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 somemimetic form of Bacchic ritual is in the opinion of the present writer still the most reasonable, although this is now denied by some scholars.91.1But 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.
Thethird 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 thestructure 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 therighteous 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.94.2In 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.94.3The 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.94.4This is the highest political title of the High God;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.”95.1These 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 elsewhere95.2by 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 fromthe 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;96.1to 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 nationalthankfulness 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 thrillingnarrative 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.98.1And 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;98.2the 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 artof 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 fourthcentury 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,”100.1embodying, as Dio Chrysostom says, a conception of the God soconvincing 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.”101.2The 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 coin101.3of 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 surpassingloveliness, 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 Greece102.2was 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 claimsprominent 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,”103.2he 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,103.3could 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.
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 apartfrom 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.105.1Nor 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.
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 shortcut,” interpreting Moira as the voice or agent or emanation of the power of Zeus.107.1And 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.107.1We 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 moralpowers 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,108.1the Dike of Æschylus, “Justice, the Maiden Daughter of God,”108.2who “shines in the poor man’s smoke-dimmed cabin”;108.3Mercy 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.108.5And 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 fourthcentury 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.”109.1This 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 hismétierallowed 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.109.2We 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”109.3is 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 mustdeal. 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 themas 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.112.1He 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,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;113.1just as he puts into the mouth of Amphitryon his own mordant criticism of the action of Zeus.113.2Yet 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-magicwhich 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 andlater philosophers.115.1On 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.115.2We 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’sEuthyphron, 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 hisscheme of education in theRepublic, 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 institution116.1—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;116.2the 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.116.3This 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
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, whichbegan 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;118.1Epicharmos, 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’sWorks 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,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.119.1The Platonic dialogue of the Minos contrasts the Greeks with the barbarians in this matter,119.2yet implies that the Arcadians in the cult of Zeus Lykaios and the men of Halos in that of Zeus Laphystios119.3continued 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,119.4and at some time earlier than this the Athenians must have ceased to immolate human scapegoats, called φαρμακοί, in their Thargelia.119.5The 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.119.6According to Porphyry the practicesurvived here and there under the Roman Empire until the time of Hadrian.120.1And Plutarch120.2declares 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.120.3The 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;120.4no such feature is discernible in the Eleusinian or other Hellenic mysteries, althoughthe Christian fathers are eager in their insinuations; the Hellenic121.1cults 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.121.2In 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,121.3sexual 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 theBœotian peasant.122.1Now 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.122.2The higher moral thought of Greece on this matter is probably more nearly represented in the utterance of Aristotle in the Politics,122.3where 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 modernideas 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-belief123.1; still in the time of Demosthenes123.2they 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 Massilia123.3and 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.123.4Even 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 theabsurdity 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.124.1And Plato,124.2speaking 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 becomethe 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, tothe 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?126.1The present writer has suggested that “this is some peasant’s dedication, who feared his god little but loved him much and treated himen bon camarade.” Epicharmos in Sicily had been beforehand with Aristophanes in venturing on the burlesque of divine actions, Hephaistos and Heraklesspecially 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,127.1and 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 ofreligious 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 leadingla haute politiqueof 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 onquestions 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 inthe 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 Aristophanes130.1and an Attic orator contemporary with Demosthenes130.2openly 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 thenew 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 world131.1; Andokides aversthat foul misconduct was a more heinous sin in a man who had been in the service of the Mother and the Maid of Eleusis132.1; 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.132.2And 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.