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.47.3In 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 himinto a free and complex individual person. As regards Hestia the facts are still clearer.48.1In 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.48.2But 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.48.3So also in the Thargelia ofAttica 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’49.2and of those at Corinth called Ἁνεμοκοῖται,49.3both 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 Clemens49.4“averted the sky’s wrath by incantations and sacrificesâ€; or in Pausanias’ account of the operations of the priest of the winds at Titane in Sikyon49.5who 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.49.6Doubtless some black magicexisted 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-supply50.1: 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.50.2A doubt may arise concerning the slaughter of the Trojan captives at the pyre of Patroklos,50.3an act of ferocity for which Homer outspokenly blames Achilles. The passagecertainly 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.51.1But 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.51.2How 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 thatit 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 ΑÏκαιος 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;52.1the Achæan or Minyan story of the sacrifice to Zeus Laphystios—Zeus the Ravening—of the king’s son of the house of Athamas;52.2Kyknos’ sacrifice of pilgrims and the dedication of their skulls to Apollo on the Hyperborean pilgrims’-way at the Achæan Pagasos;52.3the sacrifice of a boy and a maiden to Artemis ΤÏικλαÏία by the Ionians on the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth.52.4A 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 maydiscern an agricultural motive, the blood being shed as a magic charm to secure fertility.53.1At 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.53.2But 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, theMother 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 imaginationoperate 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.
Wecan 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.56.1Dionysos 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.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 ownnature 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 Herodotus58.1that these two poets were reallythe 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 ἱεÏοὶ 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 adifferent 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.60.1And 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.â€60.2The pæan and the ‘nomos’ became instinct with the Apolline, the Dithyrambos with the Dionysiac spirit,60.3the 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 singingof 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.61.2Henceforth, 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 forceworking 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 á¼Ïως comes to be applied to even the most shadowy of these functional powers, to ΜυίαγÏος, 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 ἘÏως Love, Φιλία Friendship, ΕἰÏήνη Peace, became often for the religious imagination personal individuals with human relationships;62.3thus Eireneemerges 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.63.1Others 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.63.2It 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 wasonly 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.64.1A curious and unscientific distinction that Aristophanes makes between the religions of the Hellenes and the Barbarians64.2has 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.64.3And 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.64.4In 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 inits 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 (ΣμινθεÏÏ‚ 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.65.2This 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 goddesswearing 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 á¼™Ïκεῖος, ‘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 á¼™Ïκεῖος 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 orAphrodite 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 γενÎσια, the funeral feasts of the γÎνη; 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 ΣυνοικÎσια, 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.67.1In the same sense he was called ΓενÎτωÏ, ‘the Father’ in Delos.67.2Zeus was the father of Arkas, the eponymous hero of the Arcadians, and was worshipped as ΠατÏῶος at Tegea67.3; Hermes also was ancestral God of part ofthe Arcadian land and identified with the ancestor Aipytos.68.1These 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,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. Themost natural person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the colony, the κτίστης or á¼€ÏχηγÎτης 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 ‘ἡÏῶον’ 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 χÏÏ„Ïοι, 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.70.1Nevertheless, 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 familyaspect 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 elsewhere71.1and 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 theState-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.â€
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 kindredcircle 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.73.1This 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.73.2Achilles, 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 senseof 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 ofApollo, 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, á¼Ï€Î¯ Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the Dolphin-Godâ€â€”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.—TheseCathartic 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 ἈÏχηγÎτης, that is, as the divine founder, and that the flourishing communities of the West sent back tithe-offerings to his shrine.76.1Was 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 ἈγυιεÏÏ‚, a god ‘of the road,’ the leader of the migratory host. Andin 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.77.2Due 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 doubtlessemphasised 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 localindependence 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 thereligious 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 BÅ“otia and been adopted into the Attic state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor coast,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 andbrightening 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 andabstinences 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 establishmentof 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 passage84.1protests 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 laterthan 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-playperformed 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—theπαῖς 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.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 theirspeculations 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.89.1But 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 Clemens89.2polemise 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 thefragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary polytheism;90.1but 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