ‘Sun,’ and Hestia, ‘Hearth’; as
regards the former, we have reason to surmise that his religious
prestige was higher in the pre-Homeric than in the later age, and that
the exalted position as a great political and cultured God which he
enjoyed in the later history of Rhodes was a heritage from the Minoan
religious tradition.[47.3] In Homer’s poems we find him personal and
anthropomorphised; but we may well doubt if he was so for the average
Greek, who merely kissed his hand to him every morning or bowed to him
on coming forth from his house, and who, regarding him merely as
animate, or ‘Living Sun,’ found it difficult to develop him {48} into
a free and complex individual person. As regards Hestia the facts are
still clearer.[48.1] In her worship, which belonged to the aboriginal
period of Greek religion, she was at first, and in the main she
continued to be, nothing more than ‘Holy Hearth,’ the Hearth felt as
animate, nor was the attempt to anthropomorphise into a free personal
Goddess ever wholly successful.

_Magic_.--Now that which is here called ‘animatism’ is a religious
feeling which may inspire real worship, but is more liable than pure
theism to be associated with magic; and it is reasonable to believe
that magic was in vogue in prehistoric Hellas, not necessarily in
antagonism to religion, but practised for purposes of the community as
well as for private ends.

It is true that the records which tell us about these things are all
of a period much later than Homer’s, and that he is almost silent
about such matters.[48.2] But we know now how to appreciate Homer’s
silences. And general anthropology compels us to believe that some of
those records reveal facts of immemorial antiquity in Greece. The
Thesmophoria, one of the most ancient of the Hellenic services, was
partly magical; that is, it included rites that had a direct efficacy,
apart from the appeal to any divinity, such as the strewing the fields
with the decaying remains of the pigs that had been consecrated to the
earth-Goddesses and thrown down into their vault.[48.3] So also in
the Thargelia of {49} Attica and other Greek communities, the
ceremonies connected with the scapegoat, the ritualistic whipping and
transference of sin, belong to the domain of magic rather than to
religion.[49.1]

We have also direct testimony of a magical dealing with the elements
in the titles of officials at Athens called the ‘Heudanemoi’[49.2]
and of those at Corinth called Ἁνεμοκοῖται,[49.3] both words denoting
‘wind-lullers,’ those ‘who charmed the winds to sleep’; and again in
the description of the rite performed by the magicians at Kleonai who
according to Clemens[49.4] “averted the sky’s wrath by incantations
and sacrifices”; or in Pausanias’ account of the operations of the
priest of the winds at Titane in Sikyon[49.5] who endeavoured to
assuage their fierceness by “singing over them the spells that Medea
used.” Doubtless these officials are only maintaining the practices of
an indefinitely remote past. And these are also reflected in the
legend of the ancient Salmoneus of Thessalian and possibly Minyan
origin, who drove about in a chariot imitating thunder and, while
merely practising a well-known type of weather-magic, was
misunderstood by the higher powers and later moralists.

The few records that may avail for an opinion concerning the early
period with which we are at present concerned entirely fail to suggest
any such prevalence of magic as might obstruct intellectual progress
or the growth of a higher religion. They reveal generally a type that
is harmless or even philanthropic.[49.6] Doubtless some black magic
{50} existed in the earliest as in the later Hellas, directed against
the life or the property of individuals, and worked by evil means; the
more ancient literature is entirely silent about this; but a late
record of Pausanias testifies to a barbarous magic practised by the
community of Haliartos to discover a water-supply[50.1]: a son of one
of the chief men was stabbed by his own father, and as he ran bleeding
about the land springs of water were found where his blood dripped.
But at no time, we may judge, was the religion or the intellect of
Greece so clouded with magic as was the case elsewhere in the ancient
civilisations, notably in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

_Human sacrifices_.--This attempted presentation of the first era of
Greek religion must raise the question as to the practice within it of
the ritual of human sacrifice. For we are apt to associate this with a
primitive society and with a crude or savage religion. But this
association is not borne out by the religious history of mankind. The
practice has been found in societies highly developed both in morality
and civilisation; and the a priori argument is dangerous, whether we
apply it in one way or the other.

It has been said that the Homeric poems show no consciousness of the
existence of the cruel rite in the Greek world of the period; and it
has been argued on this ground that the Achæan society of which they
are the voice was innocent of it.[50.2] A doubt may arise concerning
the slaughter of the Trojan captives at the pyre of Patroklos,[50.3]
an act of ferocity for which Homer outspokenly blames Achilles. The
passage {51} certainly suggests that the poet was aware that such
things were occasionally done at contemporary funerals; in Mycenæan
tombs at Argos and Mycenæ human remains have been found before the
entrance-door that point to an offering of slaves or captives.[51.1]
But this need not have been an act of worship or strictly of religion.
The dead might be imagined as needing slaves; and to kill slaves to
accompany the departed, just as to kill horses over the pyre, may only
imply ‘tendance’ and no worship of the spirit. But Homer’s silence
concerning human sacrifice as a rite of religion is of no value as
evidence for our present question, as I have argued elsewhere.[51.2]
How are we to account for the fairly numerous records of actual human
sacrifice, or of the semblance or reminiscence of it, in later Greek
worship, records that are found sporadically among most of the leading
Greek stocks? The old shift of attributing to Oriental influences
everything in Hellenic religion that clashed with our ideal of
Hellenism was naïvely unscientific. That the practice should have
sprung up spontaneously and suddenly in the later society, when civic
life and morality were advancing, is hard to believe. It is more
natural to suppose that it was an immemorial and enduring tradition of
the race, which was only with difficulty abolished and which lingered
here and there till the end of paganism. It has been found among many
other Aryan races, and it was especially in vogue among the
Thraco-Phrygian stock, of near kin to the Hellenic. These general
grounds for believing that {52} it was a feature of the earliest Greek
religion are confirmed by some special evidence derivable from the
legends and cult-records. It is generally impossible to date the birth
of legends; but some can be discerned to belong to an earlier stratum
than others; such are the legends concerning the human sacrifice to
Zeus Αύκαιος on Mount Lykaion in Arcadia, to which is attached the
story of King Lykaon and the banquet that he offers to Zeus on the
flesh of his own son;[52.1] the Achæan or Minyan story of the
sacrifice to Zeus Laphystios--Zeus the Ravening--of the king’s son of
the house of Athamas;[52.2] Kyknos’ sacrifice of pilgrims and the
dedication of their skulls to Apollo on the Hyperborean pilgrims’-way
at the Achæan Pagasos;[52.3] the sacrifice of a boy and a maiden to
Artemis Τρικλαρία by the Ionians on the southern shore of the Gulf of
Corinth.[52.4] A careful study of the legends of these various rites
will convince one that they belong to the earliest period of Greek
religion. The last example is specially illuminating: the human
sacrifice is here practised by the Ionians in their ancient
settlements in the land, afterwards called Achaia; and its cessation
is connected with the arrival of the cult of Dionysos and the return
of the heroes from Troy.

The purpose and significance of the rite differed probably in the
different cult-centres. In most cases we may interpret it as piacular,
the dedication to an offended deity of a valued life, the life of the
king’s son or daughter, as a substitute for the life of the people,
such vicarious sacrifice being a common human institution; in some few
cases we may {53} discern an agricultural motive, the blood being shed
as a magic charm to secure fertility.[53.1] At certain cult-centres
and at certain times the human victim may have been regarded as the
incarnation of the deity or the ‘daimon’; and this idea might explain
the legends concerning the slaying of Iphigeneia the priestess of
Artemis, or of the priests of Dionysos. Finally, in the ritual of Zeus
Lykaios, we may detect a cannibal-sacrament, in which the holy flesh
of the victim, whose life was mystically one with the God’s and the
people’s, was sacramentally devoured. This ghastly practice is only
doubtfully disclosed by legends and by interpretation of later
records; a faint reminiscence of it may also have survived in the
Argive story of Harpalyke and Klymenos.[53.2] But a close parallel to
it will be noted in the Thracian Dionysiac ritual.

_Summary account of the first period_.--A detailed account of the
pre-Homeric religious age must at many points remain doubtful and
hypothetical; but certain definite and important facts may be
established. Anthropomorphism, in a degree not found in the earliest
Roman religion, was already prevalent, even dominant; and nearly all
the leading personal divinities of the later polytheism had already
emerged; only Dionysos had not yet crossed the border from Thrace;
Asklepios, dimly known to Homer, was merely the local deity of a small
Thessalian community, Pan merely the daimon of flocks in remote
Arcadia. Cretan religion, also personal in its imagination and mainly
anthropomorphic, had left its deep imprint on the mainland; and its
divine personalities, such as Rhea, the {54} Mother of the Gods, and
Aphrodite were soon adopted by the northern immigrants, but not at
first into high positions. The deity was generally imagined not as a
spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore
the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation
and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and
weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At
the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the
bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some
force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism
than to polytheism.

Finally a study of all the facts and probabilities may convince a
careful student that the origin of Greek polytheism as a whole from
simpler forms cannot be found in this earliest period. In the second
millennium, which is the starting-point for Hellenic history proper,
we cannot discern the ‘making of a God’ (unless we mean the
building-up of his more complex character), nor do we start with a
godless period. We may well believe that in the history of mankind
theism was evolved from animism or polydaimonism; we may believe the
much more doubtful theory that anthropomorphism arises from a previous
theriomorphism, and there may still be some who are convinced that
theriomorphism implies a totemistic society. But, at any rate, these
various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two
strains--the Northern and the Mediterranean--had blended into the
Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the
simpler, forms of religious imagination {55} operate together
throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never
wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an
indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been
wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. And the attempt to
unlock many of its mysteries by the key of totemism has been abandoned
by those who recognise that many of the views concerning this social
phenomenon and its religious importance, prevalent in a former
generation, were erroneous.




 CHAPTER III.
 THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

{56}

We can now pursue the enquiry nearer the borderline of the historic
period, as it is conventionally termed.

_Introduction of worship of Dionysos_.--As early as the tenth century
B.C., and probably earlier, a new religion with a new and imposing
divinity was intruding itself into Hellenic lands from Thrace and
Macedonia.[56.1] Dionysos and the Thracian ritual-legend of Lykourgos
are known to Homer; but the poems suggest that he was not yet
definitely received into the Hellenic pantheon. Yet there are reasons
for believing that Bœotia had received the alien worship in the
‘Minyan’ epoch, before the incoming of the ‘Boiotoi’; and Attica
before the Ionic emigration; while in the Peloponnese the Argive
legend associates the advent of the god with the names of Perseus and
the Prœtid dynasty. In spite of local opposition and its natural
antagonism to the nascent spirit of Hellenism, which was now tending
to express itself in certain definite and orderly forms of mood,
thought and feeling, the new religion won its way victoriously, taking
Thebes for its Hellenic metropolis, and some time afterwards securing
its position at Delphi, where the priesthood and the Apolline oracle
become its eager champions. {57} It was distinguished from the
traditional Hellenic in regard to its idea of divine personality, its
ritual and its psychic influence, that is to say, the mood that it
evoked in the votary. In the first place, the figure of Dionysos
belonged indeed to personal theism, certainly in Hellenic cult and
probably in the Thracian; but he was less sharply defined as a
concrete individual than was, for instance, Apollo or Athena; he was
vaguer in outline, a changeful power conceived more in accordance with
daimonistic, later with pantheistic thought, incarnate in many
animal-shapes and operative in the life-processes of the vegetative
world; and an atmosphere of nature-magic accompanied him.

The central motives of his oldest form of ritual were the birth and
death of the God, a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop
in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology,
though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenæan creed.
But the death of this God was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to
pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull
or the goat or the boy whom they rent and devoured was supposed to be
his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage and at times
cannibalistic communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit
and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act and--we may suppose--by
the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants the
psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy,
which might show itself in wild outburst of mental and physical force,
and the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment in which the
worshipper escaped the limits of his own {58} nature and achieved a
temporary sense of identity with the God; and such union with divinity
might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be
used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired
and proclaimed for its own sake, as a more intense mood of life. This
religion preached no morality and could ill adapt itself to civic
life; its ideal was supranormal psychic energy. The process whereby it
was half captured and half tamed by the young Hellenic spirit forms
one of the most interesting chapters in Hellenism.

It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the
period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period
of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces
and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of
this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean
population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired
its definite instincts and bias. The ninth and the eighth centuries
witnessed the diffusion of epic literature, the rise of lyric poetry,
the emergence of the ‘eikon’ or idol in religious art, and generally
the development of cities and civic life; and it is essential to
estimate the religious influence of these forces.

_Influence of epic and lyric poetry_.--That the contribution of
Homeric and of the later Hesiodic literature to the shaping and fixing
of Hellenic religion was most fruitful and effective cannot be
doubted. Only we must not accept the exaggerating view of
Herodotus[58.1] that these two poets were really {59} the founders of
the anthropomorphic religion, creating the orthodox Hellenic theogony
and determining the names and functions and shapes of the special
divinities. By such a statement some scholars have been misled into
regarding the Homeric poems as a kind of Greek Bible, which in respect
to religious matters it might be heresy to disbelieve. But we know
that local temple-legend and local folklore could always maintain its
independence of Homeric, or Hesiodic authority, in respect to the
titles of the Gods, their relationships and genealogies. Artemis was
not everywhere reputed to have the same parentage or Zeus the same
spouse. The early epic poets gathered many of the ἱεροὶ λόγοι of
shrines, but there was much that they did not gather and which yet
survived. There was a noticeable particularism in Greek theology, and
no orthodoxy and no heterodoxy in the sense that it was moral to
believe or immoral to disbelieve any sacred book.

The chief religious achievement of Homer and his fellows was to
intensify the anthropomorphic trend in Greek religion, to sharpen and
individualise the concepts of divinity, and to diffuse throughout the
Hellenic world a certain uniformity of religious imagination. To their
work partly, as well as to the higher synthetic power of the Greek
mind, we may ascribe the fact that in spite of local varieties of myth
and cult-title, in spite of the various elements that the divine
personality may have absorbed from earlier cult-figures and cult-forms
in the various cult-centres, yet the sense of the individual unity of
person was not lost so long as the same name was in vogue; hence
Apollo Lykeios of Argos could not be a {60} different person from the
Apollo Patroös of Athens, nor could hostility arise between them.
That is to say, the higher religious literature imprinted a certain
precision and definiteness upon the personal names of the leading
divinities and endowed them with a certain essential connotation; for
example, the dogma of the virginity of Athena and Artemis, always
presented in the higher poetry, prevailed so far as to suppress the
maternal character that may have attached to them in the prehistoric
period and of which we can still discern a glimmering in certain local
cults.[60.1] And to this task of shaping the divine characters the
rising lyric poetry, which was growing up with the decay of the epic,
and which in obedience to the Hellenic passion for disciplined form
was developing fixed types of song and music appropriate to special
festivals and worships, must have contributed much. The ‘spondaic’
metre was adapted to the invocation or hymn sung at the libation--the
σπονδή--to Zeus, and the solemn gravity of the spondaic fragment
attributed to Terpander fittingly expresses the majesty of the high
God, “the primal cause of all things, the Leader of the world.”[60.2]
The pæan and the ‘nomos’ became instinct with the Apolline, the
Dithyrambos with the Dionysiac spirit,[60.3] the spirit of order and
self-restraint on the one hand, the spirit of ecstasy and passion on
the other. The earlier Greek lyric was in fact mainly religious, being
composed for public or private occasions of worship; its vogue was
therefore wide and in some communities, as in Arcadia, the singing
{61} of these compositions formed part of the national training of the
young.[61.1]

_Idolatry_.--Another phenomenon of importance at the beginning of this
second period is the rise of idolatry, the prevalence of the use of
the ‘eikon’ in actual worship in place of the older aniconic ‘agalma,’
which had sufficed for the Minoan and the Homeric world as a token of
the divine presence or as a magnet attracting it to the worshipper.
This important change in the object of cult may have been beginning in
the tenth century, for we have one indication of it in the Homeric
poems, and recently on one of a series of vases of the early geometric
style found in a grave near Knossos of the post-Minoan period the
figures of an armed God and Goddess are depicted on low bases,
evidently idols, and perhaps the earliest surviving of any Hellenic
divinity.[61.2] Henceforth, although the old fetich-object, the
aniconic ‘agalma,’ lingered long in certain shrines and holy places,
the impulse towards idolatry became imperious and almost universal,
exercising a mighty influence on the religious sentiment of the
Hellenes both before and after the triumph of Christianity. The
worship before the idol intensified the already powerful
anthropomorphic instinct of the polytheism; and was at once a source
of strength and a cause of narrowness. It brought to the people a
strong conviction of the real presence of the concrete and individual
divinity; and, as it gave its mandate to the greatest art of the
world, it evolved the ideal of divinity as the ideal of humanity,
expressible in forms of beauty, strength, and majesty. On the other
hand, it was a force {62} working against the development of a more
mystic, more immaterial religion, or of a consciousness of Godhead as
an all-pervading spirit, such as might arise out of the vaguer
religious perception of those half-personal ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’
which never wholly faded from the popular creed.

_Progress of anthropomorphism_.--It is interesting to mark within this
second period the various effects of the now regnant anthropomorphism.

Those functional ‘daimones’ mentioned above tend to leave the
amorphous twilight of religious perception, in which the Roman
‘Indigitamenta’ remained, and to be attracted into the stronger life
of personal theism. ‘Kourotrophos,’ once perhaps only a vague
functional power that nurtured children, becomes identified with
Artemis or Ge;[62.1] ‘Χλόη,’ ‘Divine verdure,’ when the cult was
introduced from the Marathonian Tetrapolis to the Akropolis of
Athens--if this indeed is a true account of its career, could only
maintain herself as Demeter Χλόη.[62.2]

Again the name Ἥρως comes to be applied to even the most shadowy of
these functional powers, to Μυίαγρος, the Fly-chaser, the most limited
and momentary of them all, to Eunostos, the daimon of good harvest,
about whom a very human tale is told, and to call them ‘Heroes’
implies that they were imagined as semi-divine men who once lived on
the earth. Even the most immaterial forces, some of those which mark
mental phases or social conditions, such as Ἐρως Love, Φιλία
Friendship, Εἰρήνη Peace, became often for the religious imagination
personal individuals with human relationships;[62.3] thus Eirene {63}
emerges almost as a real goddess with the traits of Demeter, Φιλία on
a relief in the Jacobsen Collection is individualised as the mother of
Zeus Philios, in defiance of the traditional theogony.[63.1] Others
such as ‘Αἰδώς’ ‘Compassion’ remained in the borderland between
animating forces and personal deities.

But we observe in many cases that the name itself was an obstacle to
the emergence of a convincingly personal God or Goddess; and where
this is the case the personality never could play a leading part in
the advanced religion. Thus Ἑστία bore a name that denoted nothing
more than ‘the Hearth,’ considered as animate and holy; Greek
anthropomorphism did its utmost for her, but never or rarely succeeded
in establishing her as a fully formed personal goddess. The same
phenomenon is observable in regard to Ge, Helios and Selene; it was
easy to regard them as animate substances or powers and as such to
worship them; such worship they received throughout all periods of
Greek religion, but no direction of the moral, social and spiritual
progress of the race, for their names connoted so obviously substances
unlike and alien to man that they could not with conviction be
imagined as glorified men or women.[63.2] It was otherwise with such
names as Apollo, Hera, Athena, which could become as real and
individual as Miltiades or Themistokles; and it is these humanised
personalities that alone dominate the higher religion of Greece. The
spiritual career of Demeter only began when men forgot the original
meaning of her name and half forgot that she was {64} only Mother
Earth. The ‘Anemoi’ being mere ‘Winds,’ were scarcely fitted for civic
life; but Boreas, having a personal name, could become a citizen and
was actually worshipped as Πολίτης ‘the Citizen’ at Thourioi.[64.1] A
curious and unscientific distinction that Aristophanes makes between
the religions of the Hellenes and the Barbarians[64.2] has its
justification from this point of view.

_Influence of the Polis on religion_.--The spirit of the Polis, the
dominant influence in Greek religion throughout this second period,
worked in the same direction as the anthropomorphic instinct; giving
complexity, varied individuality and an ever-growing social value to
the idea of Godhead. The deities of the wild enter the ring-wall of
the city and shed much of their wild character. Apollo Lykeios the
Wolf-God, enters Argos and becomes the political leader of the State,
in whose temple a perpetual fire was maintained, symbol of the
perpetual life of the community.[64.3] And the advanced civic
imagination tended to transform the primitive theriolatry or
theriomorphic ideas that still survived. Proofs of direct animal
worship in the later period are very rare and generally doubtful; for
the ancient writers apply the term ‘worship’ carelessly, applying it
to any trivial act of reverential treatment.[64.4] In the few cases
where we can still discern the animal receiving cult, we find the
anomaly explained away by some association established between the
animal and the anthropomorphic deity or hero. Thus the wolf became no
longer sacred in {65} its own right--if indeed it ever was--but might
be reverenced here and there as the occasional incarnation of Apollo
or as his guide or companion.

The primitive population of the Troad may once have ‘worshipped’ the
field-mouse, though the authority that attests it is a late and
doubtful one; but when Apollo becomes in this region the civic
guardian of the Æolians and the protector of their crops, he takes a
title from the mouse (Σμινθεύς from σμινθός), and the mouse is carved
at the side of the anthropomorphic image as a propitiatory hint to the
rest of the species not to injure the corn, or as a hint to the God
that mice needed regulating.[65.1]

The serpent worshipped in the cavern, or in some hole or corner of the
house--vaguely, in ‘Aryan’ times, as the Earth-daimon or
House-genius--became interpreted as the embodiment of the ancestor
Erechtheus of Athens, or Kuchreus of Salamis, or Zeus Κτήσιος, the
guardian of the household possessions, or of Zeus Meilichios, the
nether God. When the very human Asklepios came to Athens towards the
end of the fifth century, he brought with him certain dogs who were
ministers of healing; and the Athenians offered sacrificial cakes both
to the God and to his dogs who partook of his sanctity.[65.2] This
may appear a strange imbecility; but at all events we discern in these
facts the prevalent anthropomorphism dominating and transforming what
it could not abolish of the old theriolatry; just as we see the
coin-artist of Phigaleia transforming the uncouth type of the
horse-headed Demeter into a beautiful human form of a goddess {66}
wearing a necklace with a horse-hoof as its pendant. The sacred animal
never wholly died out of Hellas; but it could only maintain its
worship by entering the service of the human gods.

The expansion of the civic system in this second period, due to
extended colonisation and commerce, induced a development of law and
an expansion of moral and religious ideas. One of the most vital
results of the institution of the Polis was the widening of the idea
of kinship. For in theory the city was a congregation of kinsmen, a
combination of tribes, phratries, and families, wider or narrower
associations framed on a kin-basis; and it gradually evolved the
belief, pregnant of legal and moral developments, that every citizen
was of kin to every other.

In consonance with the conception of the State as an extended family,
we find certain ancient family-cults taken over into the religion of
the Polis. As the private family was knit together by the worship of
the Hearth in the hall and of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, ‘the God of the Garth,’ in
the courtyard of the house, so the City has its common Hestia or Holy
Hearth, upon which often a perpetual fire was maintained in its
‘Prytaneion’ or Common Hall; and the Cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος was
established in ancient days on the Akropolis of Athens. The
organisation of the ‘phratries’ was consecrated to the high deities,
Zeus Athena and--among some Ionic communities--to Aphrodite; and the
decisions of the ‘phrateres’ or ‘Brothers’ on questions of adoption
and legitimacy of citizens were delivered from the altar of Zeus
Phratrios; while the union of the local districts or ‘demes’ was
sanctified by the cult of Zeus or {67} Aphrodite Pandemos, the God or
Goddess of ‘all the demes.’ Also, the Polis organised and maintained
the kindred-festivals of commemoration proper to the family or gens or
phratria, the All-Souls celebration of the dead which was held at the
end of the Anthesteria; the γενέσια, the funeral feasts of the γένη;
the ‘Apatouria,’ the joint festival of the phratries; while the great
achievement of the consolidation of the scattered groups into the
single city was celebrated at Athens by the festival of the
Συνοικέσια, the ‘Union of all the Houses,’ and the Panathenaia, the
all-Attic feast of Athena.

The picture that these facts present of a State-religion based on the
idea of the family and of kinship is mainly drawn from Athens, of
which the religious record is always the richest; but it reflects
undoubtedly the system of the other Hellenic states as well. Many of
their records attest the belief that some one of the high divinities
was the ancestor or ancestress of the whole people, and this ancestry
was understood in the physical and literal sense. Thus Apollo
‘Patroös’ was the divine ancestor, being the father of Ion, of the
Ionic population of Attica, and even the non-Ionic stock of that
community, desired for political purposes to affiliate themselves to
this God.[67.1] In the same sense he was called Γενέτωρ, ‘the Father’
in Delos.[67.2] Zeus was the father of Arkas, the eponymous hero of
the Arcadians, and was worshipped as Πατρῶος at Tegea[67.3]; Hermes
also was ancestral God of part of {68} the Arcadian land and
identified with the ancestor Aipytos.[68.1] These religious fictions
came to exert an important influence on morality and also to develop
a certain spiritual significance which will be considered later.

_Hero-cult_.--This aspect of the public religion is further emphasised
by the prevailing custom of hero-worship which appears to have
gathered strength in this second period. The hero in the technical
sense was one whose tomb was honoured with semi-divine rites and who
was regarded either as a glorious man of the past or as the mortal
ancestor of the State or the tribe or the clan. The first clear
evidence of this in literature is in the poem of Arktinos of Miletos
called the ‘Aithiopis,’ that may belong to the end of the eighth
century, in which the apotheosis of Achilles was described. But there
is, as has been said, strong reason for believing that the practice of
‘heroising’ the dead descended from the pre-Homeric age. Nevertheless,
of the multitude of hero and ancestor cults recorded in ancient
Hellas, the greater number are probably post-Homeric. We find the
Delphic oracle giving vigorous encouragement to the institution of
them, and in the sixth century cities begin to negotiate and dispute
about the possession of the relics of heroes. Some of these in the
older cults may have been actual living men, dimly remembered, some
were fictitious ancestors, like Arkas and Lakedaimon, some may have
been faded deities, such as were Eubouleus at Eleusis and Trophonios
at Lebadeia. But all were imagined by the worshipper to have been once
men or women living upon the earth. This, {69} then, becomes a fact of
importance for the religious thought of the world, for it engenders,
or at least encourages, the belief that human beings might through
exceptional merit be exalted after death to a condition of blessed
immortality, not as mere spirits, but as beings with glorified body
and soul. Furthermore, certain ancient heroes, long endeared to the
people as the primeval parent or the war-leader of their forefathers,
become raised to the position of the high God and merged in his being;
Erechtheus shares the altar and even the title of Poseidon and Zeus,
Aipytos of Arcadia becomes Hermes, Agamemnon in Laconia at last is
fused with Zeus.[69.1]

Nor in this second period were such heroic honours reserved for the
remote ancestor or the great king or warrior of old, but were
sometimes paid to the recently dead, to the men who had served the
State well by arms or by counsel. On the assumption that Lykourgos of
Sparta was a real man--and no other theory that bears scrutiny has
been put forward about him--his case is the earliest recorded instance
of the ‘heroising’ of a personage of the historic period. A great
stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion
of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which
reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take
with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their
stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new
citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. The {70} most natural
person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the
colony, the κτίστης or ἀρχηγέτης as he was called; and we may regard
it as the usual rule that, when he died, he would be buried within the
city and his tomb would become a ‘ἡρῶον’ and would be visited yearly
with annual offerings.

That the ordinary head of the private household in this period
received posthumous honours amounting to actual worship cannot be
definitely proved. The tendance of the dead had become indeed a matter
of religion, and at Athens was attached to the ritual of the state by
the commemorative feast of All Souls, the χύτροι, or ‘Feast of Pots,’
the last day of the Anthesteria. But nothing that is recorded of this
ghost-ceremony convicts it of actual worship; the ghosts are invited
to spend the day with the household that holds them in affection; they
are offered pots of porridge, and then at sunset are requested or
commanded to depart. Prayers are proffered in their behalf to the
powers of death, but not directly to the ghosts themselves; no cult is
offered them as to superior beings endowed with supernatural power
over the lives of individuals and states.[70.1] Nevertheless, the
passionate service of lamentation and the extravagant dedication of
gifts which marked the funeral ceremonies of the eighth and seventh
centuries and which certain early legislation was framed to check,
reveals a feeling about the dead bordering on veneration and such as
might inspire actual worship.

We may safely assume that the growing interest of the States in
hero-cult intensified the family {71} aspect of the State-religion;
the hero as the glorious kinsman is invited to the sacrifices of the
higher deities, and to the hospitable ritual known as the ‘theoxenia’
in which the God himself is the host.

It is important for the student of religion to mark the consequences
of this close association of the civic religion with the idea of
kinship that held together the family and tribe. These have been
estimated more at length elsewhere[71.1] and only a few general
observations are possible here. Where a family bond exists between the
deity and the city, the spirit of genial fellowship is likely to
prevail in the ritual and religious emotions, and the family meal
might become the type of the public sacrificial meal with the god.
Such a religion is adverse to proselytism; for as it is the sacred
prerogative of certain kindred stocks, its principle means the
exclusion of the stranger. Its religious and moral feeling is
naturally clannish; the whole group must share in the moral guilt of
the individual, and the sins of the fathers will be visited on the
children. It affords a keen stimulus to local patriotism and quickens
an ardent life within the wall of the city; it has at the same time
the natural defects of narrowness of view. Yet, in the course of
religious evolution, we must regard the old Hellenic conception of the
God the Father of the tribe or the city as pregnant of the larger idea
of God as the Father of mankind, an idea which had already dawned upon
Homer at a time when the tribal spirit of religion was still at its
height.

A further result of such a system is that the {72} State-divinities
become also the patrons and guardians of the family morality, Zeus and
Hera, for instance, the supervisors of the human marriage and of the
duties of married life; and copious records present the High God as
the protector of the father’s right; of the tie that binds together
the brethren, the sisters, the kinsmen. While such a religion was a
living force, it was not likely that the family could assert itself as
against the State; to marry healthfully and early, to beget vigorous
children as defenders of the State and the family graves, to cherish
and honour one’s parents, to protect the orphan, these were patriotic
religious duties that were inspired by the developed State-religion
and strenuously preached by the best ethical teachers of Greece. The
State being the family ‘writ large,’ private morality and public could
not clash. The brutal action of Kreon in the Antigone is equally an
attack on the religion of the State as on that of the family; and it
was not till the fifth century that the claim of private conscience as
against the family and the State could arise or that the question
could be asked “Whether the good man was really the same as the good
citizen.”

_Influence of political religion on law_.--Of still greater interest
is an important advance in criminal law, discernible as early as the
eighth century, which may be traced partly to the growth of the City,
with its extended idea of kinship, partly to the growing intensity of
the belief in the power and significance of the spirits of the dead.

In the most primitive period of Hellas, the shedding of kinsman’s
blood was already a heinous sin; but the slaying of one outside the
kindred {73} circle was neither a sin against God nor a social crime.
But as the public mind of Greece became penetrated with the feeling
that all the citizens of the Polis were in some sense akin, the
slaying of a citizen became a criminal act of which the State, and no
longer merely the clan of the slain man, would take cognisance. And
this expanded concept of law is reflected in the expansion of an
ancient and most significant cult, the cult of Zeus Meilichios.[73.1]
This was the underworld God, who was angered and must be appeased when
kindred blood was shed; as the idea of kinship was enlarged, any civic
massacre might arouse his wrath and rites of atonement might be
offered to him. This keener sensitiveness concerning the sanctity of
human life was accompanied by a feeling that bloodshed might imprint a
stain on the slayer that rendered him ritualistically unclean, that
is, temporarily unfit to approach the Gods or men; it was also
fortified by the growing fear of the ghost-world, which seems to have
lain more heavily on the post-Homeric society than on Homer’s men. It
is hard to give the dates for this section of the mental history of
Hellas. The first record of the thought, which is nowhere explicit in
Homer, that homicide in certain circumstances demands purification is
derived from the Aithiopis of Arktinos, the epic poet of Miletos in
the eighth century.[73.2] Achilles, having slain the worthless
Thersites, must retire from the army for a while to be purified in
Lesbos by Apollo and Artemis; we mark here that the slain man was no
kinsman of the slayer in any true sense {74} of the word, but was a
member of the same Achæan community, and therefore his slaying
brought a religious impurity upon the hero; and we may believe that
the narrative reveals the early religious law of Miletos. But we must,
in passing, recognise the possibility that these apparently new
manifestations may be only a revival of immemorial thought and
feeling, common in the older non-Hellenic societies, and only for a
time suspended.[74.1]

_Influence of Delphi and Crete_.--In this post-Homeric development of
a system of purification from bloodshed, the legends suggest that
Crete and Delphi played a momentous part. In the great island, the
cradle of European culture, the cult of Zeus had early attached to
itself certain Cathartic ideas, probably of Dionysiac origin. And
probably in the pre-Homeric period the influence of Crete had reached
Delphi; while the legend of the migration of Apollo Delphinios from
Crete to Delphi, and the story that the God himself must go to this
island to be purified from the blood of Python, belong to the second
period with which we are dealing.

We have reason to believe that the Delphic God--through the agency of
his politic priesthood--was asserting his claim in the eighth and
seventh centuries to be the dictator in the matter of purification
from homicide, and thus to satisfy the cravings of an awakening
conscience. This claim may have been suggested partly by the fear of
competition with the spreading Dionysiac religion, which also brought
with it a ‘Kathartic’ message, and with which the Delphic priesthood
were wise enough to agree quickly; partly also by the aboriginal
nature of {75} Apollo, who was immemorially φοῖβος or ‘pure.’ Though
the claim was not universally admitted and the Apolline jurisdiction
could not obliterate the function of other divinities in this matter,
yet it was powerful and effective of much that was vital both to law
and religion. Of the early procedure at Delphi we know nothing. If the
god exercised discretion in his grant of purification, if he refused,
for instance, to purify the deliberate and cold-blooded murderer, here
was the opportunity for the emergence of a civilised law of homicide.
It may not have been until the seventh century that any Hellenic state
could express in a legal establishment its consciousness of the
difference between the act of murder and the act of justifiable or
accidental homicide. The earliest that we know of was the law-court,
ἐπί Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the
Dolphin-God”--established at Athens under the patronage of the
Cretan-Delphic God to try cases where the homicide was admitted and
justification was pleaded. In this, as in other Attic courts that
dealt with the same offence, rites of purification were often an
essential adjunct of the ceremony. The typical legend that enshrines
the early ideas of ‘Katharsis’ and turns on the question of
justifiable homicide is the legend of Orestes, which had spread around
the Peloponnese and penetrated Attica as early as the eighth century,
and later became Pan-Hellenic. Apollo, as a divine agent, appears in
it first, as far as we have any literary record, in the lyric of
Stesichoros, and at some indeterminate date in this period undertook
the purification of the matricide.

_Influence of Delphi on colonisation_.--These {76} Cathartic functions
and the general demand for their exercise must have greatly enhanced
the influence of Delphi in the earlier part of the post-Homeric
period. It was doubtless strengthened even more by the great secular
movement of Greek colonisation. With wise foresight the God had
undertaken the guidance and encouragement of this already in the
earliest days when the Hellenes were pushing across the sea; for it
seems as if the first Greek settlements on the Asia Minor coast, the
Lycian and the Æolic, were due to his leadership if not to his
inspiration. The legends that associate him with the Dorian migration
into the Peloponnese are too powerful to be rejected. And after this
event, when light begins to shine on Greek history and the Hellenic
race was rapidly establishing that chain of colonies across and around
the Mediterranean which were to diffuse Greek culture through the
world, the power of Delphi and the Delphic oracle reached its zenith.
For it is clear that it was the prevailing fashion to consult the
Pythian Apollo as to the choice of a site. Hence it came about that in
so many Greek cities Apollo was worshipped as Ἀρχηγέτης, that is, as
the divine founder, and that the flourishing communities of the West
sent back tithe-offerings to his shrine.[76.1] Was it by some
accident or by something essential in his early cult and character
that the God was able to play this momentous political part, such as
no other deity has ever played in the secular history of his people?
The cause may lie far back in the dim antiquity of the Apolline cult,
when he was specially Ἀγυιεύς, a god ‘of the road,’ the leader of the
migratory host. And {77} in pre-Homeric times, if not aboriginally, he
was already an oracular God; nor was any occasion so urgent for a
consultation of the local oracle as when the people were setting forth
on their perilous path to find a new home.[77.1]

_The Delphic oracle_.--The spiritual history of the Hellenic race in
the early history period, when we mark a growing consciousness of
nationality and of kinship in the various stocks, is very much a
record of the career and activity of the Delphic oracle; and this is
too complex and lengthy a theme to be more than adumbrated
here.[77.2] Due partly to the local position and the immemorial
sanctity of the oracle, partly to the devotion and the grateful
remembrance of the powerful Dorian states in the Peloponnese, the
Pythian worship came to overshadow the Delian, and provided the chief
religious centre and the strongest bond of spiritual unity in the
Hellenic world. For political unity it could do little, owing to the
centrifugal bias of Greek politics; yet the Delphic Amphiktyony, the
most powerful of these religious confederations that are recorded here
and there in the early history of Greece, contained within it the
germs of intertribal morality and concord. Its members were not indeed
pledged to perpetual amity, but at least to a certain mutual
forbearance even in their warlike dealings with one another. But the
chief regulative functions of the oracle were concerned with questions
of the institution and administration of cults, with the domains of
legislation, colonisation, public and even private morality and
conduct. In the sphere of religion it doubtless {78} emphasised the
necessity of purification from bloodshed; otherwise it had no high
religious message to deliver; but it was enthusiastic for the
propagation of the cult of Dionysos, and it authorised and sometimes
encouraged the growing tendency towards the posthumous worship of
distinguished men. In the sphere of morality its standard was
generally high and its influence beneficent, especially--if we can
trust the record--in the later period when it played the part of a
State-Confessional and in its utterances reflected generally the
progress of Greek ethics and the spirit of an enlightened
humanitarianism.

But its chief religious achievements were to bring some principle of
unity and authority into the complex and shifting aggregate of Greek
polytheism, and to deepen the impression on the Hellenic mind of the
divine ordering of the world; and the fruits of this teaching we
gather in the works of Attic tragedy and in the history of Herodotus.

In view of the history of other temple institutions of like power
among other peoples--the Mesopotamian, for instance--we may be
surprised that the Delphic priesthood made no attempt to impose Apollo
as the supreme God upon the Hellenic states. The author of the Homeric
hymn, composed partly under Delphic influences, exalts Apollo as high
as he dares; but neither in this nor in any Delphic utterance is
Apollo presented as more than the minister of Zeus, the mouthpiece of
the supreme Father-God, the tradition of whose supremacy among the
Aryan Hellenes had been fixed fast by Homer and the Homeridai.

Nor did the Delphic Apollo succeed in achieving a monopoly of
divination; for the spirit of local {79} independence was opposed to
any divine monopoly in any department of life. And other oracles, such
as some of those on the Asia Minor shore, acquired considerable
prestige, especially in the later period when the influence of Delphi
had declined. But from the eighth till the beginning of the fifth
century, the Pythian is the only one of the many mantic institutions
that is to be regarded as a vital force of Pan-Hellenism.

_The games of Greece_.--As another important phenomenon belonging to
the earlier part of this second period we note the emergence and
development of the great Hellenic games. Some recent theorists have
supposed that all the public athletic contests in Greece arose
directly from some religious ritual belonging to the cult either of
the gods or of the dead hero. The evidence is faulty and the
ritualistic origin of these institutions is unproven. But a common
temple-worship undoubtedly gave the opportunity and the occasion to
the development of the four Great Games, and from the beginning they
were placed beneath the ægis of religion. And these must be reckoned
as among the strongest Pan-Hellenic influences, evoking and
strengthening the consciousness of nationality. For in the sixth
century the whole of Hellas, eastern and western, was represented at
Olympia, Pytho, the Isthmus and Nemea; here was maintained the ‘truce
of God’ between the jealous or hostile communities; and at Olympia
once in every four years the Pan-Hellenes offered a common homage to
their aboriginal Father-God.

We must then regard the great games and the Pythian establishment as
momentous factors in the {80} religious national life, as tending to
evolve a religion of a broader compass than the narrow tribal type of
the remote past. And they concern the higher mental history of the
race because most of them, and notably the Pythian, included
competitions of art and literature; and thus they assisted in
establishing the specially Hellenic theory of the divine character of
the artistic and intellectual life.

There were other festal and public meetings of a more exclusively
religious purpose that also served to deepen in the various states the
consciousness of spiritual unity, and often, where the great lyric
poets composed hymns for the occasion, to exalt and illuminate the
ideal conception of the divinity; the Pan-Ionic Delian festival of
Apollo, for instance, of which the splendour developed in the early
post-Homeric age and with the growing prosperity of the new Ionic
colonies, must have contributed much to the building up of the
peculiarly Hellenic ideal of Apollo; and the Homeric hymn, inspired by
this occasion, is the earliest record of the national consciousness of
the Ionic race.

_Diffusion of Dionysos-worship_.--Another religious phenomenon,
pregnant of consequences for the spiritual history of Hellenism, is
the diffusion of the worship of Dionysos. Faint, though indubitable
traces of this can be discerned in the prehistoric period, but it only
begins to be palpable and important in the early historic. Its
significance has already been indicated in general outlines.[80.1]

Having entered Attica from Bœotia and been adopted into the Attic
state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor
coast, {81} it gradually, in the eighth and seventh centuries captured
most of the States of the Peloponnese, of the islands and the more
distant colonies.

The Hellenic culture of Dionysos forms one of the most interesting
chapters in the spiritual career of Hellenism; for the taming of the
wild Thracian God, the transformation of him into a civic deity, the
disciplining and the adaptation of the thiasoi of the Maenads to the
uses of an orderly state-religion, were not the least among the
achievements of the Hellenic genius. And as the state-religion of
these centuries had no eschatologic theory, so it seems to have
discarded everywhere whatever eschatologic promise the Dionysiac
religion proclaimed on its entrance into Greece. Yet, in spite of the
chastening influence of the civic spirit, the worship preserved much
of its distinctive tone and religious power; evoking a special mood
unknown in the other cults; while even the savage form of sacrament,
in which the God was devoured in his human or animal-incarnation,
survived with some modifications in Tenedos and Chios down to a late
period. The history, then, of the Dionysiac religion concerns the
account of the development of the sacramental idea in the
Mediterranean. It concerns also the history of Hellenic culture; for
one of its modes of expression was a peculiar type of emotional music,
accompanying the Dionysiac hymn known as the dithyramb, which has been
regarded, though probably erroneously, as the parent of Attic tragedy.
Its main contribution to the polytheism of Greece was its stimulation
of a warmer and stronger religious faith; and its special later
service to popular religious theory was the refining and {82}
brightening of men’s thoughts and sentiments concerning the life after
death and the powers of the lower world, with whom the mild and genial
God was generally identified or associated.

_Orphic thiasoi_.--But its highest importance is found rather in the
esoteric than in the external or popular domain of Hellenic religion.
For, perhaps as early as the seventh century, the cult of Dionysos was
raised to a higher power by the rise and diffusion of the Orphic
brotherhoods or ‘thiasoi’ who worshipped this deity under various
mystic names. The study of Orphism is of the highest interest and
complexity; and it is only possible here to indicate its general
features and significance. The preachers of the Orphic doctrines are
the first propagandists or missionaries that we can discover in the
pre-Christian Mediterranean world. For they had a definite message,
and ignoring the gentile and civic barriers of the old political
religion, they preached it, if not to all mankind, at least to all the
Hellenes. It was a message fraught with some new and momentous ideas,
whose real import we have been able to gather in part from the now
famous gold-tablets found in the graves of Crete and South Italy, and
containing parts of a metric Orphic liturgy and creed that is a
product at latest of the fifth, if not the sixth, century B.C.
Combining these with some passages in Pindar’s Odes and Plato’s
Dialogues, we can recover in outline the doctrine of early Orphism. It
proclaimed a theory, unfamiliar to native Greek mythology and
religion, that the soul of man is divine and of divine origin; that
the body is its impure prison-house where it is in danger of
contracting stain; that by elaborate purifications and {83}
abstinences the soul might retain its purity, and by sacramental and
magic methods the pure soul might enjoy in this life and in the next
full communion with God. Preoccupied with the problem of the life
after death, the Orphic mystics evolved the concept of Purgatory, a
mode of posthumous punishment temporary and purificatory; also, if we
can trust certain indications in Pindar and Plato, the dogma of
reincarnation or more specially of a triple cycle of lives both in
this world and the next. Students of religious philosophy have noted
here the striking resemblance to Buddhistic thought; and have
considered whether Indian speculation could have cast its influence so
far westward at so early a time.

It is of more immediate importance for the religious history of the
Greek people to determine--if we could--the measure of success that
these missions achieved, how far they succeeded in capturing the
masses or the élite of the people. They certainly did not succeed in
penetrating the inner circle of the Eleusinian mysteries; there is no
evidence that they even tried, though it is likely that they did; but
we may surmise that their influence was at one time strong at Athens,
as Aristophanes proclaims as a generally accepted tradition that
Orpheus was the apostolic founder of all mysteries. They were
evidently powerful in Crete; but the chief arena of their activity and
the chief scene of their secular and political influence was ‘Western
Hellas’ or Magna Græcia, where Pythagoras was their greatest convert
and the Pythagorean clubs their militant orders. The career of these
forms a page of general Greek history. Their downfall relieved Hellas
from the danger of the establishment {84} of Orphism as a secular
power, which threatened the Hellenic spirit with a bondage to
sacerdotalism and the pharisaic formalism of the purist. Henceforth,
the Orphic religion was a private influence only, and we have no
evidence to determine precisely how great it was at any particular
epoch. Pindar was deeply touched by it. Æschylus and Sophocles, so
far as we can see, remained unmoved, while Euripides may have been at
times attracted and at times repelled but was in no sense its
champion. Plato in a well-known passage[84.1] protests strongly
against the Orphic mystery-mongers as spiritual quacks destitute of
any real morality, who dealt in magic and traded in promises and
threats concerning the other world. Whether this moral estimate of
Orphism was just or not, there is no doubt that Plato’s theory of the
soul as expressed in the Phædrus was indebted to the Orphic
metaphysic. And the part played by these preachers of purity and
salvation in the later spiritual history of Greece was certainly of
high importance. They mark the beginning of a new era of individualism
and of what is called ‘otherworldliness’ in religion; for their
concern was with the personal soul and its destiny.

_Eleusinian mysteries_.--The Eleusinia or Mysteries of Eleusis were a
more national and Pan-Hellenic institution than the Orphica, but of
somewhat similar influence and purpose. Originally they may have been
merely the tribal mysteries of an agrarian society to which only the
adult members of the Eleusinian community were admitted. But when our
earliest record reveals them, namely, the Homeric hymn to Demeter
which cannot be later {85} than the close of the seventh century, they
have already enlarged their borders and their scope. For they appear
there as appealing to the whole Hellenic world, and their special
promise to the initiated is the happiness of the soul after death.
Having once transcended the tribal limits, they seem to have imposed
no conditions on the aspirants for admission except the possession of
Hellenic speech and purity from actual stain; the initiation was open
to women and occasionally to slaves. Nor does their influence and the
power of their appeal appear to have waned until the introduction of
Christianity. Many scholars have laboured to solve the problems
concerning their ritual, their doctrine and their inner significance.
It has been thought that their chief attractiveness may have lain in
their preservation of a higher sacramental conception of the sacrifice
that had died out in the ordinary public ritual; that the initiate
drank of a sacred cup in which were mystically infused the very life
and substance of the kindly Earth-Mother, with whom their own being
was thus transcendentally united. But more careful criticism shows
that, though a simple form of sacrament was part of the preliminary
service, the real pivot of the mystery was not this but a solemn
pageant in which certain sacred things fraught with mystic power were
shown to the eyes of the initiated, who also were allowed to witness
mimetic performances showing the action and passion of a divine drama,
the Abduction of the Daughter, the sorrow and long search of the
Mother, the Holy Marriage of reconciliation, possibly the birth of a
holy infant.

To imagine the thrill and the force of these rites, one must imagine a
mediæval passion-play {86} performed with surpassing stateliness and
solemnity. Those who saw these things in the Hall of the Mysteries at
Eleusis may have carried away with them an abiding sense of a closer
communion with the benign powers of the nether world and a resulting
hope of a happier posthumous lot. We must regard them as the highest
and most spiritual product of the pure Hellenic religion, investing it
with an atmosphere of mystery and awe that was generally lacking in
the public cult, and which was unperturbed at Eleusis by any violence
of morbid ecstasy such as marked the Phrygian and some of the Orphic
rites. We may believe that they exercised a healthful influence on the
moral and spiritual temperament of the Hellene; but it is not clear
that they definitely proclaimed any higher moral theory, nor do they
appear like the Orphica to have preached any dogma of metaphysic or
theology. But, like the Orphica, they tended to widen the horizon of
the religious spirit; for they appealed to a far larger public than
the ordinary cults of the city; and while being Pan-Hellenic in this
sense they belong to the domain of personal religion, for they
satisfied the personal craving of the individual for closer fellowship
with the deity and they soothed the troublous apprehensions that were
growing up in this second period concerning the individual destiny of
the soul. Yet as regards Attica and Athens at least and probably as
regards Hellas, they are not to be ranked, as the Orphica may be,
among the disruptive forces of individualistic religion, undermining
the social fabric of public worship. For the Athenian State
administered them--by the help of Eleusinian officials--in its
corporate capacity; and one of the catechumens--the {87} παῖς ἀφ᾽
ἑστίας--was initiated, according to the most probable view, in behalf
of the whole youth of the city.[87.1]

In the great mysteries the agrarian significance, though discoverable
and associated with simple agrarian magic, was overshadowed by higher
and more spiritual religion. And elsewhere in the State-festivals we
note this same phenomenon of progress in this second period. Old-world
utilitarian rites of agriculture and fertility were often taken over
by the expanding Polis and received an artistic elaboration that
disguised their original significance for the primitive peasant and
raised them to a higher plane of social religion. This interesting
process can be best studied in following the detailed records of the
Laconian Karneia and Hyakinthia, the Delphic Pythia, the Attic
Panathenaia: we can feelingly appreciate in these the potent influence
of the lyric poetry, the music, and the art of early Greece, shaping
and elevating men’s imagination of divinity.

By the close of this second period--_c._ 500 B.C.--the Hellenic
national consciousness had realised itself in respect of intellectual
culture, ethics and religion. Zeus Hellanios, the tribal God, is
becoming Panhellanios. The age of the tyrants contributed much to the
growth of Pan-Hellenism; Peisistratos something to the idea of a
national religion, in that he seems to have worked zealously for the
organisation and expansion of the Eleusinian mysteries. The cult of
Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways
of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the
Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of
civic worship. {88} But the two most striking phenomena in the
spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and
expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly,
the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as
the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces
affecting the life of the popular religion.

_Sixth-century philosophy_.--The relations of Greek philosophy to
Greek religion is a great and complex subject, the theme of many
modern treatises; and in this slight sketch of the whole history of
the polytheism there is no room for more than a few most general
observations. So far as the new speculation, which gave birth to the
free secular science of Europe, was preoccupied with questions of the
physical origins of things and elemental theories of cosmogony, it
would not necessarily clash with any orthodox prejudice of the average
Hellene. For he had no sacred books which dictated to him any views
concerning the origin of the world or the constitution of nature, and
which he would have considered it immoral to disbelieve. In fact when
Herakleitos boldly declared that “neither God nor man made the
Kosmos,” there was no authoritative Greek myth or theologic dogma to
gainsay him. But the great philosophers of the sixth century,
Pythagoras, Empedokles, Xenophanes and Herakleitos were also directly
concerned with the philosophy of religion, with speculations on the
nature and with the true definition of Godhead; and some of the
surviving fragments of their works express ideas and sentiments in
sharp antagonism to the concepts and ritual of the contemporary
polytheism. The main trend of their {89} speculations ran counter to
the anthropomorphic theory of divinity; and they tend to define God
not as a person, but rather as the highest spiritual or metaphysical
or even physical power or function of the universe; and there is a
common tendency in this sixth-century thought away from the theistic
to the pantheistic view. Pythagoras is said to have explained the
conception of God in terms of mathematics and to have been willing to
accept the personages of the popular polytheism on condition of
finding their true mathematical equation.[89.1] But this philosopher
stands apart from the other leaders of this first period of Hellenic
free thought. The mathematical mind is often a prey to mysticism. And
Pythagoras was the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism, the
founder of those secret societies that threatened the secular and the
intellectual freedom of Hellas. Equally on its mystic as on its
rationalistic side the Pythagorean teaching was in tendency inimical
to the public religion of Greece, though the members of this sect
appear always to have compromised with it. In the fragments of
Xenophanes we find the most severe protests against the current
religious conceptions of Hellas; his verses quoted by Clemens[89.2]
polemise strongly against the folly of anthropomorphism, which is the
master-passion of Greek polytheism; and if one or two of his quoted
utterances seem to proclaim monotheism, it is clear that for his
higher thought Godhead was not a person, but a cosmic principle or a
noetic idea. On the whole the same account may be given of the
religious theory of Herakleitos so far as this is revealed at all in
the {90} fragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he
tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary
polytheism;[90.1] but it is probably a truer view that he regarded it
with half-disguised contempt and only used its terms and figures on
occasion as literary expressions; while three of his fragments are
scornful exclamations against the excesses of the Bacchic ritual, the
methods of purification from blood, and the folly of idolatry.[90.2]

Yet in this early speculation of the sixth century the parting of the
ways has not yet been reached for physical science and religion; the
cosmic theory is expressed in spiritual and animistic rather than in
materialistic terms; for Empedokles Love and Strife are creative
principles, in the view of Thales the magnet has a soul and all things
are full of divine potencies. The great movement of Ionic thought was
indeed adaptable to a high pantheistic or animistic creed, but not to
the personal polytheism of the Hellenes, though most of the
philosophers do not appear to have been vehement protestants. And at
first their protests could have influenced only the minds of a few;
not before the fifth century was the popular State-religion obliged to
take notice of it.

_Rise of tragedy_.--The other phenomenon referred to above as marking
the close of this period was the rise of tragedy. The question of its
influence on the whole popular religion belongs to the history of the
fifth century. What concerns us chiefly at this point is its close
association with Dionysos-cult. The traditional view that it actually
originated in some {91} mimetic form of Bacchic ritual is in the
opinion of the present writer still the most reasonable, although this
is now denied by some scholars.[91.1] But even if its connection with
Dionysos-worship is a secondary or accidental fact, it is still a fact
of importance for the history of Greek polytheism. The records
concerning Thespis of the Attic village Ikaria, a place dominated by
ancient Dionysiac legend, the statement of Herodotus concerning
Kleisthenes, the tyrant of Sikyon, who gave to Dionysos the tragic
choruses that hitherto had been devoted to the hero-cult of Adrastos,
are sufficient proofs that this greatest of all the literary
achievements of post-Homeric Hellas was dedicated to the God already
in the sixth century; and throughout the glorious career of the Attic
stage Dionysos remained its patron-God.

His worship, then, must have received a strong stimulus from this new
form of literature which rapidly achieved popularity and appealed
directly to a larger public than the other. And his character thus
undergoes a singular transformation; the wild God of barbaric origin
comes to take rank by the side of Apollo and the Graces as a divinity
of culture and education, the inspirer of one of the greatest of
Hellenic arts. Here again, as in the cults of Apollo, Athena and the
Muses, we mark the characteristically Hellenic fusion of art and
religion; and the history of the dithyramb, the Dionysiac hymn which
may have been the parent of the drama and which was wedded to a
peculiar mode of music and rhythm, is an important chapter in the
history of European music.




 CHAPTER IV.
 THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

{92}

The third period of Greek religion may conveniently include the
fifth century and that part of the fourth that ends with the downfall
of the system of civic autonomy at the battle of Chaironeia. For the
history of Greek religion as of Greek culture, it is of the highest
interest, being the richest in respect of religious monuments and
literature and the most forceful and momentous in regard to the
influences at work. In the sphere of external history it witnessed
such world-crises as the struggle of Hellenism against barbarism, the
rise and fall of the Imperial City-State, and the emergence of Macedon
as a world-power; in the sphere of culture it witnessed the
culmination of the greatest art of the world, the bloom and maturity
of the Attic drama and Pindar’s lyric, the diffusion of education and
the spirit of enquiry through the activity of the Sophists, and the
higher development of philosophy and science. To show how the
religious practice and theory of the higher and lower members of
Hellenic society were affected by the great events and achievements of
this greatest period of human history is a necessary but a difficult
task.

_Fifth-century religion contrasted with the Homeric_.--If we take
Athens as the typical religious community of the fifth century and
compare the {93} structure and forms of her state-polytheism with
those of the old Homeric world, we find the personalities of the
prehistoric pantheon still worshipped and cherished; no prehistoric
cult of that epic world has as yet fallen into desuetude; nor had the
most civilised city of Hellas discarded the immemorial rites of the
simple peasant religion, the worship of rivers and streams, nor some
of the most naïve practices of animism. And it is clear that this
conservatism was no hieratic convention, but a living faith,
expressing a religious intuition of the people, who were as yet
untouched by the cooling influences of science and philosophic
scepticism. In fact, for the greater part of the fifth century, the
life of the polytheism was probably stronger than it had been ever in
the past. It was strengthened by the admission of a few new figures
and by the development of some of the old.[93.1]

It is rather in respect to its spirit, tone and outlook that the
religion of the fifth century presents some striking contrasts to the
Homeric. Its anthropomorphism is even more pronounced, thanks to its
great art-power, but it reveals a deeper conviction concerning the
part played by moral agencies and powers in the affairs of men. The
writings of Herodotus expound a religious view of history of which
only faint indications were found in the earlier epic literature. The
historian of the fifth century regards the momentous contest of Greece
with Persia as a conflict of moral forces, the issue being worked out
by unseen powers, such as Nemesis, Violence and Justice, with Zeus as
the {94} righteous Judge. And in weaving into his narrative the
stories of Æacid heroes and the Eleusinian deities speeding to the
help of the Hellenes at Salamis, he doubtless represents the faith of
the average Greek. A similar view was also impressed on the religious
imagination of the people by oracular utterances, such as that which
was imputed to the prophet Bakis--Δῖα Δίκη σβέσσει κρατερὸν Κόρον,
Ὑβριος υἱόν,[94.1] “Justice divine shall quench fell Koros, the child
of Insolence,” Koros standing for Persia, the tyranny born of satiety.
It is expressed pictorially on the famous vase at Naples, representing
Hellas and Asia pleading their cause before the High God with Ἀπάτη,
as a tempting demon, standing by Asia.[94.2] In this scene we trace
also the influence of the famous tragedy of Æschylus, the ‘Persæ,’
which in more than one passage of deep religious conviction pronounces
moral judgment on the great event.[94.3] The same view is expressed
and the same tone heard in the striking poem of Pindar’s eighth
Pythian ode, where he exults over the triumph of ‘Hesychia,’ the armed
Peace of Hellas, who has cast Insolence into the sea, even as Zeus
quelled the monster Typhœus.

_Pan-Hellenism_.--The Hellenic confederate effort against Persia was
the nearest approach ever made by the Hellenic race to Pan-Hellenic
action; and in a striking chapter of Herodotus, eulogising the loyalty
of the Athenians to the cause of Greece, emphasis is laid on the name
of Zeus Hellenios.[94.4] This is the highest political title of the
High God; {95} and its history is interesting. Originally the narrow
tribal name of the God of the Hellenes, a small Thessalian group under
the leadership of the Aiakidai, it was transported to Aigina by a
migration of the same tribe, whose ancestor Aiakos was the high-priest
of Zeus Hellanios; already in the sixth century, when the denotation
of Hellas was enlarged, the title may have taken on a wider meaning.
But it was the danger of the Persian wars, and the part played in
them--we may believe--by the men and the old heroes of Aigina that
brought the cult into prominence, investing the cult-name with a wider
significance and a more potent appeal. Here, then, was Hellenic
religion giving voice to an ideal that might be realised by the poet,
the artist, and the thinker, but never by any statesman or state.

Another cult belonging to the same range as this was that of Zeus
Eleutherios, the God of Hellenic freedom. “Having driven out the
Persian they raised an altar to Zeus, the God of the free, a fair
monument of freedom for Hellas.”[95.1] These lines of Simonides
commemorate the dedication of the Greeks after the victory at Platæa,
when they had purified the land and its shrines from the polluting
presence of the barbarian by means of sacred fire brought from Delphi.
The significance of this has been pointed out elsewhere[95.2] by the
present writer; the fight for liberty was prompted by more than a mere
secular passion, but by an idea inherent in the civic religion. The
title Ελευθέριος is only known before the Persian wars in the
Zeus-worship of Laconia; henceforth it was widely diffused,
commemorating not only the deliverance of Greece from {96} the
barbarian, but, in Sicily for instance, emancipation from the domestic
tyrant.

In contrast with the deterioration of the old Roman religion, caused
by the Hannibalic wars, the successful struggle of Greece against
barbarism in the east and the west undoubtedly quickened for a time
the fervour and devotion inspired by the national cults. The
sufferings of Hellas were easily repaired; the Gods in whom they had
trusted had not failed them, and much of the spoils won from the
barbarian were gratefully dedicated to the embellishment of the
shrines. The vacillating and time-serving policy of Delphi at the hour
of the greatest peril was condoned or unnoted by the victors, and
Apollo received an ample share of the fruits of victory. The champions
of Hellenism in the West, Gelo and Hiero, commemorated their victories
over the Carthaginian and Etruscan powers at Himera and Kyme by
thankofferings sent to Apollo at Delphi and Zeus at Olympia. The
bronze helmet found at Olympia, and now in the British Museum,
inscribed with the simple dedication, “Hieron the son of Deinomenes
and the Syracusans send Tuscan spoils to Zeus from Kyme,” is an
epoch-marking monument of Pan-Hellenic history and religion. The
gratitude of Hellas was paid in the first instance to the High God
Zeus; to him was consecrated the ‘feast of freedom’ at Platæa, which
was still commemorated with pathetic fervour even in the last days of
Hellenic decay;[96.1] to him, under the national title of Olympios,
was dedicated the mighty temple at Akragas, from the spoils won by
Gelo at Himera. But the outflow of national {97} thankfulness was
directed to other divinities as well; notably and naturally to the
War-Goddess of the Athenians, and the spoils of Persia at Athens and
Platæa were partly devoted to the erection of two striking statues of
Athena. Nor were the lesser powers of the elements forgotten; the
winds that assisted the Greek fleet at Artemision and the nymphs of
the soil on which the battle of Platæa was fought; the grateful
Athenians instituted a cult of Boreas, their kinsman, in their
restored city and assisted in the worship of the Nymphs at Kithairon.
The Arcadian goatherd-God, the rustic Pan, was admitted into Athens
shortly before the battle of Marathon, and the story to which the
Athenians gave currency of the help he rendered them at the great
battle contributed something no doubt to the subsequent diffusion of
his cult.

A further religious consequence of these great events was the stimulus
given to hero-worship; Gelo, the victor at Himera, and some of the
Hellenes who fell at Thermopylæ, Marathon and Platæa received heroic
honours. This ‘heroising’ of the recently defunct had its moral value
as a strong stimulus to patriotism, when they had died in the service
of their country; and though it was degraded in the fifth century to
the exaltation of the useless athlete, yet it must be reckoned among
the life-forces of later polytheism and as a momentous factor of
higher religious history.

Finally, we may with probability ascribe to the triumph of Hellas and
to the expanding glory and greatness of Athens a marked increase in
the Hellenic popularity of the Eleusinian mysteries. For this the
Athenians might thank Herodotus and his thrilling {98} narrative of
the vision of a heavenly host seen moving from Eleusis towards
Salamis, for the salvation of Hellas; they might also thank their own
far-sighted policy of encouraging the whole Hellenic world to take
part in the worship at Eleusis, aspiring thus to make the Hall of the
Mysteries, a recent architectural work of the Periclean
administration, the centre of a Pan-Hellenic faith.[98.1] And their
attempt in great measure succeeded.

_Influence of religious art_.--The study of the polytheism of this
century is essentially also a study of the great religious art which
culminated in the handiwork of Pheidias, but which continued forceful
and prolific till the age of Alexander. The general effect of the
iconic art upon Greek religion has been briefly indicated above; and
long before this century the religious bias of the race was committed
to idolatry;[98.2] the people craved an image that they could love
and cherish, though here and there they might retain the uncouth
fetich, the block of wood or rudely hewn stone, because of the
immemorial magic which it had acquired through ages of shy half-savage
veneration. The achievement of Pheidias and his contemporaries was
only the culmination in a process of ideal anthropomorphism that began
with Homer and was helped forward by the lyric poetry and music of the
post-Homeric age and by the art of the sixth century. Strictly
estimated and studied in all its fullness, in the marvellous products
of vase-painting, glyptic and sculpture that even the shattered fabric
of antiquity presents to us, the art of the fifth and early fourth
century must be called the most perfect religious art {99} of the
world. A more spiritual or more mystic religion could not have
produced or could not have borne with such an art. But it was the best
and most satisfying expression of the best that the religious spirit
of Hellenism admitted; for this polytheism had been built up by the
teachers of the people, poets and artists obeying the race-instinct,
not on vague conceptions of infinite Godhead ineffable for art and
inexpressible in clear speech, but on vivid perceptions of concrete
divine personages, distinct in form, attributes and character robust
and very real. The Greek artist, with his miraculous cunning of hand,
could deal with such types as he could not have dealt with ‘the Word’
or with the ‘Buddha.’ Nor was he merely the exponent of the highest
popular imagination, but, unconsciously perhaps and in obedience to a
true art-tradition, at times a reformer and in any case a creator. For
us his works have this value among others that, even more than the
poetic literature, they reveal to us how the people at their best
imagined their deities. But they also helped the people to imagine
them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that
takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic
vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of
Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary
above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of
self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here
more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of
Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone.
It was not till the time of Skopas in the fourth {100} century that
Greek sculpture could so deal with this orgiastic theme. The plastic
work of the fifth century dealing with divine forms is mainly
tranquil, majestic, ethical, intellectual; the physical perfection of
the divinities sculptured on the Parthenon impresses us not merely and
not so much with the sense of physical beauty and strength, but rather
with the sense of a higher and nobler vital power; so instinct is the
beauty with that quality that the Greeks called σεμνότης, a quality
partly ethical, partly spiritual, but palpable in material forms that
hint at a tranquil reserve of strength. The expressive power of such
an art can show benignity and mildness of mood without sentimentality,
because without voluptuousness, intellectual thought without
morbidness, majesty without self-display.

The gentle and tranquillising spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries
speaks in the famous Eleusinian relief showing the mother and the maid
giving his mission to Triptolemos. The Pheidian Athena Parthenos was a
more deeply conceived ideal than the Athena of the poets, for it
showed her as the Madonna of the Athenian people, with a softer touch
of maternal gentleness in the face. The Zeus Olympios of Pheidias
transcended the portrait of the High God as given by Homer or even by
Æschylus; for the chryselephantine statue impressed the later Greeks
as the ideal of the benign and friendly deity, the divine patron of a
Hellas united and at peace with itself; an image that appeared “to add
something to the traditional religion,”[100.1] embodying, as Dio
Chrysostom says, a conception of the God so {101} convincing and
complete that “having once seen it one could not imagine him
otherwise.”[101.1]

Nor had any of the poets presented Hera in forms so winning and
gracious as those in which the best art of this age embodied her, as
the Argive Goddess ‘of good works’ “in whose face and person
brightness appeared by the side of majesty.”[101.2] The poetic
presentation of Apollo is blurred and incomplete compared with such
plastic types as the Apollo of the Parthenon frieze and the Pheidian
statue in the Museo delle Terme. The older poetic ideal of Aphrodite
was shallow and trite compared to the Aphrodite of the Pheidian type,
such as we see presented by the Laborde head in the Louvre; here is
something of the majesty of the great cosmic goddess imagined by
Æschylus in his Danaides, but combined with an emotion of human love
in the countenance and a winning appeal that the verses of the great
poet do not clearly convey. And we may surmise that the ‘Ourania’
Aphrodite of Pheidias had some influence on the theory of Plato and
his distinction between the heavenly and the sensual love. The full
imagination of the personality of Kore would combine the radiance and
the grace of the young cornfield with the awe and mystery of the lower
world; the former is masterfully presented by a coin[101.3] of
Lampsakos that shows her rising from among the cornstalks with
uplifted yearning face; the unknown artist of the great Syracusan
medallion struck towards the close of the fifth century combines this
aspect of her, in a type of surpassing {102} loveliness, with a touch
of melancholy that hints at the character of the Goddess of
death.[102.1]

And yet this triumphant anthropomorphic art must have failed, and
judged by the fragments that survive did fail, when it tried to reveal
in clear outline and full light the half-shrouded forms of the nether
world, the Chthonian Goddesses and the Eumenides whose nature appealed
to the sense of religious awe, to what the Greeks called τὸ φρικῶδες,
and did not brook to be wholly revealed. We may doubt therefore if
even the statues of the Holy Ones, the Semnai, carved by Kalamis and
Skopas, were types so expressive of the real moral-religious
imagination that fashioned these figures of cult as were certain
awestruck verses of Sophocles in the Œdipus Coloneus. Nevertheless,
this ideal Greek art, by expressing in palpable forms of benign beauty
the half-palpable personages of the lower world, did one service to
religion and the religious imagination; it banished the uncouth and
the terrible and helped to purge and tranquillise the Greek mind by
investing the Chthonian powers with benevolence and grace. We discern
here the influence of the Bacchic and Demeter mysteries working upon
the artist and of the artist upon the popular faith. That the average
Greek of the classic period was saved from the vampire terrors that
Mr. Lawson has discovered in modern Greece[102.2] was due equally to
the religion and to the art that he saw around him.

Apart from this special fact, a phenomenon so momentous in the
spiritual world as the flowering of this religious art in the fifth
century claims {103} prominent notice even in the slightest sketch of
the whole history of Greek religion; for it must have worked an effect
which no student of insight would be tempted to belittle upon the
religious mood and thought of the people. Greek records sufficiently
attest its religious working; even the alien Roman, Æmilius Paulus,
when he approached the Pheidian masterpiece of Zeus Olympios felt the
thrill of the ‘real presence’[103.1]; when Aristophanes fervently
calls on Athena as “the Maiden who holdeth our city in her hand and
alone hath visible power and might and is called the Warder of the
Gate,”[103.2] he is thinking of the bronze statue carved by Pheidias
and set to guard the entrance to the Akropolis.

It is impossible, then, that this beautiful idolatry, against which
the philosophers might occasionally protest,[103.3] could have
weakened the popular faith in the native deities. Introduced suddenly
into Rome it helped to destroy the old Roman animistic religion. But
the religious instinct and history of Greece was wholly different from
that of Rome. Greek polytheism would probably have perished or been
transformed by alien systems of cult far sooner than it was, if Greek
art had not fortified and ennobled it, rooting it deeply in the
æsthetic-religious emotions and perceptions of the people. By
establishing so convincingly the individuality of the Greek
divinities, it preserved them from a too rapid absorption into the
personalities of Oriental religions, when the fusion of west and east
had been achieved by Alexander and his successors.

{104}

_Influence of Literature: Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles_.--More
familiar and apparently more answerable is the question concerning the
influence of the poetic masterpieces of this period, the works of
Pindar and the Attic drama, on the general history of Greek religion.
The subject is obviously too complex for the scope of this summary,
and has been handled by many scholars in large treatises. There is
only room here for the most general statement of facts, tendencies and
effects. As exponents of the highest contemporary religious thought
the names of Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are those of
primary authority. It is easy and interesting to collect religious
citations from their works, to compare these one with another and with
the current polytheism. It is far more difficult to decide generally
and in regard to any special point how far any one of them could have
influenced or modified the popular religion. Nor are all these four on
the same footing in respect of opportunity. For Pindar writes for
dynasts and aristocrats and, being a hireling, might be thought
fettered in the free expression of his sentiments; and in any case his
public was more limited than that which the three dramatists
addressed. Therefore their message was likely to reach further and to
penetrate the Greek mind more deeply than anything that Pindar had to
say; and that this was actually the case can be proved. Nevertheless,
Pindar must be reckoned with as an original thinker who spoke words of
power; in spite of his profession, his mind remained imperial and
free; and in his attitude to the public religion he is to be grouped
with Æschylus and Sophocles; and all three stand together and apart
{105} from Euripides. All three show the virility, the mental
tranquillity combined with imagination and audacity, that marked the
typical character of the greatest age of Hellas. And all three
genially and without querulous protest, though with some freedom of
criticism, accept the existing religious order, desiring to ennoble
it, not to destroy it. Pindar himself was the establisher of certain
new cults, and the first great literary preacher in Greece of Orphic
eschatology, and, we may say, the first great poet in Europe who
raised the theme of Paradise to the level of the highest poetry. Such
a marvel of song on the mysteries of life and death as the second
Olympian ode was a new voice in Hellas; how far it echoed, and with
what influence on the faith of the people, is impossible to measure
with accuracy. For the progress of this new eschatology, which is a
weighty subject for the history of later Hellenism, we have some
important negative evidence in the fact that neither Æschylus nor
Sophocles show any knowledge of Orphism or interest in it, or any
preoccupying concern with the state of the soul after death; nor in
their occasional utterances concerning posthumous judgment do they go
beyond the popular traditional view: though the thoughtful refinement
of Sophocles suggested to him that there might be forgiveness of sins
and reconciliation after death.[105.1] Nor do we find anywhere in the
works of the two dramatists any hint of that pregnant Orphic doctrine
to which Pindar gives voice, that humanity is of divine origin--ἓν
ἀνδρῶν ἓν Θεῶν γένος--a doctrine which passed into the higher thought
of later Greece.

{106}

Leaving aside this special question, we find a certain general
resemblance in the religious view of these earlier poets of the fifth
century. All three preach the supremacy of Zeus, his omnipotence and
perfect justice, while Sophocles lays stress on his mercy. The effect
of this poetic message was probably great and certainly timely; for
the growing power and frequency of hero-cult, which Pindar himself and
the dramatists indirectly encouraged, was a danger to the higher
religion; and the backward and less cultured Hellenes were doubtless
liable to the propensity of the savage mind to prefer the worship of
the local daimon to that of the high God. Against such degeneracy the
works of the greatest fifth-century poets, like the masterpiece of the
greatest fifth-century sculptor, served at least as an enduring
protest in Hellas.

And it would be of interest to consider how far the sculptor, in
regard to the general conception of his mighty theme and in the choice
of mystic bywork whereby he made it articulate, drew certain
suggestions from the poetry of Æschylus.

These poets also deal with the question of Fate and Destiny. The
personal, or half-personal, Μοῖρα was an old but insignificant figure
of the popular religion and mythology, and Homer is aware of her and
has to reckon with her. She might become more formidable under the
philosophic conception of τὸ εἱμαρμένον which appeared in the
philosophy of Herakleitos; and we know that later philosophy and
cultivated thought was much perplexed over the problem of the
reconciliation of Fate with the idea of a free divine Providence. The
great Attic poets, taking their cue from Homer, “follow a short {107}
cut,” interpreting Moira as the voice or agent or emanation of the
power of Zeus.[107.1] And the pupil of Pheidias, Theokosmos of
Megara, was working out the same idea when he carved the Fates with
the Hours as subordinate adjuncts to the great form of Zeus.[107.1]
We may say, then, that both the poetry and the art of this period
worked for the deliverance of the polytheism from the burden of
fatalism, which tends to lower the value and sap the force of all
personal religion.

The Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus expresses indeed a view of Zeus
that conflicts with the higher religious thought of the poet. But
Æschylus has here taken up a crude story that he cannot wholly
moralise. On the other hand, his handling of the idea of the curse in
the house of Pelops is not worked out on the lines of mechanical
fatalism; one is made to feel it as a spiritual atmosphere which
engenders a bias towards evil, but does not overpower the freedom of
the individual.

Again, each of these poets, while accepting and in certain points
purifying the traditional polytheism, was capable of religious thought
that worked on other lines than anthropomorphism. The High God, Zeus,
is generally for them a definite personal Being; but once at least
Æschylus transcends this apprehension of him and defines Zeus
pantheistically as a supreme cosmic force; a fragment of his
‘Heliades’ speaks of him thus: “Zeus is air, earth, heaven; Zeus is
the whole of things, and whatsoever is higher still than these.”
Moreover, the other divine forces that shape our lives are presented
by him and his fellow-poets, not always as θεοί, but as moral {108}
powers that are only half-personal, not as concrete individual
deities, but as emanations of the divinity. We may call them
‘personifications of moral ideas,’ and some are no more than what this
phrase implies, such as those for instance with which Euripides
capriciously plays. But some may be rather described as the
Soul-powers of the High God, like, in some ways, to the Persian
Fravashi; such are Pindar’s Σώτειρα Διὸς Ξενίου Θέμις,[108.1] the
Dike of Æschylus, “Justice, the Maiden Daughter of God,”[108.2] who
“shines in the poor man’s smoke-dimmed cabin”;[108.3] Mercy in the
verse of Sophocles,[108.4] “Mercy shares the throne of God to deal
with all the deeds of men.” While Pindar’s genius inclines to the
brighter of these emanations, Æschylus broods rather over the gloomy
forces of the shadowy world, which he might at times be constrained to
present in palpable concrete form for stage purposes and yet his own
deeper thought could grasp as half-outlined spiritual powers, not the
less real because impalpable. The ordinary Hellene in his religious
perceptions laid too much stress on personal individuality, as if this
were the only criterion of ideal reality; from his point of view if
Eros was to be a real power of the divine world, then Eros must be
imagined as a beautiful youth. But Kypris or Aphrodite in a striking
Sophoclean fragment is no longer presented as a personal goddess, but
as a diffused pantheistic force.[108.5] And the Attic drama may have
enlarged the mental outlook of the succeeding generations in this
matter; for the author of the speech against Aristogeiton in the
fourth {109} century must have been sure that his audience would
understand him when he said, “all mankind have altars dedicated to
Justice, Law-abidingness and Pity, the fairest and holiest (being
those) in the very soul and the nature of each individual.”[109.1]
This is just how Euripides might speak.

The great fifth-century poets were all moralists each in his own way.
The history of Greek ethics only concerns us at the several points
where it touches religion; and to this history, both generally and on
its religious side, the works of Pindar and the three dramatists make
important contributions. Of special interest is their attitude to
Greek mythology which, in spite of its general brightness and beauty,
seriously needed in parts the puritanical reformer, if it was to be
harmonised with the higher religious thought. But none of these poets,
not even the grave Æschylus, was willing to undertake such a rôle.
Pindar of all the three comes nearest to preaching, for his _métier_
allowed him more personal freedom of comment. While following, on the
whole, the beaten path of tradition, he could innovate or invent if a
moral purpose was to be gained; for instance, he preaches to a friend
the doctrine of forgiveness of injuries and confirms it by the example
of Zeus, who forgave and released the Titans, a myth for which he is
the sole authority.[109.2] We find him anticipating Plato in his
protest against some grotesque and repulsive stories, such as the
cannibalism of the Gods in the myth of Pelops, or blasphemous stories,
such as the theomachies and the combats of heroes against divinities:
“let all war and strife stand far apart from the immortals”[109.3]
{110} is a good sententious maxim for the expurgation of Greek
mythology and for the enrichment of Greek ethico-religious thought.
But neither Pindar nor the two older dramatists protest against the
more licentious myths, and they accept at need various legends about
the amours of the Gods. In fact, the axiom that sexual purity was an
essential attribute of all divinity was not yet accepted by the higher
thought of Greece.

Pindar’s freedom and sense of irresponsibility in regard to myths has
a certain value in that it shows that the futilities and improprieties
of mythology--the “unhappy stories of bards”--were not necessarily a
burden on the stronger religious minds of Hellas, and that they could
be greatly excised from the polytheism without endangering the popular
worship and faith, which in the main was independent of them.

As for the two dramatists, his contemporaries, mythology was their
public business, and they accepted it genially because they were not,
in the first place, moral teachers, but dramatists; it did not
therefore occur to them to protest or violently to reform. But they
might select, discard and reshape; they could take the great legends
of the past, legends of Thebes, the story of the Niobids, of
Prometheus, the death of Ajax, all of them irreconcilable in parts
with higher morality and religion, and invest them with as much
morality as the tradition admitted. This they did with force and
subtlety. And generally the moral spirit and imagination of Æschylus
and Sophocles must be counted among the spiritual facts of this period
with which the history of Greek ethics and religion must {111} deal.
Doubtless the older and robuster poet was the stronger moral and
religious force; his protests against the non-moral doctrine of
Nemesis, his profound utterances concerning moral responsibility and
the moral continuity that links our lives and actions, his discovery
that suffering brings moral wisdom--these are landmarks in the ethical
story of Greece; while with Sophocles the conviction is no less deep
of the eternity and divinity of the moral law.

They were the last spokesmen of a civic-imperial system with a civic
religion and morality that had not yet passed its zenith.

_Euripides_.--The part played by Euripides in this spiritual history
of Hellas was wholly different. Younger contemporary of Sophocles as
he was, he seems to belong to a different age. In his work and thought
is reflected far more vividly than in the older poets of the same
century the new mental life which was fostered by the philosophers and
the sophists. The influence of the physical speculations of the sixth
century and of those of Demokritos and Anaxagoras of the fifth, which
at some points advanced further in materialism, has had time to
penetrate the more gifted minds and to compel the public to a certain
attention. The paid ‘Sophist,’ the pioneer of modern education and the
first champion of the critical spirit, was travelling around. And
after 470 B.C. the imperial greatness of Athens had begun to attract
the greatest teachers and thinkers of the age. It was of great moment
for Euripides that such men as Anaxagoras and Protagoras were active
in Athens for many years, and that he had enjoyed familiar intercourse
with them {112} as he also enjoyed with Sokrates. It is clear that the
poet imbibed deeply their teaching and their spirit; he was also
learned in Orphism, antiquarianism and remote folklore. Being by
nature a great poet, he has also something of the weakness of the
‘polymath’ or the ‘intellectual’; he had not the steadiness of brain
or strong conviction enough to evolve a systematic philosophy or clear
religious faith; his was, in fact, the stimulating, eager, critical
spirit, not the constructive. His mental sympathies and interests
shift and range from pole to pole. He is a secularist in his view of a
physical universe, and he foreshadows a secular treatment of ethics
based on ideas of φύσις and heredity, though a chorus of his maidens
may praise chastity as “the fairest gift of the Gods.” It was
therefore possible, though most unjust, that Aristophanes should call
him an atheist. On the other hand, he is capable of profound religious
sentiment and exalted religious utterance, and strikes out flashes of
light that might kindle and illuminate a higher religion. Therefore it
was possible for Clemens of Alexandria to find in some of his words a
foreshadowing of Christ.[112.1] He remains for us an enigma, and
probably no final judgment will ever be pronounced upon him, in which
we shall all agree.

But the student of Greek religion must confront these two questions
about him: (_a_) What was his real sentiment concerning the popular
religion? (_b_) What were his contributions to religious thought, and
what was likely to be his influence on the religious temperament? To
make up one’s mind on these questions demands a long and critical
study, {113} also a tactful sense of the distinction between Euripides
the playwright and Euripides the thinker. It is the confusion of this
distinction that leads, for instance, to the strangely erroneous views
held concerning the religious significance of his ‘Bacchæ.’ A
sympathetic reading of many of the plays must convey the impression
that certain cult-figures and legends of the polytheism filled the
poet with scorn and loathing; and at times he seems to compose as if
he had a personal hatred of Apollo and Aphrodite in particular, for
instance, in the Ion and Hippolytus. When he can interpret Aphrodite
as a cosmic force he can dilate on this as beautifully and ardently as
Lucretius; if he could have believed that Apollo was merely the Sun,
as he tells us ‘the wise’ were well aware, he might have forgiven him.
But it is the real personal Aphrodite of Homer and Helen, the personal
Apollo, the father of Ion, the seducer of Kreusa, and the beloved
ancestor of the Athenians, that rankled in his mind. When he handles
the story of the madness of Herakles and brings madness on the stage,
he uses her first as his mouthpiece to convey to the Athenians what he
thought of Hera;[113.1] just as he puts into the mouth of Amphitryon
his own mordant criticism of the action of Zeus.[113.2] Yet with
other parts of the polytheism he seems at times in the most glowing
sympathy; in the Hippolytus, for instance, where he expresses for the
first time in literature the religious rapture of purity; in the
Bacchæ where he discovers the necessary phrase for the expression of
the Bacchic communion, for the ecstasy of the Mænad-revel on the
mountain, in verses that tingle with the nature-magic {114} which was
at the root of this wild cult. Yet no one should be deceived into
thinking that he is preaching the cause of Dionysiac worship; for the
Bacchæ closes with that depressing anti-climax, where Dionysos plays
the sorriest part, and Euripides’ own sour dislike of the personal
traditional God gives an unpleasant flavour to the last scene. It is
this bitterness of protestantism and criticism in this poet that
strikes a new note in Greece; and Euripides may be regarded as the
first in European history to be possessed with the theologic temper.
It cannot be said that he preached a new religion; he was no votary
even of Orphism, for though, as the Bacchæ and the fragment of his
‘Cretans’ attest, he felt something of its spell, he was not of that
cast of mind that could be deceived by its pharisaic ritual and laws
of diet, and he certainly cherished no mystic belief concerning the
life after death; for even in the ‘Bacchæ’ there is no reference to
this attractive dogma, which was the main anchor of the Orphic faith.
Nor can he be truly described as a zealous reformer of the people’s
faith and practice; for the reformer must have some belief in that
which he wishes to reform; and that Euripides firmly believed in any
part of the polytheism is hard to maintain; his final attitude is
generally a doubt. Nevertheless, his protests might have been of value
to the more cultured citizen who still clave to his civic worship.
They are directed mainly and most forcibly against the stories of
divine vindictiveness and divine licentiousness. He is evidently
touched with the new idea that vengeance is alien to the perfect
nature of God; this was still more insistently proclaimed by Plato and
by the Pythagoreans and {115} later philosophers.[115.1] On the
second count his protest is suggested by the notion that was dawning
in him that purity in every sense was essential to the divine nature;
he is then the herald in literature of a thought which Orphism may
have prompted and which was to play a leading part in later religion
and religious speculation, but which was unfamiliar to his
contemporaries either in Hellas or anywhere in the Mediterranean
except in Israel. His leading principle of criticism in all these
matters is expressed in the Iphigeneia in Tauris, namely, that the
evil in religious practice and legend arises from men imputing their
own evil nature to God.[115.2] We owe much to the man who first
uttered this warning against a debasing anthropomorphism.

The immoral elements in Greek mythology, which have been constantly
reprobated by ancient and modern writers, have often blinded them to
the fact that Greek religion in its forms of worship and sacred
formulæ was mainly pure and refined. The stories about the Gods,
often of the type natural to savage folklore, did not constitute
ancient religion; and they were the less able to choke the growth of a
higher ethical-religious spirit in that they were not enshrined in
sacred books that could speak with authority to the people. Yet we
have not infrequent proofs in Greek literature, notably in Plato’s
_Euthyphron_, that they might exercise at times an immoral influence
on men’s conduct. Meantime the educational movement in the sixth and
fifth centuries had awakened men’s minds to the importance of the
moral question in literature. And the protests of Euripides are
developed by Plato in his {116} scheme of education in the _Republic_,
and the same point of view prompts him to his puritanical legislation
against poets. Such moral movements in the polytheistic societies of
Greece are interesting to mark, though their effect is often difficult
to estimate. The new puritanical spirit had probably a wholesome
influence on the more cultured minds; it had little influence on the
mass of the people, nor does the later poetry of the Hellenistic
period show much trace of it.

As regards the actual forms of Greek ritual and worship, Euripides has
nothing revolutionary to say. He appears to have a strong dislike for
prophets, and in this he was in some accord with Æschylus, Sophocles,
and the Athenian people. He shows great distrust for Delphi; and its
influence was doubtless impaired at Athens during the Peloponnesian
war. He protests against human sacrifice as a barbaric and
non-Hellenic institution[116.1]--though he appears fond of it as a
dramatic motive--and on one occasion the speaker argues that the Gods
need nothing from mortals at all;[116.2] the thought was suggested
merely by dramatic exigencies; and Euripides nowhere attempts a
crusade against the value of sacrifice in general. He has only one
important thing to say about it, namely that the small sacrifice of
the pious often outweighs the hecatomb.[116.3] This thought implies a
more spiritual view of the divine nature and is not infrequently
expressed in the later literature; according to Theophrastos and
Theopompos this higher view of sacrifice was even encouraged by the
Delphic oracle.[116.4]

{117}

There is much indeed in the sententious poetry of Euripides that might
have elevated and cleared the religious thoughts of his age; but it is
doubtful if his ultimate conception of Godhead, as it tends towards
pantheism, could have been reconciled with the anthropomorphic
polytheism of the people or if those most conversant with his tone and
inspired by his spirit could have remained long in sympathy with
orthodoxy. And there is an instinct in Euripides which enhances his
value for the modern man, but which was to be subversive in the
longrun of the old civic religion, namely, the humanitarian or
cosmopolitan instinct; that which allowed him to sympathise with
Trojans, women, children and slaves, which inspired him with the
beautiful thought that “the whole earth is the good man’s fatherland,”
which also prompted him to despise the life of civic duty and activity
and to recommend, as Aristotle does, the secluded and contemplative
life. The further development of this cosmopolitan spirit and its
effect on the old civic religion will be noted below.

It has been necessary to dwell so long on Euripides, not only for the
reasons mentioned above, but also because owing to the vogue that he
won in his lifetime and that was greatly to increase after his death,
he more than any other of the great men of letters must be regarded as
the populariser of the new enlightenment.

Whether he individually exercised any immediate religious influence
upon the popular religious mind, for good or for harm, is not easy to
decide with precision; for there were other exponents than he of the
same freer and more advanced thought, which {118} began to express
itself early in the sixth century. As a result we are able to discern
the religious view of human life and conduct, becoming what we should
term more spiritual, more inward. The moral judgment begins to look to
the soul or the inner principle; the doctrine begins to be proclaimed
that God as a spiritual power can read the heart of man and judges him
by that; that sin lies not in the external act alone; that external
ritualistic purity is of less avail than purity of soul. Such thoughts
as these which could serve as the foundation-stones of a new religion
and which helped to shape the later religious history of Europe were
mainly a heritage from the speculation of the sixth century and were
in the air of the fifth. We cannot think that they were confined to
the philosophic circles until Euripides gave them publicity; for the
notable oracle quoted and commented on by Herodotus had proclaimed to
the people the novel view that a sinful purpose was the same in the
sight of God as a sinful act;[118.1] Epicharmos, the Sicilian poet of
the earlier fifth century, had preached the higher ideal of
purity--“if thou art pure in mind, thou art pure in thy whole body.”
It was probably in the latter part of the same century that some
rhetorician of the school of Gorgias interpolated the proem of
Hesiod’s _Works and Days_, which reveals an exalted view of the High
God.[118.2]

We may believe, then, that this higher religious ethic had a certain
elevating influence on the popular imagination. The question of
immediate interest is whether we can trace any effects of this in
actual worship. Did the new enlightenment, for instance, {119} lead to
the abolition or reform of cruel or impure or absurd forms of ritual?

_Human sacrifice_.--This question involves the consideration of the
practice of human sacrifice, which had been certainly prevalent in
prehistoric and early historic Greece, as in other Mediterranean
communities. We have evidence that in the fifth and fourth centuries
the practice was of rare occurrence in the Greek societies and was
repugnant to the religious morality of all but the most backward. The
feeling about the sacrifice of Iphigeneia manifested in the Agamemnon
of Æschylus, the story about the Bœotian generals and the sacrifice
of a maiden before the battle of Leuktra are sufficient proof.[119.1]
The Platonic dialogue of the Minos contrasts the Greeks with the
barbarians in this matter,[119.2] yet implies that the Arcadians in
the cult of Zeus Lykaios and the men of Halos in that of Zeus
Laphystios[119.3] continued the cruel offerings that disgraced their
Hellenism. Euripides attests that the human sacrifice once customary
in the rites of Artemis, near Brauron, had been, before his day,
transformed to a mere fiction,[119.4] and at some time earlier than
this the Athenians must have ceased to immolate human scapegoats,
called φαρμακοί, in their Thargelia.[119.5] The Rhodians eased their
consciences and at the same time maintained their immemorial rite by
choosing a malefactor who had been condemned to death as a human
victim to Kronos.[119.6] According to Porphyry the practice {120}
survived here and there under the Roman Empire until the time of
Hadrian.[120.1] And Plutarch[120.2] declares that the yearly custom
of exposing the two Locrian maidens to the chance of a cruel death on
the shore of Ilium, in expiation of the sin of Aias the Less against
Athena Ilias, had been abandoned not very long before his time.

But the better sentiment of Greece in respect of such rites had
probably begun to work as early as the time of Homer, for certain
legends concerning the abolition of this ritual and the substitution
of the animal for the human life point back to the prehistoric period;
and the merciful reform was ascribed to the High God himself in a
Laconian legend that closely resembles the story of the sacrifice of
Isaac.[120.3] The humanitarian spirit, then, had asserted itself
before the sixth century; but doubtless the higher teaching and
thinking of this and the succeeding age quickened its influence.

_Phallic ritual_.--As regards that element in Greek ritual which the
modern taste pronounces impure, there is little trace of any attempt
at reform in any period of the polytheism. The element was indeed but
slight. The forms of worship were, on the whole, decorous, often
stately and beautiful; ancient legend reveals the anxious care of the
early Hellenes to preserve their temples from any sexual defilement;
where a ἱερὸς γάμος, or Holy Marriage, was enacted in any of the
shrines, there is no need to suspect any licentiousness;[120.4] no
such feature is discernible in the Eleusinian or other Hellenic
mysteries, although {121} the Christian fathers are eager in their
insinuations; the Hellenic[121.1] cults of the Oriental Aphrodite
were generally innocent of that ritual of temple-prostitution which
was found in certain Anatolian cults and which scandalised the Greek
as much as the Christian writers; the few impure titles attaching to
this goddess may well have arisen in the later period of the decadent
polytheism.[121.2] In the early ages, it is clear, the wholesome and
temperate influence of the Hellenic spirit had worked upon the forms
of the polytheism. Nevertheless, in the ritual of a few divinities,
Demeter, Hermes, Dionysos, and even of Artemis herself,[121.3] sexual
emblems were occasionally in vogue, dances of a more or less
licentious character are mentioned, though these were very rare; while
in the Thesmophoria and other services of Demeter, what was called
αἰσχρολογία, indecent and scurrilous badinage, was indulged in by the
women among themselves or more rarely with the men also. We note that
such ritual is practically confined to vegetation-cults, and in some
it is merely vegetation magic hardly attaching to the divinity, nor
affecting his or her moral aspect. The phallic emblem and the
procession called the φαλλαγωγία or φαλλοφορία were specially
associated with Dionysos and Hermes; and Plutarch, a man of more than
the average culture and refinement and strikingly susceptible to the
spiritual influences of the more mystic religions, describes it as a
harmless adjunct of the ancestral and cheerful ritual of the {122}
Bœotian peasant.[122.1] Now it is worth noting that against this
element in Greek ritual there is scarcely a word of protest in all the
ethical and philosophic literature of Greece. The exception is only a
fragmentary utterance of Herakleitos, in which he seems to rail
against the phallic procession of Dionysos; but the exact sense of his
words is not quite clear.[122.2] The higher moral thought of Greece
on this matter is probably more nearly represented in the utterance of
Aristotle in the Politics,[122.3] where he lays down austere rules
for the training of the young: “No impure emblem or painting or any
representation of impropriety is to be allowed by the archons, except
in the cults of those divinities to whom the law attaches the ritual
of scurrility (τωθασμός): in their case the law allows those of more
advanced age to perform the divine service in behalf of themselves,
their children and their wives.” Even in the last three centuries
before Christ, when greater stress was continually being laid upon
purity in cult, no protest is heard against these old-world forms,
which have maintained themselves in many parts of Europe down to the
present day in spite of the denunciations of Christianity. The seeming
paradox is explained when we reflect that the idea of purity changes
its content in the different generations; and secondly that the
Hellenic, like all the other Mediterranean religions, except the
Hebraic, regarded the physical procreative power as belonging to the
divine character and as part of his cosmic creative force; therefore
an emblem that was secularly impure might be made holy by cult and
consecration. It is in this respect that the modern {123} ideas of
refinement differ most markedly from the classic.

_Survival of other primitive ritual_.--There is much besides in old
Greek ritual that appears to us harmless but uncouth and irrational;
strange and naïve things were done that primitive ideas of magic and
animism inspired; and one may be surprised to find that the higher
culture of the fifth and succeeding centuries is not known to have
suppressed a single one of these. Still, in the time of Theophrastos,
and indefinitely later, the Athenians were capable of the quaint
old-world ritual of the Bouphonia, that strange medley of worship and
magic and dramatic make-belief[123.1]; still in the time of
Demosthenes[123.2] they were capable of bringing up to judgment in
the law court an axe or any other inanimate thing that had caused the
death of a man or of the sacred ox and solemnly condemning it to be
thrown into the sea; the driving out of sin or famine, incarnate in a
human being, was a ceremony in vogue at Massilia[123.3] and probably
also at Athens long after the beginning of our era. Nor did the higher
anthropomorphism, powerful as its working was, entirely obliterate the
worship or half-worship of animals in the later centuries.[123.4]
Even Zeus might still be conceived by the men of the fourth century as
occasionally incarnate in the snake; and in a ritual law regulating
the cult of Asclepios at Athens, composed shortly after 400 B.C., a
sacrifice was ordered to certain sacred dogs; the pious votary would
comply, however the act might awaken the laughter of a comic poet.
Herakleitos protested against the {124} absurdity of praying to idols;
but no voice of the new enlightenment is heard against these far more
irrational and backward ceremonies. The average public thought of the
fifth century did not repudiate the use of magic; in fact, it is not
till the fifth century that its efficacy is known to have been
recognised by legislation.[124.1] And Plato,[124.2] speaking about
it in his Laws, a work of his declining years and intellect, is not
sure whether he believes or disbelieves in its power. There is nothing
more conservative than ritual; and Greece produced no ardent
Protestant reformer. Therefore, the average educated Athenian even of
the fourth century would doubtless agree with the orator Lysias, that
“it is prudent to maintain the same sacrifices as had been ordained by
our ancestors who made our city great, if for no other reason, for the
sake of the city’s luck.”[124.3]

_Strength of the traditional religion in the fifth century_.--The
question naturally occurs--were the mass of the citizens touched at
all in their inward theory of things by the spirit of modernism which
breathed from Ionia and inspired the sophists? The culture that was
the stock-in-trade of the latter was only offered to those who could
pay; and upon these the poorer Athenian looked askance. He heard of it
at first with a dislike that might become dangerous. Fanaticism, as we
are familiar with it in the pages of European and Semitic history, was
happily alien to the Greek temperament. But the banishment of
Anaxagoras and Protagoras, and the execution of Sokrates by the city
that was to become {125} the schoolmistress of Greece, might seem to
savour somewhat of this temper of mind. These acts, indeed, were not
inspired solely by religious feelings; but they are clear proofs that
the polytheism was by no means moribund and could be dangerous in its
own defence. Nothing is more erroneous than the view which is
sometimes expressed, that the popular devotion to the old religion was
abating and its divine personalities and forms losing life and value
towards the close of the fifth century. In their dark days the
Athenians bided truer to their old faith than did Rome in her time of
terror. We do not find a prostrate Athens turning desperately for aid
to alien Oriental cults. We hear indeed of the beginnings of
Adonis-cult in the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, the first
ripple of a wave of Orientalism that was to surge westward later. But
this feminine excess was unauthorised, and Aristophanes hates it and
mocks at it. And the shallow view mentioned above would be
sufficiently refuted by his comedy of ‘the Clouds,’ in which he, the
greatest literary genius of his time, poses as the champion of the
reaction against modernism. It is refuted also by other incidents in
Athenian history that fall within the last decades of this century;
for the rage of the people at the mutilation of the Hermai, at the
supposed insult to the Eleusinian mysteries, at the neglect of the
dead after the battle of Arginousai, may be evidence of morbid
religiosity, and is surely inconsistent with a general prevalence of
scepticism. In these episodes the whole people reveal a passionate
attachment to their holy mysteries, to their quaint phallic
Herme-images on which the luck and the life of the State depended, to
{126} the duties of the loving tendance of the dead. Even their
animistic beliefs concerning the common phenomena of the physical
world had not yet been extirpated or purged by the physical philosophy
of Ionia; for according to Plato it was still a dangerous paradox,
which his Sokrates disclaims before the jury, to maintain with
Anaxagoras that the Sun and the Moon were merely material bodies and
not in themselves divine. Intellectually Nikias appears inferior to
Homer’s Hektor. It was Athens that produced in the fourth century the
‘superstitious man’ of Theophrastos; but it is right to bear in mind
that she also produced the man who could so genially and tolerantly
expose that character.

_Influence of comedy_.--Those who believed that the faith in the
polytheism was falling into rapid decay by 400 B.C. sometimes quote by
way of evidence the astonishing licence of Attic comedy in dealing
with the divine personalities; the notorious example is the ludicrous
figure and part of Dionysos in the Frogs of Aristophanes. Yet the
people who enjoyed the humour of the play were more devoted to
Dionysos than to most of the other persons of their pantheon. If the
‘excellent fooling’ of Aristophanes is a proof of popular unbelief,
what shall we say of that Attic terra-cotta of the sixth century that
represents him half asleep and half drunk on the back of a mule and
supported by an anxious Seilenos?[126.1] The present writer has
suggested that “this is some peasant’s dedication, who feared his god
little but loved him much and treated him _en bon camarade_.”
Epicharmos in Sicily had been beforehand with Aristophanes in
venturing on the burlesque of divine actions, Hephaistos and Herakles
{127} specially lending themselves to ridiculous situations. Even in
the epic period the same gay irreverence had occasionally appeared, as
in the Homeric hymn to Hermes. These things do not necessarily arise
from an anti-religious spirit, but they may be taken as indication of
a certain vein in the Hellenic character, a light-heartedness and a
reckless freedom in dealing on certain occasions with things divine
that is markedly in contrast to the Oriental spirit. Nevertheless, it
is not improbable that comedy at Athens and elsewhere did gradually
exercise a weakening or a debasing influence on the popular faith. For
the other poets of Attic comedy took greater liberties than even
Aristophanes; Kratinos and Telekleides of the fifth century, Amphis of
the fourth, did not shrink from introducing the High God himself on
the stage in ridiculous and licentious situations. There probably was
some reserve and no gross indecency in the presentation of these
plots. And much is conceded to the spirit of the carnival, especially
when a certain αἰσχρολογία was sanctified by custom and ritual.
Nevertheless, the more earnest-minded of the Athenians may have agreed
with Plato’s condemnation of such a handling of divine
personages,[127.1] and though the popular faith may have been robust
enough to endure such shocks, one cannot but suspect that the people’s
religious imagination suffered a debasement in moral tone. A few
South-Italian vases of the fourth century, on which are scenes that
appear to have been inspired by such comedies, are the worst examples
of Hellenic vulgarity.

The history of Greek religion, then, must reckon with Attic comedy as
among the possible causes of {128} religious corruption and decay; but
at the worst this is only one side of the picture, for the fragments
of the comedies of Menander, as will be shown, contain many a striking
expression of the higher religious spirit and advanced ethical
sentiment.

_Waning of the political value of Delphi_.--There are certain external
events in the history of Greek religion towards the close of the fifth
century that must be noted in a general sketch of its career. One is
the waning of the political influence of the Delphic oracle; its
secular mission appeared to have been accomplished when the era of
Greek colonial expansion had closed; at the first terror of the
Persian invasion the great states anxiously resorted to Delphi for
guidance, but the priesthood failed to rise to the Pan-Hellenic
occasion and played a double game. During the Peloponnesian war it was
obvious that they were ‘Laconising’; nor were they ever given again an
opportunity of leading _la haute politique_ of Hellas, and in the
middle of the fourth century Demosthenes could speak contemptuously of
‘the shadow at Delphi,’ although the Amphictyonic League, as the only
federal council of Hellas, still retained a nominal value sufficient
to induce Philip to scheme for admission. Generally, in the fourth,
third and second centuries, the oracle retained influence only in the
spheres of religion and morality. Plato still regards the Delphic God
as the natural director of the religious institutions of the State.
And we have interesting examples in the later literature of
consultation of the oracle by individuals whose minds were troubled by
religious terrors and remorse. In fact, it came to serve the purposes
of a private confessional, giving advice on {129} questions of
conscience; and its advice was generally sane and often enlightened
and shows the priests as possessed with the progressive spirit of
Greek ethical philosophy.[129.1]

_Spread of Asklepios-worship_.--Another event of importance is the
diffusion of the cult of Asklepios and the growing influence on the
Hellenic mind of this once obscure hero or earth-daimon of the
Thessalian Trikka. It was thence that sometime probably in the sixth
century he had migrated to Epidauros, where his power expanded through
his union with Apollo. His cult-settlement in Kos was connected with
the Epidaurian; and already in the fifth century the Asclepieion of
this favoured island had reared the great Hippokrates and was thus the
cradle of the later medical science of Europe. Towards the close of
this century Asklepios and his daughters came even from Epidauros to
Athens, and according to a well-founded tradition the poet Sophocles
was his first apostle; in the next generation we find the Athenian
state regulating his worship, which was soon to conquer the whole
Hellenic world. And in the survey of the Hellenistic age it must be
reckoned with as one of the main religious forces of later Hellenism.
We may note in passing a striking divergence between the European
spirit of Hellenic religion and the Oriental spirit of Mesopotamia:
the Babylonian God practises magic, the Hellenic Asklepios, though he
worked miracles enough, came in a later day at least to foster
science, and even his cases at Epidauros were not all merely of the
Lourdes type.

_Growth of the Thiasoi_.--Another interesting phenomenon that begins
to arrest our attention in {130} the latter part of the fifth century
is the growth of private θίασοι or voluntary religious associations
independent of the public religion and devoted to a special divinity
who might be an alien. The most interesting testimony is the title of
a comedy by Eupolis called the ‘Baptai,’ which we may interpret as
‘the Baptisers,’ satirising a society devoted to the Thracian goddess,
Kotytto, whose initiation-rites must have included a ceremony of
baptism, of which this is the earliest example within the Hellenic
area. It will be more convenient to estimate the importance of
religious significance of these θίασοι in the survey of the next
period of our history. Meanwhile, it is well to mark certain evidence
that the most powerful and appealing of these, the Orphic mystery,
having failed in the sixth century to capture the States of Magna
Græcia, was increasing its private influence in Eastern Greece in the
century before the rise of Alexander. Plato’s attack is itself a
witness of this. And when Aristophanes[130.1] and an Attic orator
contemporary with Demosthenes[130.2] openly acknowledge Orpheus as
the apostle to the Hellenes of the most holy mysteries, and the
teacher of a higher way of life, we must conclude that the spirit of
the Orphic brotherhoods had touched the imagination of the general
public outside the circle of the initiated.

_Religion in first half of fourth century B.C._--Yet it is hazardous
and probably false to say that the public religion of Greece was
decaying visibly throughout the first half of the fourth century.
Athens is as usual our chief witness. The restored democracy was all
the more strenuous in matters of religion as scepticism was considered
a mark of the {131} new culture of the oligarchically-minded. The
trial of Socrates is an indication of this temper. We have also
evidence from this period of the occasional severity of the Athenian
people against those who tried to introduce unauthorised and
un-Hellenic cults. The Hellenic tradition is still strong against the
contagion of the orgiastic spirit of the Anatolian religion, and it
was with difficulty that the Athenian public could tolerate the wild
ritual of Sabazios and the Phrygian Mother, nor even in the time of
Demosthenes were the participants in it secure from danger. The early
fourth-century art still exhales the religious spirit and serious
ethos of the Pheidian school; and it created the type, and almost
succeeded in establishing the cult, of the new Goddess of Peace,
Eirene, for whose presence among them the wearied Athenians might well
yearn; it also perfected the ideal of Demeter, the Madre Dolorosa of
Greek myth, whose Eleusinian rites with their benign promise of
salvation added power and significance to the later polytheism. The
literature of this period attests the enduring vitality of the popular
religion. The Attic oratory of the fourth century was more religious
in its appeal than any modern has been, as might be expected of a time
when there was yet no divorce conceivable between Church and State. It
is not a question of the religious faith of the individual orator, but
of the religious temper of the audience which is attested by many
striking passages in the speeches. According to Antiphon, the
punishment of sinners and the avenging of the wronged is specially the
concern of the deities of the nether world[131.1]; Andokides avers
{132} that foul misconduct was a more heinous sin in a man who had
been in the service of the Mother and the Maid of Eleusis[132.1]; the
speech against Aristogeiton is almost as much a religious as a
juridical utterance. Demosthenes may have been a sceptic at heart,
believing in chance--as he once says--as the governing force of our
life; but otherwise he is glowingly orthodox in respect of Attic
religion and mythology, and the greatest of his speeches closes with a
fervent and pious prayer.[132.2] And again it is well to remind
ourselves that the political or forensic orator is a truer witness to
the average popular belief than the poet or the philosopher.

_Plato’s attitude towards the popular religion_.--A consecutive
history of Greek religious thought as embodied in the surviving
writings or records of the philosophic schools of Hellas is far too
large a subject even to be adumbrated here. And a general survey of
the religion can only notice shortly the leading thinkers whose works
there is reason to suppose had popular vogue and lasting influence
upon the religious world.

Among these the primacy belongs to Plato; and the full account of
Greek religion, both in the period that precedes the downfall of Greek
independence and in the periods that follow, must include a critical
estimate of his religious speculation. This is no place for an
elaborate consideration of the metaphysic of his ideal theory, or the
relation of his ideas to a theistic system; but only the most general
observations may be allowed for the purpose of this sketch. To
understand his main attitude towards the popular cults, and his
influence upon the later {133} educated world of Greece, we must
recognise at once that, idealist and reformer as he was, he was no
revolutionary or iconoclast in matters of religion; he would reform
Greek mythology, purging it of stories of divine conflicts, divine
vengeance, divine amours; and, as these fortunately were enshrined in
no sacred books, he feels that this might be done gently and easily
without disturbance to the established forms of worship. He does not
desire to abolish sacrifice or idolatry, but inculcates simplicity in
the offerings.[133.1] In one passage he even maintains that the
legislator will not change a single detail of the ritual, if only for
the reason that he does not know anything of the inner truth that may
lie behind such outward forms.[133.2] Even in his most advanced
physical and metaphysical speculations he finds a place for the
popular pantheon;[133.3] in the hierarchic scale of things the
Olympians are ranged somewhere below the supreme transcendental God of
the Universe. The ‘Timæus’ dialogue presents some interesting
theologic dogma; here[133.4] in the scale of Divine creation the
Olympian Pantheon, which seems to be accepted rather for the sake of
ancient tradition, is given the third place after the planets and the
Sun which are the second works of the Supreme Creator, the first being
the cosmic Heaven. These deities of the polytheism, then, are not
immortal in their own nature, but are held together for all eternity
by the will of the highest God. And it was to them that he committed
the formation of man, and lent for this purpose a portion of his own
immortality; the mortality of man is thus accounted {134} for; which
would have been inexplicable had he sprung directly from the immortal
Supreme Being.

It is interesting for our present purpose to note that this esoteric
and transcendental system, devised by the great master and parent of
Greek theosophy, would leave the established religion more or less
unimpaired; it even accepts its data at certain points, namely, the
nativity of its Gods, and draws the logical conclusion that Gods, who
were born could not be by essence immortal; therefore Zeus could not
be accepted as the Absolute and Supreme Being of the Cosmos. Also it
proclaims the idea of an immortal element in man, which, again, is in
accord not only with Orphic teaching, but also with the contemporary
popular faith in the survival of some part of our being after death.
But the work which reflects most vividly the popular religion and
betrays the strongest sympathy with it is the Laws, a work of his old
age in which the conservative spirit of the religious reformer is no
less striking than the intellectual decay of the philosopher. He
accepts the greater part of the civic political religion, merely
purifying the mythology and some of the ideas concerning divinity; and
it is striking how easily he finds in it materials ready to his hand
on which he can build an exalted ethical-religious system of rights
and duties, especially those which concern the life of the family and
the groups of kinship.[134.1] In fact, the background of the thought
in this lengthy treatise is almost always the Greek Polis, though
glimpses may here and there break through of a wider vista. He
expresses the prejudices of the Greek citizen against new forms of
private or foreign orgiastic cult which {135} were dangerously
enticing to women;[135.1] any doubtful question that might arise
concerning rite or cult he would leave to the decision of the oracles
of Delphi or Dodona or of Zeus Ammon.[135.2] We feel generally that
Plato did not assume the part of an apostle of a new order of
religion, but that both in his philosophy and religious theory he
found a sufficient _point d’appui_ in the old, of which he tried to
strengthen the moral potentialities.

The later sects which attached themselves to his name or to his school
were deeply interested in religious speculation, which degenerates at
last into the mystic superstition of Neoplatonism. Therefore, as the
work of Aristotle belongs to the history of European science, so the
philosophy of Plato concerns the later history, both of pre-Christian
and Christian religious thought. To estimate exactly how his influence
worked on the better popular mind in the centuries before Christ is
impossible. But we may naturally and with probability surmise that he
contributed much to the diffusion of the belief in the spiritual
nature and perfection of God, to the extirpation of the crude notions
of divine vindictiveness and jealousy, to the interpretation of the
external world in terms of mind and spirit as against any
materialistic expression, to the acceptance of the belief in the
divinity of the human soul and its affinity with God and in the
importance of its posthumous life, which was partly conditioned by the
attainment of purity. These latter ideas constitute the faith of the
Orphic sects, from whom Plato may have silently borrowed them. But
whether through Plato or the thiasoi many of them {136} came to appeal
strongly to the popular mind of later Hellas.

_Religious art in the fourth century_.--Our general survey is now
approaching that period of world-change brought about by the rise of
Macedon. But before leaving the scene of the free City-State, we
should remember to estimate the religious work done by the great
fourth-century masters of sculpture before the power of Alexander
reached its zenith. The fiery imagination of Skopas found plastic
types for the forms of Dionysos and his thiasos, and his work rivalled
at least, if it did not surpass, in inspiration of tumultuous life the
masterpieces of the older Attic vase-painters noticed above.
Praxiteles, the master of the gentler moods of the soul, in the
religious sphere consummated the types of Aphrodite and Demeter; the
almost perfect embodiment of the latter goddess, the Cnidian Demeter
of the British Museum, a work of his school, combines something of the
tearful expression of the Madre Dolorosa with the blitheness of the
Corn-Goddess. We are conscious indeed of a change in the
representation of divinity. The works of this later generation have
lost the majesty and awe, the σεμνότης, as the Greeks called it, of
the fifth-century art; nor can the Greek states command any longer the
creation of the chryselephantine colossal statues of temple-worship.
In these later types, though still divine, there is more infusion of
human passion, of the personal experience, the struggles and yearning
of the individual soul. Anthropomorphism is pursuing its path, and
though still fertile in works of high spiritual value, may come to
weary and weaken the religious sense.




 CHAPTER V.
 THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

{137}

The establishment of the Macedonian Empire wrought momentous changes
in the civic-political religion of Hellas; and some of these were in
the direction of loss and decay, while others worked for the birth of
new religious life. The political significance of Apollo of Delphi, of
Zeus and Athena, the divine leaders of the Polis in its counsels and
ambitions, was doomed to pass away. Athena, as the warder and
counsellor, was of less avail for Athens than were the Samothracian
sea-deities for the victorious Demetrios.

Certainly in the first centuries of the Hellenistic age there were few
external signs of decay; we do not yet hear of ruined shrines or the
decline of great festivals such as the Delia; Athena, though no longer
the goddess of a civic Empire, was still and for ages yet remained the
benign Madonna for the Athenian, to whose care the boy-athlete and the
marriageable girl were dedicated; we have record from the island of
Tenos[137.1] of the abiding hold that even such a deity as Poseidon
still exercised on the affections of his people, as late as the second
and first centuries B.C.; and if we had continuous chronicles of each
cult-centre we should probably find similar evidence showing that the
dominant {138} figures of the old polytheism were still able to fulfil
in some degree the religious wants of the individual worshipper. And
scholars who have been tempted to ante-date the decay of Hellenic
polytheism have ignored, among other evidence, this important historic
fact that in the fourth century it was still vital enough to make
foreign conquests, to penetrate and take possession of Carthage, for
instance, and that in the third century it began to secure for itself
a new lease of life within the city and the growing Empire of Rome; in
fact, the last chapter of Greek religion falls within the Roman
imperial period.

_Growing force of personal religion_.--Yet the Hellene in the fourth
century and in the early days of Macedonian ascendancy began to crave
other outlets for his religious emotion than the traditional cults of
his phratry or tribe or city. Personal religion was beginning to be a
more powerful impulse and to stimulate a craving in the individual for
a more intimate union with the divinity, such, for instance, as was
offered freely by the Great Mysteries of Eleusis. And we have fairly
sufficient evidence that the fourth century witnessed a great
extension of their influence.[138.1] The mysteries of Megalopolis
were instituted and those of Andania were reorganised by their aid;
and the first Ptolemy is said to have invited an apostle from Eleusis
to assist in some religious institutions of his new city of
Alexandria.[138.2]

_The religious brotherhoods_.--The same aspiration was also satisfied
by the private θίασοι, the guilds of brethren devoted to the special
cult of one {139} divinity. These unions belong to the type of the
secret religious society which is found in all parts of the world at
varying levels of culture. In Greece we have evidence of them as early
as the time of Solon; it was probably not till the fifth century that
any of them were instituted for the service of foreign divinities; we
hear then of the thiasos of the Thracian Goddess, and in the earlier
half of the fourth century of the orgiastic fraternity devoted to
Sabazios, with which Æschines in his youth was associated. But it is
not till the Macedonian period that the epigraphic record of them
begins; henceforth the inscriptions are numerous and enlightening
concerning their organisation and their wide prevalence throughout the
Hellenic world.[139.1] Their importance for the history of religion
is great on various grounds.

They show the development of the idea of a humanitarian religion in
that they transcend, in most cases, the limits of the old tribal and
civic religion and invite the stranger; so that the members, both men
and women, associate voluntarily, no longer on the ground of birth or
status, but drawn together by their personal devotion to a particular
deity, to whom they stand in a far more intimate and individual
relation than the ordinary citizen could stand to the divinities of
his tribe and city. This sense of divine fellowship might sometimes
have been enhanced by a sacrament which the members partook of
together; we know that this was the bond of fellowship in the
Samothracian mysteries, which were beginning to appeal widely to the
early Hellenistic world. A common meal at {140} least, a love-feast or
‘Agape,’ formed the chief bond of the ‘thiasotai,’ and this was
sometimes a funeral-feast commemorative of the departed brother or
sister. There was nothing to prevent the thiasos choosing as its
patron-deity some one of the leading divinities of traditional
polytheism, to which they must not be supposed, as Foucart supposed
them, to stand in any natural antagonism; therefore, for instance,
there were local reasons why Greek merchants whose central
meeting-point was Rhodes should form θίασοι under the protection and
in the name of Zeus Xenios, the God who protects the stranger, or of
Athena Lindia, the ancient and powerful divinity of Lindos, or of
Helios, the prehistoric Sun-God whose personality pervaded the whole
island. So far, then, the religious importance of these societies
consists in their quickening influence on personal religion, in the
gratification that they afforded to the individuals craving for
personal union with the Godhead, also in their organisation which
aroused a keener sense of religious fellowship between the members,
and which later served as a model to the nascent Christian community.
But in the history of the Hellenic religion their significance is even
greater on another ground, namely, that they bear a most striking
testimony to that fusion of East and West which it was the object of
Alexander, and the mission of his successors, to effect; for many of
these religious brotherhoods, whose members and organisation were
Hellenic, were consecrated to foreign deities, Sabazios, Adonis,
Xousares, the Syrian Goddess; so that they played undesignedly the
part of missionaries in the momentous movement sometimes called the
{141} Θεοκρασία, the blending of Eastern and Western religions and
divine personalities, of which the significance will be considered a
little later.

_Menander_.--The student who is tracking the course of the religious
life and experience of Hellas through the Hellenistic period should
endeavour to gather beforehand a vivid impression of the spirit of the
Menandrian comedy. For Menander, the friend of Epicurus and the
devoted admirer of Euripides, was the favoured heir of the
humanitarian spirit that had gleamed fitfully even in the Homeric
period and had gathered strength and articulate expression in the
century before Alexander opened the gates of the East. Patronised and
courted by Demetrios Phalereus and Ptolemy, admired by the scholars
and reading public of Alexandria and the Hellenistic world even more
than he had been by his own contemporaries, Menander was eminently in
a position to give a tone to the religious sentiment of this period;
and the Anthologies of his works prove that he was actually reverenced
as an ethical-religious teacher.[141.1] Therefore, for the general
exoteric history of Greek religion he counts for more than any of the
philosophers, for he addressed a far larger public. Yet the message
that he has to deliver has come to him from the philosophers and from
the inspiration of the humanised Attic spirit, of which he appears
{142} the most delicate and final expression. While writing and
thinking pre-eminently as the cultured Athenian of the close of the
fourth century, he is the mouthpiece of cosmopolitanism in ethics and
religion--“no good man is alien to me; the nature of all is one and
the same (οὐδείς ἐστί μοι ἀλλότριος ἂν ᾖ χρηστός· ἡ φύσις μία
πάντων)”[142.1]; the Terentian formula--‘homo sum, humanum nil a me
alienum puto’--is only an extension of this, losing something of its
ethical colouring. Many of the fragments, showing striking
approximations to New Testament teaching, are of vital importance for
the history of Greek ethics. As regards religion, they may contain
protests against superstition and the extravagance of sacrifice
proffered as a bribe[142.2]; but they exhibit no real or veiled
attack on the popular polytheism as a whole. On the other hand, they
have preserved many memorable sentences that bear witness to the
development of a religion more personal, more inward and spiritual
than had hitherto been current, save perhaps in Platonic circles. God
is presented as a spirit and as spiritually discerned by the mind of
man; and a high ideal of Platonic speculation is delivered to the
public in the beautiful line, φῶς ἐστὶ τῷ νῷ πρὸς θεὸν βλέπειν ἀέι,
“the light of the mind is to gaze ever upon God.”[142.3] The sense of
close and mystic communion between man and the divine omnipresent
spirit is strikingly attested in the passage of one of his unknown
comedies: “a guardian spirit [δαίμων] stands by every man, straightway
from his birth, {143} to guide him into the mysteries of life, a good
spirit, for one must not imagine that there is an evil spirit injuring
good life, but that God is utterly good.”[143.1]

In attempting to grasp what is most elusive, the inner religious
sentiment of any period, it is important to remember that the author
of such expression was dear to at least the cultivated public of the
Hellenistic age.

_The_ Θεοκρασία.--The tolerant humanitarianism of Menander, of which
we catch the echo in certain formulæ inscribed on the Delphic and
other temples, is reflected in that which is perhaps the most striking
religious phenomenon of this period, namely, the ‘theocrasia,’ the
fusion of divinities of East and West. As regards religious theory
this is not to be regarded as a new departure. Herodotus shows how
natural it was to the Hellenic mind to interpret the deities of
foreign nations in terms of its native pantheon; and it was easy for
Euripides to commend Kybele as Demeter.[143.2] But it was by no means
easy, in fact it was exceedingly dangerous, before the time of
Alexander, to introduce any unauthorised foreign cult into the
City-State. We hear vaguely of the death-sentence inflicted or
threatened on those who did so. Nevertheless, as we have seen, such
foreigners as Sabazios and Attis were intruding themselves into Athens
at the time of the Peloponnesian war, trailing with them the orgiastic
atmosphere of Phrygia; and at some indefinite time before this the
impure ritual of certain Oriental Goddess-cults had invaded the
Corinthian worship of Aphrodite. But after the establishment of the
kingdoms of the Diadochi, the gentile barrier in {144} religion loses
gradually its force and significance. It was, in fact, a far-sighted
measure of policy on the part of some of the kings to establish some
common cult that might win the devotion of the Hellenic and Oriental
peoples alike. Such was the intention of Ptolemy when he founded at
Alexandria the cult of the Babylonian god, Sarapis, whom the Egyptians
were able owing to a similarity of name to identify with their
Osiris-Apis, and the Hellenes with their Plouton, owing to the
accidental fact that an image of this underworld-god happened to be
consecrated to the cult at its first institution. Similarly, when the
Syrian city of Bambyke was resettled as Hierapolis by Seleukos
Nikator, the personality of the great goddess, Atargatis, was blent
with that of Artemis, Hera, Aphrodite and other Hellenic goddesses;
and the treatise of Lucian, _de Dea Syria_, gives us the most
interesting picture presented by antiquity of the working of the
θεοκρασία in the domain of religion and religious art.

The spirit of syncretism grows stronger and more pervading through the
later Greek and Græco-Roman periods, and dominates the later Orphic
and Gnostic thought; and the inscriptions, usually the best record of
the popular religious practice, attest its wide diffusion. We find the
deities of diverse lands--Egypt, Syria and Greece--linked together in
the same formula of thanksgiving and the same offering dedicated to
them all. And the name Zeus is applied to so many gods of the East
that in the cult-formulæ it seems often to have lost all its personal
and concrete value and acquired the vaguer meaning of ‘God.’ The
Jewish Jahivé himself--under the name Ἰάω--was occasionally {145}
identified with him and at times, it seems, even with
Dionysos.[145.1]

The importance of this movement for religious thought was of the
highest. Varro’s view, recorded by Augustine.[145.2] that the name of
the deity made no difference, so long as ‘the same thing is
understood,’ and that therefore the God of the Jews was the same as
Jupiter, is a great idea that has been bequeathed to the world by
Greek tolerance and Greek sanity. Only a nation could attain to this
freedom of religious imagination that was not held captive by the
magic spell of names[145.3] which made it so difficult for the Jew to
shake off the tribal spirit of the religious blood-feud. This Hellenic
expression of religious enlightenment prepared the way for monotheism
and thus indirectly for Christianity. It also could induce the
pantheistic idea of a diffused omnipresent spirit of divinity, such as
is expressed in the lines of Aratos, the scientific poet of the third
century B.C., “all the ways are full of (the spirit of) God, and all
the gathering-places of men, the sea and harbours; and at every turn
we are all in need of God,[145.4] for we are of kin to him.”

_Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism_.--This pantheistic speculation
inspires some of the dogmas of Stoicism; and for most of the Stoic
writers and thinkers the concept of divinity was less that of a
personal concrete Being than of a spiritual force or soul-power
immanent in things; therefore while some of them tried to find a place
in their {146} metaphysical system for the creations of the polytheism
and even a justification for augury and divination, the impression
left on our minds by the fragments that have come down to us of the
religious speculation of the Stoa is as of a system alien and
antipathetic to the popular theistic point of view and especially to
the social religion of kin-group and city; and Zeno the founder is
said to have protested against shrines and idols.[146.1] His protest
was in vain; nor is there any clear indication that Stoicism had any
influence on the religious thought and practice of the average man of
the people; unless, indeed, the emergence of the cult of Αρετή,
Virtue, in the second century B.C. at Pergamon and Smyrna was
suggested by the strong theologic colouring that the Stoics gave to
morality.[146.2]

As for Epicureanism, it cannot be regarded normally as a religious
force; if it touched the popular mind at all its influence must have
been generally in the direction of atheism or indifferentism; the only
signs that it did are occasional grave-inscriptions that breathe the
Epicurean spirit of unperturbed quiescence in regard to the posthumous
fate of the soul.

The philosophic school that was most aggressively protestant against
the popular creeds and cults appears to have been the Cynic, mordant
and outspoken criticism being characteristic of this sect. We have
record of Diogenes’ contempt for the Eleusinian mysteries, of
Antisthenes’ disdain for the Great Mother of Phrygia and her mendicant
priests; and the fragments in a newly discovered papyrus of {147} a
treatise by Kerkidas,[147.1] the Cynic philosopher and statesman of
Megalopolis in the third century B.C., contain a theory which reduces
personal deities to impotent instruments of Fate and would substitute
for Zeus and his colleagues certain divinised abstractions, such as
Nemesis and Μετάδως; the latter term, if the reading is sound, seems
to denote the Spirit of Unselfishness or Sacrifice, an interesting and
potentially valuable idea, but at this time still-born.

_Asclepios-Cult and later mysteries_.--The philosophic sectarians of
this later age do not appear to have made a serious attempt to capture
the mind of the public; and the popular religious movements for the
most part ignored them and their teaching. The Hellenistic religions
are as convincedly theistic and idolatrous as the older were. The
chief change lay in this, that a man now might to some extent choose
his own divinity or--what was even of more import--be chosen by him or
her; he was no longer limited to the cults into which he was born.
This freedom had already for some time been offered by the ‘thiasoi’;
and now in the Hellenistic world, especially through the powerful and
wide influence of the cult of Asklepios, the idea was developed of a
deity who as Healer and Saviour called all mankind to himself; and it
was this significant cult-phenomenon that induced Kerkidas in the
above-mentioned passage to include Παιάν, the ‘Healer,’ among the true
divinities whose worship ought to supplant that of the older gods. In
the treatise called ‘Asclepios’ of the pseudo-Apuleius a long address
and prayer to this deity are preserved of which the tone is strikingly
{148} Christian.[148.1] “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because
thou hast shown thyself wholly to us; we rejoice that thou hast
deigned to consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these
mortal bodies.… We have known thee, oh, true life of the life of man.…
Adoring thy goodness we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst
be willing to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.”

_Non-Hellenic mysteries_.--The phenomenon here indicated attests the
stronger vitality at this period of personal or individual, as
distinct from tribal or political religion; and this was quickened
also by the growth of certain non-Hellenic mysteries in the
Mediterranean area in the latter centuries of Paganism, notably by the
Samothracian, those of Attis and the Great Mother, the Egyptian Isis,
and finally in the last period of all of Mithras. In most of these the
records allow us to discover many interesting ideas that reappear in
early Christianity, such, for instance, as communion with the divinity
through sacrament, the mystic death and rebirth of the Catechumen, the
saving efficacy of baptism and purification. These rites could satisfy
the craving of the mortal to attain to the conviction of immortality
and to the ecstatic consciousness of complete or temporary
self-absorption in God. But in the mysteries of Sabazios and Cybele
and possibly in others this sense of divinity was conveyed to the
‘mystes’ by the simulation of a holy marriage or sex-communion with
the God or Goddess; and for this reason the Pagan mysteries were
generally attacked by the Christian Fathers as obscene; the {149}
charge was unjust on the whole, though the psychic effect of the
special act of ritual just alluded to was probably detrimental to the
moral imagination.

_Hermetic literature_.--The strangest and most interesting
manifestation that the ancient records have preserved for us of this
fusion of Hellenic culture and Oriental religious sentiment is
presented by the Hermetic literature. The origins of this fantastic
product of the human mind are traced by Professor Petrie[149.1] back
to the sixth or fifth centuries B.C. But, though much of it is
pre-Christian, its philosophic diction proves that it cannot be
earlier than 300 B.C., and the bulk of it is probably later.[149.2]
A frequent Hermetic formula, addressed to the deity--ἐγώ εἰμι σὺ καὶ
σὺ ἐγώ, “I am Thou and Thou art I”--may be taken as the master-word of
these hieratic writings. This unnatural alliance between Greek
philosophy and Oriental mystic theosophy is a momentous phenomenon of
later Paganism; and the study of the origins of Christian metaphysic
is much concerned with it.

Such theosophy had a natural affinity with magic; and magic, always a
power in an age of intellectual decay, begins to be most powerful in
this latest age of Hellenism. It is a just reproach that Augustine
brings against Porphyry, the most notable of the Neoplatonists that he
‘wavered between philosophy and a sacrilegious curiosity,’ that is, a
vicious interest in the black art.[149.3]

In these strange forms of faith and speculation the clearness and
sanity of the pure Hellenic intellect appear clouded and troubled, the
lineaments of the {150} old types of the Hellenic thought and
imagination almost effaced. And the learning and science of the
Hellenistic age stood mainly aloof from the religious forces that
moved the masses of the people.

_Daimonism_.--The mystic and theosophic literature of the Hellenistic
and Græco-Roman period was markedly ‘daimonistic,’ being infected
with the polydaimonism of the East and positing the existence of good
and evil ‘daimones’ as a metaphysic dogma. We can trace a
corresponding change in the popular Hellenic imagination. In the
earlier period, as has been shown, the native Hellene was, as compared
with other races, fairly strong-minded in respect of the terrors of
the demon-world; but the later people of the Greek area were certainly
tainted in some degree with this unfortunate superstition of the East,
and various forms of exorcism, conjuration and evocation became more
prevalent. The modern Greek temperament appears to be morbidly
possessed with this disease[150.1]; and we may suppose that the germs
have been inherited and developed from this last period of the old
civilisation.

_Eschatology_.--But another feature that we mark in these mystic
worships and mystic societies of the Hellenistic world indicates a
higher aspect of religion and marks an epoch in religious aspiration.
Most of them, if not all, proclaimed the immortality of the soul, a
happy resurrection, a divine life after death. The Hellene who had
been initiated into the Osiris faith hoped to attain immortal
happiness in and through Osiris, availing himself of Egyptian ideas
and Egyptian spell-formulæ. The priest of certain {151} mysteries,
probably of Attis, comforts the congregation of the faithful,
sorrowing over the death of their God, with words that aver the
certainty of his resurrection and by implication the hope of their
own--

 θαρρεῖτε μύσται τοῦ θεοῦ σεσωσμένου
 ἔσται γὰρ ἡμῖν ἐκ πόνων σωτηρία.[151.1]

“Be of good cheer, ye of the mystery of the saved God, for after our
troubles there shall be to us salvation.”

The mysteries of Mithras embodied much the same eschatologic ideas and
hopes; but these came to the Græco-Roman world only in the latest
period before the establishment of Christianity, and had little hold
on Hellenic society proper. Doubtless the most attractive mystery for
the Hellenes was the Orphic, and we have many proofs of its activity
and life in the two centuries before and after the beginning of our
era; and we can well understand the causes of its popularity. Its
deity had become Hellenised long ago; the Orphic formulæ were free
from barbarous jargon and admitted the familiar divine names; the
insistence on purification was congenial to many Hellenic
temperaments; there was probably nothing surviving in the ritual that
was objectionable to the cultivated Hellene; and finally its picture
of Paradise seems to have accorded with the trend of the Hellenic
imagination. The numerous grave-inscriptions of these centuries rarely
express any definite Orphic sentiment or allude to any specially
mystic faith; but we know that the {152} sacred hymn of the votaries
was buried with them from the fourth century down to the Roman
Imperial period; and we have the evidence of Plutarch attesting the
prevalence of these societies and their power of appeal, for, when he
is consoling his wife for the death of their child, he reminds her of
the promises of future happiness held out by the Dionysiac mysteries,
into which they have both been initiated.[152.1]

_Hero-worship and apotheosis_.--The idea that was common to many of
these mystic brotherhoods, that the mortal might achieve divinity, is
illustrated by another religious phenomenon which stands out in this
latest period, namely, the worship of individual men and women either
in their lifetime or immediately after death. To appreciate the full
significance of this, one must be familiar with the usages of the
earlier Hellenes as also of the Oriental peoples who became subjects
of the Diadochi. We have observed that the Greek of the sixth and
fifth centuries was willing to concede heroic honours to certain
distinguished individuals after death; in this there was nothing
inconsistent with the principles of higher polytheism; and in the
earlier cases the grounds of canonisation were usually good and
reasonable. It becomes a more serious question about the religious and
moral character of a people when divine worship is proffered to a
living person. Of this the first example is the cult of Lysander as a
God, which, as Plutarch seems to imply, arose even in his
lifetime.[152.2] The same writer records the story of the apotheosis
offered by the people of Thasos {153} to Agesilaos and his sarcastic
refusal.[153.1] The same kind of adulation was lavished by the
degenerate Athenians on Alexander and Demetrios Poliorketes. The most
salient examples are derived from the records of the Seleukidai and
the Ptolemies, the kings of these dynasties usually enjoying divine
honours after death, and sometimes bearing divine titles, such as
Σωτηρ, Saviour, Θεός, or God, in their lifetime. Is this merely the
gross servility of a decadent age that had lost all real sense of
religion? This is no doubt the true account of it in some degree; Dio
Chrysostom exclaims against the quackery and vanity of it;[153.2] and
the sharp-witted Athenians and the educated Greek generally would be
under no illusion when they prostrated themselves before these
human-Gods. It is natural to suppose that the effect upon the life of
the old religion was corrosive when a queen or a courtesan could be
publicly recognised as Aphrodite, and that the general belief in
Apollo and Dionysos would tend to collapse when the one was identified
with the Seleukidai, the other with Attalos. Yet the faith in Dionysos
at least was able to survive the strain. And what seems to us mere
hypocrisy and blasphemy would appear to many of the Hellenistic
communities in another light. It seems that the uncultured Greek in
the time of Herodotus was capable of believing in all seriousness that
Xerxes might be a real incarnation of Zeus upon earth;[153.3] and
such an idea would be familiar, as an old tradition in the popular
estimate of kingship, to the {154} natives of Syria and still more to
the Egyptians. When the Rosetta stone proclaims the Ptolemy as ‘the
living image of God,’ the average Greek might smile in secret, but the
native Egyptian would instinctively assent to this assumption of
divinity by the heir of the ancient Pharaohs.

This apotheosis of the mortal, so rife in this later period, may be
regarded as a moral and religious evil. Yet it must not be taken too
hastily as a proof of the unreality of the prevailing polytheism. And,
for better or worse, it was a momentous fact belonging to the higher
history of European religion; for it familiarised the Græco-Roman
world with the idea of the incarnation of the Man-God.

_Signs of decay and of new life in later Paganism_.--The Hellenistic
period cannot be severed by any sharp dividing line from the
Græco-Roman; but it belongs rather to the student of Roman religion
and the Roman Empire to pursue the history of Hellenic polytheism
through the first centuries of our era down to the establishment of
Christianity. The religious phenomena of the period that has just been
sketched present, on the one hand, the signs of decay, the decay of
the old civic and political religion which fostered the growth of the
Greek Polis, the intrusion from the East of demonology and magic, and
on the other hand the working of new religious forces which prepare
the way for Christianity. The cults of Apollo, Zeus and Athene were
among the first to wither; yet a living and personal religious sense
was in all probability more diffused through the Greek world under the
Epigoni and the Roman Empire than it had been in the earlier
centuries. Contact with the Oriental spirit brought to many a stronger
{155} intensity of religious life; religion is no longer preoccupied
with the physical and political world, but its horizon lies beyond the
grave and its force is ‘other-worldliness.’ Men flock to the
mysteries, seeking communion with the divinity by sacrament, and
sustaining their faith by mystic dogmas. The religious virtue most
emphasised is purity, of which the influence is often anti-social;
this was no longer always understood in a pharisaic sense, but its
spiritual significance was proclaimed to the people and penetrated the
sphere of temple-ritual. An inscription from a temple in Rhodes of the
time of Hadrian contains a list of rules concerning righteous entrance
into the shrine, “the first and greatest rule is to be pure and
unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil
conscience.”[155.1] Something similar was inscribed on the temple of
Asklepios at Epidauros.[155.2] The _objective_ of the earlier
Hellenic polytheism was the city, the tribe, the family; that of the
later was the individual soul; the earlier religious morality looked
rather to works and practice, the later rather to purity and personal
intimacy with God, which gave the cue to the later ‘gnosis’ and
theosophy. The gradual divorce of religion from political life was a
loss which was not repaired for many centuries; but it was compensated
by the rise of a humanitarian spirit which was to be infused into a
new cosmopolitan religion.[155.3]

The above is only a panoramic sketch indicating the various elements
of a singularly manifold religious system. It has been impossible to
touch {156} on all the special points of interest, such as divination
and the minutiæ of ritual and of the festivals; for these the student
must consult special treatises. The object of this monograph has been
to present the main essential features in a chronologic survey and to
assign to each its significance and relative importance. The history
has been adumbrated of a religion that maintained itself for nearly
two thousand years on the higher plane of polytheism; a religion
which, while lacking the sublimity and moral fervour of some of the
Oriental creeds, made certain unique contributions to the evolution of
society and the higher intellectual life of man.

By the side of the higher growths many of the products of lower and
savage culture were maintained which were mainly obliterated by
Christianity. It is necessary to note and appreciate these lower
facts; but there is a risk of overestimating their importance and
vitality. Many of these are found in all higher religions, usually in
a moribund state. It is its higher achievement that makes any
particular religion of importance in the history of civilisation; and
we are now aware that Greek religion can claim this importance. Nor
can the lower elements as a whole be shown to be the germs of the
higher within the Hellenic period proper. We cannot show the evolution
of the personal anthropomorphic deities of Greece from magic ritual or
totemism or theriomorphism without transcending the chronologic limits
of the period within which it is allowable to speak of a Hellenic
people at all. The emergence of personal Gods, from whatever region or
by whatever influence they emerged, is an event of very primitive
history. At least we know that of {157} the two populations whose
blending made Hellenism, the indigenous Mediterranean and the Northern
or Central European invader, the former possessed a personal theism of
dateless antiquity; while all the evidence points to the conviction
that the Aryan tribes entered Greece with certain personal deities
already evolved or acquired.

We find that anthropomorphism was the strongest bias of the Hellenic
religious imagination; and with this we associate his passion for
idolatry and hero-worship. It is interesting for the student of
Hellenic Christianity to note the influence of these tendencies on the
later history of the Greek Church; and generally it has been the
result of much modern research to reveal the truth that the
indebtedness of Christian dogma and ritual to the later Hellenic
paganism was far greater than used to be supposed.




 LITERATURE

{158}

Older works, such as _Welcker’s Griechische Götterlehre_ (3 vols.,
1857-1863), and _Preller’s Griechische Mythologie_ (2 vols., 4th ed.,
by C. Robert, 1887), are only useful now for their collection of
facts.

Recent literature: O. Gruppe, _Griechische Culte und Mythen in ihren
Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen_, 1887; _Griechische
Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte_, 1906; L. R. Farnell, _Cults of
the Greek States_, 5 vols. (1896-1910); Chantepie de la Saussaye,
_Lehrbuch der Religiongeschichte_ (Greek section, 1906); Jane
Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_ (1903),
_Themis, a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion_ (1912) (both
works dealing mainly with special questions and the more primitive
aspects of the religion).

Treatises on special cults and special questions: Roscher,
_Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie_
(1884, in progress); Paulz-Wissowa, _Real Encyclopædie_ (1894, in
progress); and Daremberg et Saglio, _Dictionnaire des Antiquités_
(1873-1917); Showerman, _The Great Mother of the Gods_ (Wisconsin,
1901); Frazer, _Attis, Adonis, Osiris_ (2nd ed., 1910); A. Dieterich,
_Mutter Erde_ (1905); Eitrem, _Hermes und die Toten_ (Christiania,
1909); Immerwahr, _Kulte und Mythe Arkadiens_ (1891); S. Wide,
_Lakonische Kulte_ (1893); Usener, _Götternamen_ (1896); cf. paper on
his theory in _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, “The
Place of the Sondergötter in Greek Polytheism,” by L. R. Farnell
(1907); De Visser, _De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem
humanam_ (Leyden, 1900); E. Fehrle, _Die Kultische Keuscheit im
Alterthum_ (Giessen, 1910); cf. L. R. Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_
(1905), Lect. iii, “The Ritual of Purification”; {159} Th. Wáchter,
_Reinheitsvorschriften im grieschischen Kult_ (Giessen, 1910); C.
Ausfeld, _De Graecorum precationibus quaestiones_, in Fleckeisen’s
Supplement (1903); cf. L. R. Farnell, _op cit._, Lect. iv, “The
Evolution of Prayer”; S. Reinach, various articles on Greek cults and
myths in _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, 3 vols. (1904-1908).

For Eschatology, Mysteries, Thiasoi, Hero-worship: A. Lobeck,
_Aglaophamus_, 2 vols. (1829); E. Rohde, _Psyche_ (2nd ed., 1898); A.
Dieterich, _Nekyia_ (1893); also _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_ (1903); Jong,
_Das Antike Mysterien-Wesen_ (Leiden, 1909); Goblet d’Alviella,
_Eleusinia_ (Paris, 1903); Foucart, “Les Grands Mystères d’Eleusis”
(1900), in the _Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-lettres_, xxxvii; Pringsheim, _Archäologische Beiträge zur
Geschichte des Eleusinischen Kults_ (Munich, 1905); Foucart,
_Associations religieuses chez les Grecs_ (1873); L. Weniger, _Ueber
das Collegium der Thyiaden_ (1876); Article on “Héros,” by Deneken,
in Roscher’s _Lexikon_; Pfister, _Der Reliquien-kult im Alterthum_
(1910).

Greek ritual and festivals: A. Mommsen, _Feste der Stadt Athen_
(1898); P. Stengel, “Die griechischen Sacral-alterthümer,” in Iwan
von Müller’s _Handbuch_ (vol. v, 1898); _id. Opferbraüche der
Griechen_ (1910); Fritze, _Die Rauchopfer bei den Griechen_ (1894); L.
R. Farnell, “Sacramental Communion in Greek Religion,” _Hibbert
Journal_ (1903); M. P. Nillson, _Griechische Feste_ (1906), also
_Studia de Dionysiis Atticis_ (1900); Foucart, _Le culte de Dionysos
en Attique_ (1904); A. Thomsen, “Der Trug des Prometheus,” in _Archiv
für Religions-Wissenschaft_ (1909); Rouse, _Greek Votive Offerings_
(1902); Bouché-Leclerq, _Histoire de la divination_ (4 vols.
1879-1881); Deubner, _De Incubatione_ (1900); E. Samter, _Geburt
Hochzeit und Tod_ (1911).

Greek religious thought and speculation: L. Campbell, _Religion in
Greek Literature_ (1898); Caird, _Evolution of Theology in the Greek
Philosophers_ (2 vols., 1900-1902); J. Adam, _The Religious Teachers
of Greece_ (1908); Decharme, _La critique des traditions religieuses
chez les Grecs des origines au temps de Plutarque_ (1904).

{160}

Epigraphic material: _Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum_ (passim);
special collections of inscriptions bearing on Greek religion:
Dittenberger, _Sylloge_ (vol. 2), “Res Sacrae”; J. von Prott and L.
Ziehen, _Leges Graecorum sacrae e titulis collectae_ (1896-1906, in
progress).

Religious monuments: Overbeck, _Griechische Kunst Mythologie_
(1871-1887, unfinished); L. R. Farnell, _Cults_; J. Harrison, op.
cit.; Baumeister, _Denkmäler des klassischen Alterthums_ (1885-1888);
Roscher, op. cit.; Daremberg-Saglio, op. cit.; C. Bötticher, _Über
den Baumkultus der Hellenen und Römer_ (1856).

 _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth, England_. William Brendon & Son




 ENDNOTES

 [21.1]
 As Karsten assumes in his _Outlines of Greek Religion_, p. 6.

 [22.1]
 Vide E. Meyer, “Der erste auftreten der Aryer in der Geschichte,”
 _Sitzungsb. d. König. preuss. Akad. Wissensch._, 1908, p. 14.

 [23.1]
 Vide my _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 93.

 [24.1]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 95-99.

 [24.2]
 The name Hera is probably Aryan-Hellenic, but applied in Argolis to
 the pre-Hellenic Goddess.

 [29.1]
 _Od._, 13, 174.

 [31.1]
 At Gournia. Vide Hawes’ _Crete the Forerunner of Greece_, pp.
 101-102.

 [32.1]
 _Il._, 16, 234.

 [32.2]
 _Il._, 16, 605.

 [32.3]
 _Il._, 5, 77.

 [33.1]
 He is aware, however, that a θεοῦ ὀμφή, an oracular mandate, might be
 delivered against the royal house. _Od._, 3, 215.

 [33.2]
 Vide my _Cults_, 4, p. 190.

 [33.3]
 _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 236-245.

 [34.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 1, pp. 88-92.

 [34.2]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, p. 236; also my article on “Sacrificial
 Communion in Greek Religion” in _Hibbert Journal_, 1904: on
 “Sacrifice” (Greek), in Hastings’ _Encyclopædia of Religion and
 Ethics_.

 [35.1]
 _Od._, 10, 517-520, 528.

 [35.2]
 Vide Evans’ “Mycenæan Tree and Pillar Cult,” _Hell. Journ._, 901, p.
 191.

 [35.3]
 _Arch. Anzeig._, 1909, p. 98.

 [35.4]
 e.g. _Il._, 9, 500.

 [36.1]
 10, 38, 8.

 [36.2]
 _Cults_, 4, pp. 180, 193.

 [36.3]
 _Il._, 3, 243: but the poet of the Nekyia is well aware of the heroic
 or divine honours paid them, _Od._, 11, 300-304.

 [36.4]
 _Od._, 11, 602.

 [36.5]
 _Il._, 2, 548.

 [37.1]
 Vide _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 206-207.

 [37.2]
 Vide v. Prott, _Leges Græcorum Sacræ_, n. 4. Cf. _Arch. für
 Religionsw._, 1909, pp. 467, 482-485.

 [37.3]
 _Od._, 17, 500.

 [37.4]
 Paus., 1, 43, 7.

 [38.1]
 _Cults_, 3, pp. 50-62.

 [39.1]
 _Op._, 735.

 [40.1]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 192-194.

 [42.1]
 _Cults_, 4, pp. 113-116.

 [42.2]
 Vide Nillson, in _Athen. Mitth._, 1908, p. 279.

 [43.1]
 _Cults_, 2, pp. 434-449.

 [43.2]
 _De Græcorum deis non referentibus speciem humanam_, 1900.

 [43.3]
 _Bull. Corresp. Hellên._, 1899, p. 635.

 [43.4]
 _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 66-80. Vide Schrader’s article, “Aryan
 Religion,” Hastings’ _Encyclopædia_, vol. 2, p. 38.

 [44.1]
 _Götternamen_, 1896.

 [44.2]
 Paus., 2, 11, 2.

 [45.1]
 Paus., 1, 1, 5.

 [45.2]
 Paus., 9, 33, 3.

 [45.3]
 Paus., 10, 37, 3.

 [45.4]
 I have criticised this theory of evolution in _Anthropological Essays
 presented to E. B. Tylor_, 1907, “The place of the Sondergötter in
 Greek Polytheism,” where I have taken the view that some of them are
 products of the same religious instinct that produces theism or
 polytheism and that some appear to be late offshoots of the
 polytheistic system.

 [46.1]
 _Bull. Corr. Hell._, 1878, p. 515.

 [46.2]
 Paus., 3, 22, 1.

 [46.3]
 _Id._, 1, 22, 3; for other references vide _Cults_, 3, p. 312, R.9.

 [47.1]
 Paus., 8, 29, 1.

 [47.2]
 Paus., 8, 38, 3. ὁ ἱερεὺς τοῦ Λυκαίου Διὸς προσευξάμενος ὲς τὸ ὕδωρ.
 Cf. Hesiod., _Op._, 737; for the general facts vide _Cults_, 5, pp.
 420-424.

 [47.3]
 Vide _Cults_, 5, pp. 417-420.

 [48.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 5, pp. 345-365.

 [48.2]
 Agamede of Ephyra seems to have practised harmless magic, _Il._, 14,
 740; and the poet may have regarded the Elean Ephyra as the special
 home of magic. Vide _Od._, 2, 328.

 [48.3]
 _Cults_, 3, p. 85-93; Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena_, pp. 120-136.

 [49.1]
 _Cults_, 4, p. 268, etc.

 [49.2]
 Arrian, _Anab._, 3, 16, 8.

 [49.3]
 Hesych., _s.v._

 [49.4]
 _Strom._, p. 755.

 [49.5]
 2, 12, 1.

 [49.6]
 In the earliest versions of her legend, the magic of Medea is not
 black but benevolent.

 [50.1]
 9, 33, 4.

 [50.2]
 Andrew Lang, _The World of Homer_, pp. 210, 216.

 [50.3]
 _Il._, 23, 174.

 [51.1]
 Vide Tsountas in _Ephem. Archaiol._, 1888, pp. 130-131, and
 Vollgraff, in _Bull. Corr. Hell._, 1904, p. 370.

 [51.2]
 Vide _Hibbert Lectures_, “Higher Aspects of Greek Religion,” pp. 19,
 20.

 [52.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 1, p. 40-42.

 [52.2]
 _Ib._, p. 42.

 [52.3]
 _Ib._, 4, p. 272; Schol. Pind., _Ol._, 10, 19.

 [52.4]
 7, 19, 1-9.

 [53.1]
 e.g. vide _Cults_, 3, 93.

 [53.2]
 _Cults_, 3, p. 22.

 [56.1]
 Vide _Cults_, vol. 5, pp. 85-118. Cf. generally chs. iv and v.

 [58.1]
 2, 53.

 [60.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 2, pp. 442-449.

 [60.2]
 Bergk, _Pœtæ Lyrici Græci_, vol. III, Fr. 1.

 [60.3]
 Philochoros Frag., 21, Müller, F. H. G., vol. i.

 [61.1]
 Athenæ., p. 626 B.

 [61.2]
 Vide _Arch. Anzeig_, 1908, p. 122.

 [62.1]
 _Cults_, 3, pp. 17-18.

 [62.2]
 _Ib._, 3, pp. 33-34.

 [62.3]
 _Cults_, 5, p. 443-447.

 [63.1]
 Vide Furtwängler, in _Münchener Sitzungsber._, 1897, 1, p. 401;
 Nillson, in _Athen. Mittheil._, 1908, p. 284.

 [63.2]
 The striking exception to this rule is the great cult of Helios at
 Rhodes. _Vide supra_, p. 29.

 [64.1]
 Ael., _Var. Hist._, 12, 61.

 [64.2]
 “They worship Sun and Moon, we worship real Gods such as Apollo and
 Hermes,” _Pax_, 410.

 [64.3]
 Schol. Soph., _Elec._, 6.

 [64.4]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 77-80.

 [65.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 4, pp. 163-166.

 [65.2]
 Prott-Ziehen, _Leg. Saer._, n., 18.

 [67.1]
 Plat., _Euthyd._, p. 302 C; Demosth., 18, § 141, 57, § 54, 67;
 Arist., _Ath. Polit._, 55.

 [67.2]
 Diog. Laert., 8, 1, 13; Macrob., 3, 6, 2.

 [67.3]
 _Bull. Corr. Hell._, 1893, p. 24.

 [68.1]
 Paus., 8, 47, 4.

 [69.1]
 The other view, still held by some, that Zeus-Agamemnon is the
 earlier fact, and Agamemnon the hero the later, does not bear
 criticism.

 [70.1]
 _Cults_, v, pp. 219-221; J. Harrison, _Prolegomena_, ch. ii.

 [71.1]
 Vide “Higher Aspects of Greek Religion,” _Hibbert Lectures_,
 pp. 73-91.

 [73.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 1, pp. 64-69; for the religious evolution of the Greek
 laws concerning homicide, vide my _Evolution of Religion_, pp.
 139-152. _Cults_, IV, pp. 295-306.

 [73.2]
 _Epic. Græc. Frag._, Kinkel, p. 33.

 [74.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 4, p. 299.

 [76.1]
 Vide _Cults_, IV, pp. 200-202.

 [77.1]
 Vide _Cults_, IV, pp. 161-162, 200-202.

 [77.2]
 A fuller account will be found in _Cults_, IV, pp. 179-218.

 [80.1]
 Vide _supra_, pp. 34-35.

 [84.1]
 _Republ._, pp. 364-365.

 [87.1]
 For more detailed discussion, vide _Cults_, 3, pp. 126-198.

 [89.1]
 Plut., _Mor._, p. 881 E; Porphyr., _Vit. Pyth._, 19, 20.

 [89.2]
 _Strom._, V, p. 714.

 [90.1]
 Vide Gilbert, “Speculation und Volksglaube in der Ionischen
 Philosophie,” in _Arch. Relig. Wiss._, 1910, p. 306.

 [90.2]
 _Frag._, CXXVI, CXXVII, CXXX (Bywater).

 [91.1]
 Vide Ridgeway’s _Origin of Tragedy_; his theory is criticised in
 _Hermathena_, 1912.

 [93.1]
 Pan, the daimon-god of flocks, came in from Arcadia at the beginning
 of this century (vide _Cults_, V, p. 431); Asklepios, with his circle
 from Epidauros, at the close.

 [94.1]
 Herod., 8, 77.

 [94.2]
 Heydemann, _Die Vasensammlungen des Museum Nazionale zu Neapel_,
 3253.

 [94.3]
 Vide specially l. 805-808, 822-824.

 [94.4]
 9, 7, 4.

 [95.1]
 Bergk, _Frag._, 140.

 [95.2]
 _Hibbert Lectures_, 83-84.

 [96.1]
 Plut., _Vit. Arist._, 20; Paus., 9, 2, 5.

 [98.1]
 Vide _Cults_, III, pp. 156-157.

 [98.2]
 Vide _supra_, pp. 36-37.

 [100.1]
 Quintil., _Inst. Orat._, 12, 10, 9.

 [101.1]
 _Or._, 53, p. 401.

 [101.2]
 Vide _Cults_, 1, p. 231.

 [101.3]
 _Cults_, Vol. III, Coin Pl. No. 2; Gardner’s _Types of Greek Coins_,
 Pl. 10, 25.

 [102.1]
 Vide _Cults_, III, pp. 271-272, Coin Pl. No. 18.

 [102.2]
 _Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion_.

 [103.1]
 Livy, 45, 28.

 [103.2]
 _Thesmoph._, 1136.

 [103.3]
 Xenophanes’ protest in the sixth century is the most noticeable,
 Clem., _Strom._, 5, pp. 714-715 P. The Stoic theory of Zeno condemned
 the erection of temples as well as idols, _ib._, p. 691 P.

 [105.1]
 _Antig._, 521.

 [107.1]
 Paus., 1, 40, 4.

 [108.1]
 _Ol._, 8, 28.

 [108.2]
 _Sept. c. Theb._, 662.

 [108.3]
 _Agam._, 776.

 [108.4]
 _Oed. Col._, 1268.

 [108.5]
 _Trag. Græc. Frag._ (Nanck), 855.

 [109.1]
 § 35.

 [109.2]
 _Pyth._, 4, 517.

 [109.3]
 _Ol._, 9, 60.

 [112.1]
 _Strom._, p. 688.

 [113.1]
 _Herc. Fur._, l. 847-858.

 [113.2]
 _Ib._, 339-347.

 [115.1]
 Vide my _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 114.

 [115.2]
 l. 391.

 [116.1]
 _Iphig Taur._, l. 391.

 [116.2]
 Clem., _Strom._, p. 691 P.

 [116.3]
 Vide Stobæ, _Flor._, Vol. IV (Meineke), p. 264.

 [116.4]
 Vide _Cults_, Vol. IV, p. 210.

 [118.1]
 6, 86.

 [118.2]
 Vide Ziegler, in _Archiv. f. Religionswiss_, 1911, p. 393-405.

 [119.1]
 Plut., _Vit. Pelop._, C. 21, 22. Cf. Eur., _Iph. Taur._, l. 391.

 [119.2]
 p. 315 B-C.

 [119.3]
 Cf. Herod., 7, 197, who shows that the human sacrifice in this cult
 was rare and conditional.

 [119.4]
 _Iph. Taur._, l. 1458.

 [119.5]
 Vide _Cults_, 4, pp. 276-279.

 [119.6]
 Porphyry, _De Abstin._, 2, 54.

 [120.1]
 _Ib._, 2, 56.

 [120.2]
 De ser. num. vind., 12, p. 557 C-D.

 [120.3]
 Plut., _Parallela_, 35. Vide _Cults_, 1, 95.

 [120.4]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, p. 267.

 [121.1]
 The exceptions are the cults of Aphrodite at Corinth and among the
 Lokri Epizephyrii. Vide _Cults_, 2, pp. 635-636.

 [121.2]
 _Cults_, 2, p. 667.

 [121.3]
 e.g., in the cult of Artemis κορδάκα in Elis, said to be of Lydian
 origin (_Cults_, Vol. II, p. 445).

 [122.1]
 p. 527 D.

 [122.2]
 Bywater, _Frag._, CXXVII.

 [122.3]
 7, 17, p. 1336 _b._

 [123.1]
 _Cults_, I, pp. 56, 88-92.

 [123.2]
 23, § 76.

 [123.3]
 Serv. ad Verg., _Æn._, 3, 57.

 [123.4]
 Vide my _Greece and Babylon_, pp. 76-81.

 [124.1]
 Vide fifth-century inscription of Teos containing a law threatening
 with penalties those who used magic against the State or against
 individuals (Rœhl, _Inscr. Græc. Antiq._, 497).

 [124.2]
 p. 932 E-933 E.

 [124.3]
 _Or._, 30, § 18.

 [126.1]
 _Cults_, 5, p. 264.

 [127.1]
 _Rep._, 378 C., where he seems to glance at Epicharmos.

 [129.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 4, pp. 211-214.

 [130.1]
 _Frags._, 1032.

 [130.2]
 κ. Ἀριστογειτ, § 11.

 [131.1]
 _Or._, 1, p. 31.

 [132.1]
 _De Myster._, § 125; cf. § 31.

 [132.2]
 _De Cor._, § 324.

 [133.1]
 _Laws_, 956 A-B.

 [133.2]
 _Ib._, 985 D.

 [133.3]
 e.g. _ib._, 984 D.

 [133.4]
 p. 34-41.

 [134.1]
 For particulars vide _Hibbert Lectures_, pp. 37, 46-48, 103, 117.

 [135.1]
 _Laws_, p. 909 E.

 [135.2]
 738 C.

 [137.1]
 _Bull. Corr. Hell._, XXVI, pp. 399-489.

 [138.1]
 Vide _Cults_, 3, pp. 199-202.

 [138.2]
 _Ib._, p. 199.

 [139.1]
 Vide Foucart, _Des Associations religieuses_.

 [141.1]
 A paper by Pierre Waltz in the _Revue des Études Grecques_,
 1911--‘sur les sentences de Ménandre’--aims at discovering or
 imagining the dramatic setting of each fragment and at disproving
 the view that Menander was posing as an original ethical teacher.
 Accepting his theory, we can still assign high value to the
 ‘sentences’ for the purpose of Greek ethical history, whether we
 regard them as original and earnest utterances of Menander or
 commonplaces which he uses lightly for dramatic purposes; for if the
 latter view of them is the truer, they show at least what was in the
 air.

 [142.1]
 Kock, _Com. Att. Frag._, 602.

 [142.2]
 e.g., quotation by Clemens, _Strom_, p. 720 P. Cf. fragment of the
 Ἱέρεια, Kock, 245.

 [142.3]
 Γνῶμαι Μονοστιχοι 589, Meineke, 4, p. 356.

 [143.1]
 _Fab. Incert._, Kock, _Frag._, 550.

 [143.2]
 Helene, 1300-1365.

 [145.1]
 Vide A. B. Cooke, _Zeus_, pp. 232-234.

 [145.2]
 _De Consensu Evangelistarum_, 1, 30 (xxii); cf. _De Civ. Dei._, IV,
 9.

 [145.3]
 Vide my _Hibbert Lectures_, pp. 104-106.

 [145.4]
 Phainomen, 1, 2-5.

 [146.1]
 Clem., _Strom._, p. 691.

 [146.2]
 Vide _Cults_, 5, pp. 446, 745 R, 221.

 [147.1]
 _Oxyrhynch. Papyri._, viii, p. 31.

 [148.1]
 Vide _Archiv, für Relig. Wiss._, 1904, p. 395; my _Evolution of
 Religion_, p. 207.

 [149.1]
 _Personal Religion in Egypt_, p. 40.

 [149.2]
 Vide Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_.

 [149.3]
 _De Civ. Dei._, 10, 9.

 [150.1]
 Vide J. C. Lawson, _Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek
 Religion_, 1910.

 [151.1]
 Firm. Mat., _De Err._, 22; cf. Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, p.
 174.

 [152.1]
 _Consol. ad uxor._, 10, p. 611 D.

 [152.2]
 Vit. Lysandr., 18. Cf. Athenag, p. 51 (Lechair).

 [153.1]
 p. 210 D, _Apoth. Lacon_; he advised them to begin with making
 themselves Gods if they felt equal to making him one.

 [153.2]
 _Or._, 64 R, 338 (Dind, 2. p. 213).

 [153.3]
 7, 56.

 [155.1]
 _C.I.G. Ins. Mar. Æg._, 1, 789.

 [155.2]
 Vide my _Evolution of Religion_, p. 138.

 [155.3]
 Vide my _Hibbert Lectures_, Lect. VI, “Personal Religion in
 Greece.”




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

This book is first in the _Duckworth’s Student Series_.

Page numbers are given in {curly} brackets.

Plain text version only: endnote markers are given in [square]
brackets.

Add the book title and author’s name to the cover image.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ ethical-religious/ethical
religious, Maenads/Mænads, etc.) along with the use of both Arabic
and Roman numerals to indicate volume numbers in the endnotes have
been preserved.

(p. 142, note 3) The last character(s) of the word beginning with
“Μονοστιχ” are illegible in the source text. Μονοστιχοι is used until
the proper word can be determined.

Alterations to the text:

Convert footnotes to endnotes, relabel note markers (append the
original note number to the page number), and add a corresponding
entry to the TOC.

[Chapter IV]

Change “or _φαλλοφορἱα_ were specially associated with Dionysos…” to
_φαλλοφορία_.

[Chapter V]

“abstractions, such as Nemesis and ‘Μετάδως; the latter term…” delete
left single quotation mark.

[Endnotes]

A couple of trivial punctuation corrections.

(p. 49, note 6) “the magic of _Media_ is not black but benevolent” to
_Medea_.

[End of text]





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