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THE JEWS AMONG THE
GREEKS AND ROMANS
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[Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS, ROME]
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THE JEWS AMONG THE
GREEKS AND ROMANS
BY
MAX RADIN
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1915
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COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
------------------------------------
MATRI MEÆ
PIETATIS ERGO
HOC OPUSCULUM
D. D. D.
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PREFACE
It is a counsel of perfection that any historical study should be
approached with complete detachment. To such detachment I can make all
the less claim as I freely admit an abiding reverence for the history of
my own people, and, for the life of ancient Greece and Rome, a
passionate affection that is frankly unreasoning. At no place in the
course of the following pages have I been consciously apologetic. It is
true that where several explanations of an incident are possible, I have
not always selected the one most discreditable to the Jews. Doubtless
that will not be forgiven me by those who have accepted the anti-Semitic
pamphlets of Willrich as serious contributions to historical research.
The literature on the subject is enormous. Very few references to what
are known as “secondary” sources will, however, be found in this book. A
short bibliography is appended, in which various books of reference are
cited. From these all who are interested in the innumerable
controversies that the subject has elicited may obtain full information.
There remains the grateful task of acknowledging my personal
indebtedness to my friend, Dr. Ernst Riess, for many valuable
suggestions. Above all I desire to express my indebtedness to President
Solomon Schechter, of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, at
whose instance the preparation of this book was undertaken. Those who
share with me the privilege of his friendship will note in more than one
turn of expression and thought the impress of that rich personality.
MAX RADIN
NEW YORK CITY,
October, 1915
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CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction 13
I. Greek Religious Concepts 21
II. Roman Religious Concepts 40
III. Greek and Roman Concepts of Race 48
IV. Sketch of Jewish History between 56
Nebuchadnezzar and Constantine
V. Internal Development of the Jews 66
during the Persian Period
VI. The First Contact between Greek and 76
Jew
VII. Egypt 90
VIII. Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt 104
IX. The Struggle against Greek Culture 118
in Palestine
X. Antiochus the Manifest God 135
XI. The Jewish Propaganda 148
XII. The Opposition 163
XIII. The Opposition in Its Social Aspect 176
XIV. The Philosophic Opposition 191
XV. The Romans 210
XVI. Jews in Rome during the Early 236
Empire
XVII. The Jews of the Empire till the 257
Revolt
XVIII. The Revolt of 68 C.E. 287
XIX. The Development of the Roman Jewish 304
Community
XX. The Final Revolts of the Jews 328
XXI. The Legal Position of the Jews in 350
the Later Empire
Summary 368
Notes 373
Bibliography 415
Index 417
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ILLUSTRATIONS
ARCH OF TITUS, ROME Frontispiece
RUINS OF THE AMPHITHEATER AT GERASA 62
(JERASH), GILEAD, PALESTINE
ANTIOCHUS (IV) EPIPHANES, AFTER A COIN 136
(from a Drawing by Ralph Iligan)
GREEK INSCRIPTION, FOUND ON SITE OF 186
TEMPLE AREA, FORBIDDING GENTILES TO
PASS BEYOND THE INNER TEMPLE WALLS AT
JERUSALEM
RUINS OF AN ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE AT MEROM, 216
GALILEE, PALESTINE (Roman Period)
TOMBS OF THE KINGS, VALLEY OF KEDRON, 268
JERUSALEM (from Wilson’s “Jerusalem”)
SYMBOLS AND INSCRIPTIONS FROM JEWISH 310
CATACOMBS AND CEMETERIES IN ROME (from
Garrucci)
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INTRODUCTION
The civilization of Europe and America is composed of elements of many
different kinds and of various origin. Most of the beginnings cannot be
recovered within the limits of recorded history. We do not know where
and when a great many of our fundamental institutions arose, and about
them we are reduced to conjectures that are sometimes frankly
improbable. But about a great many elements of our civilization, and
precisely those upon which we base our claim to be called
civilized—indeed, which give us the word and the concept of civic
life—we know relatively a great deal, and we know that they originated
on the eastern shores of the large landlocked sea known as the
Mediterranean.
We are beginning to be aware that the process of developing these
elements was much longer than we had been accustomed to believe. Many
races and several millennia seem to have elaborated slowly the
institutions that older historians were prepared to regard as the
conscious contrivance of a single epoch. But even if increasing
archeological research shall render us more familiar than we are with
Pelasgians, Myceneans, Minoans, Aegeans, it is not likely that the
claims of two historic peoples to have founded European civilization
will be seriously impugned. These are the Romans and the Greeks. To
these must be added another people, the Jews, whose contribution to
civilization was no less real and lasting.
The Greeks and Romans have left descendants only in a qualified sense.
There are no doubt thousands of individuals now living who are the
actual descendants of the kinsmen and contemporaries of the great names
in Greek and Roman history; but these individuals are widely scattered,
and are united by national and racial bonds with thousands of
individuals not so descended, from whom they have become wholly
indistinguishable. We have documentary evidence of great masses of other
races, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Semitic, entering into the territory
occupied by Greeks and Romans and mingling with them, and to this
evidence is added the confirmation of anthropological researches. This
fact has made it possible to consider Greek and Roman history
objectively. Only rarely can investigators be found who feel more than a
very diluted pride in the achievements of peoples so dubiously connected
with themselves. It is therefore with increasing clarity of vision that
we are ordering the large body of facts we already know about Greeks and
Romans, and are gathering them in constantly broadening categories.
That unfortunately is not the case with the Jews. Here, too, racial
admixture was present, but it never took place on a large scale at any
one time, and may always have remained exceptional. However that may be,
common belief both among Jews and non-Jews holds very strongly the view
that the Jews of to-day are the lineal descendants of the community
reorganized by Ezra, nor is it likely that this belief would be
seriously modified by much stronger evidence to the contrary than has
yet been adduced.[1] The result has been that the place of the Jews in
history has been determined upon the basis of institutions avowedly
hostile to them. It may be said that historians have introduced the Jews
as a point of departure for Christianity, and have not otherwise
concerned themselves with them.
There was a time when Greek and Roman and Jew were in contact. What was
the nature of that contact? What were its results? What were the mutual
impressions made by all three of them on one another? The usual answer
has been largely a transference of modern attitudes to ancient times. Is
another answer possible? Do the materials at our disposal permit us to
arrive at a firmer and better conclusion?
It is necessary first to know the conditions of our inquiry. The period
that we must partially analyze extends from the end of the Babylonian
Captivity to the establishment of Christianity—roughly from about 450
B.C.E. to 350 C.E., some seven or eight hundred years.
The time limits are of course arbitrary. The contact with Greeks may
have begun before the earlier of the two limits, and the relations of
the Jews with both Greeks and Romans certainly did not cease with either
Constantine or Theodosius. However, it was during the years that
followed the return from the Exile that much of the equipment was
prepared with which the Jew actually met the Greek, and, on the other
hand, the relations of Christian Rome to the Jews were determined by
quite different considerations from those that governed Pagan Rome. It
is at this point accordingly that a study of the Jews among the Greeks
and Romans may properly end.
THE SOURCES
Even for laymen it has become a matter of great interest to know upon
what material the statements are based which scientists and scholars
present to them. It is part perhaps of the general skepticism that has
displaced the abundant faith of past generations in the printed word.
For that reason what the sources are from which we must obtain the
statements that we shall make here, will be briefly indicated below.
First we have a number of Greek and Latin writers who incidentally or
specially referred to the Jews. However, as is the case with many other
matters of prime importance, the writings of most of these authors have
not come down to us completely, but in fragments. That is to say, we
have only the brief citations made of them by much later writers, or
contained in very late compilations, such as lexicons, commonplace
books, or manuals for instruction. Modern scholars have found it
imperatively necessary to collect these fragments, so that they may be
compared and studied more readily. In this way the fragments of lost
books on history, grammar, music, of lost poems and plays, have been
collected at various times. Similarly the fragments concerning the Jews
have been collected, and gathered into a single book by M. Théodore
Reinach, under the title of _Textes d’ auteurs grecs et latins relatifs
au judaisme_. Here the Greek and Latin texts and the French translation
of them are arranged in parallel columns, and furnished with explanatory
footnotes. M. Reinach’s great distinction as a classical scholar enables
him to speak with authority upon many of the controverted questions that
these texts contain. Often his judgment as to what certain passages mean
may be unquestioningly accepted, and at all times one disagrees with him
with diffidence.
Secondly, we have the Jewish literature of the period; but that
literature was produced under such various conditions and with such
diverse purposes that a further classification is necessary.
Most important for our purposes is that part of Jewish literature which
was a direct outcome of the contact we are setting forth—the apologetic
writings of the Jews, or those books written in Greek, only rarely in
Latin, in which Jewish customs and history are explained or defended for
non-Jewish readers. Most of these books likewise have been lost, and
have left only inconsiderable fragments, but in the case of two writers
we have very extensive remains. One of these men is the Alexandrian Jew
Philo, a contemporary of the first Roman emperors. The other was the
Palestinian Jew Joseph, who played an important, if ignoble, part in the
rebellion of 68 C.E.
An estimate of the character of Philo and Josephus—to give the latter
the name by which alone he is remembered—or of the value of their works,
is out of place here. Philo’s extant writings are chiefly concerned with
philosophic exposition, and are only indirectly of documentary value.
However, he also wrote a “Defense” of his people, of which large
portions have survived, notably the _In Flaccum_, a bitter invective
against the prefect of Egypt under Tiberius, and the _Legatio ad Gaium_,
a plea in behalf of the Alexandrian Jews made to the emperor Caligula by
an embassy of which Philo was himself a member.[2]
An apologetic purpose, for himself more than for his fellow-citizens, is
discernible in practically all the extant writings of Josephus. One of
them, however, the misnamed _Contra Apionem_, is avowedly a defense of
the Jews against certain misrepresentations contained in Greek books.
The importance of Josephus’ works is impossible to overrate. For many
matters he is our sole authority. But the character exhibited in his own
account of his conduct has impaired the credibility of much of what he
says, and has provoked numerous controversies. It is impossible to
disregard him, and unsafe to rely upon him. However, it is not unlikely
that fuller knowledge, which the sands of Egypt and Palestine may at any
time offer, will compel us to change our attitude toward him
completely.[3]
Besides the apologetic Jewish writings, directed to gentile readers,
there was a flourishing literature in Greek (and perhaps in Latin too)
intended for Greek-speaking Jews. It may be said that no branch of
literary art was quite neglected. The great majority of these books are
lost. Some, however, of a homiletic or parenetic tendency, attained
partial sanctity in some of the Jewish congregations, and were, under
such protection, transferred to the Christian communities that succeeded
them. They may now be found in collections of Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha, such as the German collection of Kautzsch and that
recently completed in English by Charles. Examples are the Wisdom of
Solomon, the Jewish Sibyl, the Letter of Aristeas, etc.
All these books were intended for Jewish readers, but for Jews whose
sole mother tongue was Greek. In Palestine and Syria the Jews spoke
Aramaic, and the educated among them used Hebrew for both literary and
colloquial purposes. There was consequently an active literature in
these languages. Some books so written were early translated into Greek,
and from Greek into Latin and Ethiopic, and have survived as part of the
Apocrypha. Judith, First Maccabees, Tobit, are instances. It was a rare
and fortunate accident that gave us the Hebrew original of such a book,
of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus.
Again, the highly organized religious and legal institutions of the Jews
found literary expression in the decisions and comments upon them that
all such institutions involve. The exposition of the consecrated ancient
literature was also begun in this period. It was not, however, till
relatively late, 200 C.E. and after, that actual books were put
together, so that it is dangerous to accept uncritically references to
earlier dates.
The books referred to are primarily the Mishnah and the other extant
collections of Baraitot. Besides these, such works as the Megillat
Taanit and the Seder Olam must be grouped here. The earlier portions of
both Talmuds may be included, perhaps all of the Jerusalem Talmud.
One source of somewhat problematic character remains to be considered.
Biblical critics have been at some pains to assign as much as possible
of the Bible to the earlier centuries of the period we have delimited.
That more than a very slight portion can be so assigned is scarcely
probable, but some of it may, especially those books or passages in
which Greek influence is clearly noticeable. However, little profit can
be gained for our purposes from material that demands such a deal of
caution in its use.
Finally, besides literary evidences, which, as we have seen, have
wretchedly failed to substantiate the poet’s vaunt of being more lasting
than brass, we have the brass itself; that is, we have the stones,
coins, utensils, potsherds, and papyri inscribed with Hebrew, Aramaic,
Greek, Latin, Babylonian, and Egyptian words, which are the actual
contemporaries, just as we have them, of the events they illustrate. It
is the study of evidences like these that has principally differentiated
modern historical research from the methods it displaced, and in the
unceasing increase of these fragmentary and invaluable remains our hopes
of better knowledge of ancient life are centered.[4]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
GREEK RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS
The Jew is presented to the modern world in the double aspect of a race
and a religion. In a measure this has always been the case, but we shall
not in the least understand what the statement of the fact means without
a very close analysis of the concepts of race and religion formed by
both Greeks and Romans.
The word religion has a very definite meaning to us. It is the term
applied to the body of beliefs that any group of men maintain about
supernatural entities upon whom they consider themselves wholly
dependent. The salient fact of modern religions is that for most men the
group is very large indeed, that it vastly transcends all national
limits. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all profess the purpose of
gaining the entire human race for their adherents, and have actively
attempted to do so. The fact that the religions with which we are most
familiar are “world-religions,” and the abstract character of the
predicates of the Deity in them, would seem to make religion as such
practically free from local limitation. However, that is not completely
true even for our time. In the first place, the bulk of Christians, as
of Muslims and Buddhists, are in all three cases bearers of a common
culture, and have long believed themselves of common descent. They
occupy further a continuous, even if very large, area. Religious maps of
the world would show solid blocks of color, not spots scattered
everywhere. Secondly, even within the limits of the religion itself
national boundaries are not wholly expunged. The common Christianity of
Spain and England presents such obvious differences that insistence upon
them is unnecessary; nor does the fact that Southern Germany, Belgium,
and Ireland are all Roman Catholic imply that all these sections have
the same religious attitude.
These are modern illustrations, and they represent survivals of a state
of things which in the Greek world was fundamental. As it seems to us
axiomatic that an abstractly conceived God cannot be the resident of a
limited area on the surface of the earth, just so axiomatic it seemed,
at one stage of Greek religious growth, that a god was locally limited,
that his activities did not extend—or extended only in a weakened
form—beyond a certain sharply circumscribed geographical area. That is
probably the most fundamental and thoroughgoing of the differences
between Greek religious feeling and that of our day. Opinions may differ
widely about the degree of anthropomorphism present at the contrasted
periods; and then, as now, the statements made about the nature and
power of the Deity were contradictory, vague, and confusing. But one
thing it is hard to question: the devoutly religious man of to-day feels
himself everywhere, always, in the presence of his God. The Greek did
not feel that his god was everywhere with him, certainly did not feel
that he was everywhere approachable.[5]
At another point too we are in great danger of importing modern notions
into ancient conditions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all
book-religions. The final source of their doctrines is a revelation that
has been written down, and is extant as an actual and easily accessible
book. Moreover, it is the narrative portion of this book that is the
best-known part of it, and that is generally associated in the popular
mind with it. In the same way, we are prone to think of Greek religion
as a series of extraordinarily beautiful myths or narratives of gods and
heroes, which have likewise been written down, and are extant in the
poems and dramas of which they are the subject. This view has been
greatly strengthened by the unfortunate currency of the epigram that
Homer was the Greek Bible. No one would be inclined to force, except as
a paradox, the analogy upon which the statement rests; yet the phrase is
so terse and simple, and the elements of the comparison are so generally
familiar, that consciously and unconsciously current conceptions are
moulded by it.
Now if the epigram quoted is essentially true, we have at once a measure
of Greek religious feeling, since the Homeric poems are as accessible to
us as to the Greeks themselves. We should be compelled to reckon with
variety in the interpretation of the text, but in the literal
signification there would always be a point of departure. And we should
at once realize that for divine beings depicted as they are by Homer a
devotion of a very different sort is demanded from that which modern
faiths give their Deity. Nor does later literature represent the gods on
a loftier moral plane. When we read Aristophanes,[6] it becomes still
more difficult to understand how the gods could retain their divinity
not only when deprived of their moral character, but even when stripped
of their dignity. So far from raising the moral character of the divine
beings who are the actors in these legends, the later versions of many
quite unexceptionable myths deliberately debase them by subjecting most
actions to a foully erotic interpretation.[7] The less offensive
narrative, to be sure, survives as well, but it is to be noted that the
divinity of the personages in question seems to be as unquestioned in
the corrupt as in the purer form of the story.
How might an emotionally sensitive or mentally trained man pour forth
supplication before a guzzling braggart like the Aristophanic Heracles
or an effeminate voluptuary like the Apollo of Alexandrian poetry? It
seems hard to discover any other defense than the one Charles Lamb
offered for the dramatists of the Restoration—that the world the gods
moved in was a wholly different one from the human world; a world in
which moral categories had no existence, a Land of Cockayne without
vices, because it was without the sanctions which vice disregards. No
doubt some Greeks felt in this way toward the myths. But it was not a
satisfactory theory. It introduced a dualism into standards of conduct
that soon became intolerable, when men reflected seriously upon other
sides of the divine nature, and drew inferences from it.
As a matter of fact, the difficulty we find in addressing words of
prayer and praise to such unworthy gods as sat upon the Homeric Olympus
is modern, and was probably not felt at all by the vast majority of
Greeks, either in Homer’s time or later. Not that the fraud, cruelty,
faithlessness there exhibited seemed to the Greeks of any epoch
commendable or imitable qualities. Even the Homeric Greek was far from
being in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state. Civic virtues as between
men were known and practised. But the personality of the individual gods
in these stories could be disregarded in practice, because they were in
no sense a part of the Greek religion. The chastest of men might with a
clear conscience worship the lecherous Zeus, because worship did not at
all concern itself with the catalogue of his amours. In Homer’s time and
after, the Greek firmly believed that the Olympians were actually
existing beings, but he scarcely stopped to ask himself whether it was
literally true that Zeus had bidden Hera be silent under threats of
personal violence. What did concern him in his relation with his gods
was the disposition in which the god was likely to be toward him or his
people. And his religious activity was directed to the end of making
that disposition as good as possible.
The matter just set forth is far from being new doctrine; but for the
general reader it must be constantly re-emphasized, because it is
constantly forgotten. We continually find the Greek myths discussed in
terms that would be true only of the Gospel narratives, and we see the
Greek gods described as though they possessed the sharpness of personal
outline which the Deity has in the minds of believing Christians. It is
no doubt the extant literature—a florilegium at best—that is at fault in
the matter. This literature, it must be remembered, was not preserved
altogether by accident. To a large extent it represents a conscious
selection, made for pedagogic purposes. The relative coherence which
Greek myths have for us is due to the fact that the surviving poems and
dramas which contain them were selected, partially at least, by
Hellenistic and Byzantine schoolmasters in order to fit into a set cycle
or scheme. Even in what we have there is abundant evidence that the
myths about the gods could pretend to no sanctity for anybody, devout or
scoffer, for the simple reason that they negated themselves, that widely
differing and hopelessly contradictory stories were told of the same
event or person.
In reality the Greek myths were not coherent. It is hard to discover in
many of them a folkloristic kernel that had to be kept intact. Almost
everywhere we are dealing with the free fantasies of highly imaginative
poets. So fully was this understood that the stories most familiar to us
are generally alluded to in serious Greek literature with an apologetic,
ὡς oἱ ποιηταί φασι, “as the poets say,” or some similar
phrase. And as these stories were largely unrelated, so also were the
gods of whom they were told, even though they bore the same name. If
mythographers had taken the trouble to collect all the stories known of
any one god—Hermes, for example—there would be nothing except the common
name to indicate that they referred to the same chief actor, and much
that, except for the common name, would be referred to different gods.
Not even a single prominent trait, not a physical feature, would be
found to run through all the myths so collected.
So far we have been dealing with extant literature. But if the more
recondite notices of popular superstition are taken into account, as
well as the archeological discoveries, we meet such figures as Demeter,
Artemis, Apollo,[8] in various and curious forms and associations, so
that one might be tempted to suppose that these highly individualized
figures of poetry were, in the shrines in which they were worshiped,
hardly more than divine appellatives of rather vague content. And on the
islands of the Aegean, in Crete and Cyprus, where the continuity between
Aegean, Mycenean, and Hellenic civilization[9] was perhaps less
disturbed by convulsive upheavals, this seems especially to have been
the case.
For cult purposes, then—the primary purpose of Greek religion—there was
less difference between gods than we might suppose. Not even the
strongly marked personages that poetry made of them were able to fix
themselves in the popular mind. Sculptors had been busy in
differentiating types, and yet even here the process was not completed.
While in general we know of Poseidon-types, Zeus-types, etc., in art,
the most thoroughly equipped critics find themselves embarrassed if they
are required to name a statue that is wholly lacking in definite
external symbols or attributes, such as the thunderbolt, trident,
caduceus, and others.[10] Even the unrivaled artistic abilities of Greek
sculptors found it impossible to create unmistakable types of the Greek
gods, for the reason that the character of the god as portrayed in myth
and fable was fluid, and not fixed.
As among most peoples of the time, the essential religious act was that
which brought the god and his worshiper into contact—the sacrifice. What
the real nature of sacrifice was need not concern us here. The undoubted
fact is that sacrifice and prayer formed a single act;[11] that it was
during the sacrifice that the worshiper ventured to address his prayer
to the godhead he invoked. In doing so he must of necessity use the
god’s name, and, as we have seen, the name was of more general and less
specific connotation than is usually supposed. But the act of worship
itself was specifically occasioned. Even the fixed and annually
recurring festivals related to a specific, if recurring, occasion in the
life of the people. This was eminently the case in the irregular acts of
worship that arose out of some unforeseen contingency. Whatever the
divine name was that was used, the specific occasion of its use made it
necessary also to specify the function of the divinity of which the
intervention was sought. That was regularly done by attaching to the
name a qualifying epithet. When the rights of hospitality were
threatened with invasion, it was Ζεὺς Ξένιος, Zeus the
Protector of Strangers, that was addressed. In gratitude for a
deliverance, Zeus or Apollo or Heracles or the Dioscuri or many another
might be invoked as “the Savior.”[12] And it might well be argued that
the Greek who did so had scarcely anything more definite in mind than a
Roman who worshiped Salus, the abstract principle of safety. In very
many cases the particular function was especially potent in certain
areas, so that a local adjective applied as a divine epithet would sum
up the power desired to be set in motion.
In the actual moment of prayer or propitiation, it was often a matter of
courtesy to ignore the existence of other gods. This makes perhaps a
sufficiently definite phenomenon to justify the application to it of the
special name “henotheism” long ago devised by Max Müller;[13] and in
henotheism we have very likely the germ of monotheism. But when not
actually engaged in worship, the Greek was well aware that there were
many gods, and that there were differences among them, and this quite
apart from the myths, to which, as has been said, no very great
importance can be attached in this connection. The differences in power
and prominence of deities were perhaps not original, but they had arisen
quickly and generally.
One difference particularly, that between gods and heroes, seems to have
been real to the popular mind. A difference in the terminology that
described the ritual act, and a difference in the act itself, point to a
real distinction between the two divine conceptions.[14]
Who and what the heroes actually were is an extremely doubtful matter.
That some of them were originally men is a proposition with which legend
has made us familiar.[15] We shall recur later to the common heroization
of the dead. That some of them were undoubted gods has been amply
established.[16] It may well be that they were deities of a narrowly
limited territory, knowledge of whom, for one reason or another,
remained sharply circumscribed for a long time, so that when they came
later within the range of myth-making they could not be readily fitted
into any divine scheme. Often the name that appears in some legends as a
hero appears in others as an epithet or cult-title of a better-known
god. This fact may be variously interpreted. At least one interpretation
derives this fusion of names from the fact that the worshipers of the
later deity invaded the cult-home of the earlier, and ultimately
degraded the latter to accessory rank. Or it may be taken as a
compromise of existing claims. At any rate, in some of the heroes we
seem to reach an element somewhat closer to the religious consciousness
of the Greek masses. And if the gods, or most of them, are heroes who
owe their promotion to a fortunate accident rather than to any inherent
superiority, we may discover the fundamental divine conceptions of the
Greeks in the traits that especially mark the heroes: sharp local
limitation, absence of personal lineaments, adoration based upon power
for evil as well as for good.[17]
It was because of this last fact that Greek poets could deal freely with
gods and heroes in the narratives they created. The divine name
possessed none of the ineffable sanctity it has for us by thousands of
years of tradition. Except during the performance of the ritual act, the
god’s presence and power were not vividly felt, and it would have been
considered preposterous to suppose that he resented as compromising an
idle tale from which he suffered no impairment of worship. That the gods
really existed, and that honor was to be paid them after the ancestral
manner, was more than the essence, it was the totality, of popular Greek
theology. Speculation as to the real nature of gods and the world, the
mass of citizens would have regarded as the most futile form of
triviality.[18]
But there were some who thought otherwise. Many thoughtful men must have
felt the absurdities and immoralities of the myths as keenly as we do.
Xenophanes[19] protests, and no doubt not first of all men, against
them. Further, with the earliest stirrings of cosmic speculation in
Ionia, systems of theology are proposed that dispense with demiurges and
administrators. Intellectually developed men cannot have been long in
ridding themselves of popular conceptions that violated the most
elementary reflection. To be sure, the philosopher did not always feel
free to carry his conviction to the point of openly disregarding the
established forms. To do so would bring him into conflict with other
institutions that he valued, and with which religious forms had become
inextricably bound up. But his own beliefs took broader and broader
ground, and well before Alexander became monotheism, pantheism, or
agnosticism.[20]
All these standpoints must be kept in mind when we deal with the
conflict between Greek and Jew: the popular one, no doubt rooted in a
primitive animism, to which the gods were of indifferent and somewhat
shifting personality, but to which the ritual act was vital; the
attitude of poetry and folk-lore, in which divine persons appeared
freely as actors, but in which each poem or legend was an end in itself
unrelated to any other; and finally the philosophic analysis, which did
not notably differ in result from similar processes of our own day.
We find the Hellenic world in possession of very many gods. Some of them
are found practically wherever there were Greeks, although the degree of
veneration they received in the different Greek communities varied
greatly. However, such common gods did exist, and their existence
involves the consideration of the spread of worships.
It is of course quite possible that the common gods grew out of the
personification of natural phenomena, the solar-myth theory, on which
nineteenth-century scholars sharpened their ingenuity.[21] It may be,
too, that one or more of them are the national gods of the conquering
Hellenes, whensoever and howsoever such a conquest may have taken place.
Some may have been of relatively late importation. The Greeks lived in
territory open to streams of influence from every point of the compass.
Of one such importation we know some details—the worship of
Dionysus.[22] Of others, such as Aphrodite, we suspect a Semitic origin
by way of Cyprus.[23] It will be noticed that the names of most of the
common gods are difficult to trace to Greek roots, a fact in itself of
some significance.
We must remember that the wandering of the god is often merely the
wandering of a name. That is especially true in those cases in which an
old divine name becomes the epithet or cult-title of the intruding
deity. Here obviously there was no change in the nature of the god
worshiped and no interruption of his worship. It is very likely, too,
that very few deities ever completely disappeared, even when there was a
real migration of a god. The new god took his place by the side of the
old one, and relations of many kinds, superior or inferior, were
speedily devised. So at Athens, in the contest between Poseidon and
Athena, permanently recorded on the west pediment of the Parthenon, the
triumph of Athena merely gave her a privilege. The defeated Poseidon
remained in uninterrupted possession of shrine and votaries.
How did the worship of certain gods spread? One answer is obvious: by
the migration of their votaries. Locally limited as the operation of the
divinity was, in normal circumstances there never was a doubt that it
could transcend those limits when the circumstances ceased to be normal.
And that certainly took place when the community of which the god was a
member changed its residence. The methods of propitiation, as
crystallized into the inherited ritual, and the divine name, in which,
for the rank and file, the individuality of the god existed, would be
continued, though they were subject to new influences, and not
infrequently suffered a sea-change.
But migration of all or some of the worshipers of a given deity was not
the only way by which the god himself moved from place to place. Exotic
rituals, as soon as men became acquainted with them, had attractions of
their own, especially if they contained features that made a direct
sensational appeal. The medium of transference may have been the
constantly increasing commerce, which brought strangers into every city
at various times. In all Greek communities there was a large number of
“disinherited”—metics, emancipated slaves, suffrageless plebs—to whom
the established gods seemed cold and aloof, or who had only a limited
share in the performance of the established ritual. These men perhaps
were the first to welcome newer rituals, which it was safer to introduce
when they were directed to newer gods.[24] They were assisted in doing
this by the long-noted tolerance Greeks exhibited toward other religious
observances, a tolerance which Christian Europe has taught us to
consider strange and exceptional.
That tolerance was not altogether an inference from polytheism itself.
Polytheism, to be sure, takes for granted the existence of other gods in
other localities, but it does not follow that it permits the entrance of
one god into the jurisdiction of another. And it was not universal.
Among communities inhospitable in other respects it did not prevail. But
it was the general rule, because the conception of ἀσέβεια,
of “impiety,”[25] was largely the same everywhere. Impiety was such
conduct as prevented or corrupted the established forms of divine
communication. The introduction of new deities was an indictable offense
at Athens only so far as it displaced the old ones. Where no such danger
was apprehended, no charge would lie. The traditions that describe the
bitter opposition which the introduction of Dionysus encountered in many
places, are too uniform to be discredited.[26] But the opposition was
directed to the grave social derangements that doubtless attended the
adoption by many of an enthusiastic ritual. The opposition cannot have
been general nor of long duration, since the worship of Dionysus spread
with extraordinary rapidity, and covered the whole Greek world.
Religious movements curiously like the “revivals” of medieval and modern
times visited Greece as they visit most organized communities. One of
the most important of these, which gradually spread over Greece during
the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., must be reserved for later
treatment. We may note here merely that there had been present from very
early times the nuclei of a more intense religious life than any that
could be experienced through the rather perfunctory solemnities of the
state cults. These were the mysteries, of which the most famous were the
Eleusinian in Attica. Some assign the latter to an Egyptian origin.[27]
Wherever they came from, they had assumed a large place in the
imagination of Greeks as early as the eighth century;[28] and they
gained their adherents not so much by wrapping themselves in
impenetrable secrecy as by promising their participants an otherwise
unattainable degree of divine favor. Other mysteries existed elsewhere,
possibly modeled upon the Eleusinian. All, however, made similar claims.
It was in the form of mysteries that the emotional side of religion was
deepened. Further, the organization of these mysteries exercised a
profound influence upon all propagandizing movements, whether religious
or not. It is not unlikely that the earliest organization of the
Christian ecclesiae was, at least in part, influenced by the
organization of the mysteries, whether of Eleusis or of some other sort.
It has been said that one commonly worshiped group of heroes were
frankly and concededly dead men. It needs no demonstration to make clear
that such worship of the dead must of necessity be very old; but at many
places in the Greek world this ancient worship of the dead had become
much weakened. The Homeric poems, for example, know it only in a very
attenuated form.[29] At many other places, on the other hand, it
flourished vigorously and continuously from the earliest times. The
application of the word ἥρως, “hero,” to the dead may have
had very ancient sanction. In later times, the term appears very
commonly,[30] and undoubtedly claims for the persons so qualified the
essential characteristics of other heroes—_i.e._ immortality, the
primary divine quality in Homer, and greatly increased power. It
involved no difficulty to the Greek mind to make this claim, for it was
a very common, perhaps universal, belief that gods and men were akin,
that they were the same in nature. Perhaps the very oldest of
transcendental beliefs is that the all-overwhelming phenomenon of death
is not an annihilation, and that something survives, even if only as a
shadow in the House of Hades. When men began to speculate actively upon
the real results of bodily death, it must have occurred to many that the
vaguely enlarged scope of such life as did survive was a return to a
former and essential divinity.[31]
But from a hero, limited and obscure, to a god, seated in full
effulgence at the table of Zeus, was a big step, and bigger yet was the
deification of living men. It may even be that the latter conception was
not Greek, but was borrowed from Egypt or Mesopotamia. There is no
indication of its presence before Alexander. That a man in the flesh
might be translated from mortality to immortality—_entrückt_—was a very
ancient conviction. The son-in-law of Zeus, Menelaos, had been so
privileged.[32] A poetic hyperbole claimed as much for the tyrannicide
Harmodius.[33] There were others, of no special moment, who by popular
legend had walked among men and were not found, as in later times
happened to Arthur and Barbarossa. But they became as gods only by their
translation. We do not meet in Greece for centuries men who ventured to
claim for themselves in the visible body that measure of divinity. In
Egypt, however, and Mesopotamia the conception was not new. Certainly
Pharaoh did not wait to receive his divine character from the hand of
the embalmer. He was at all times Very God. At both the Euphrates and
the Nile, Alexander found ample precedent for the assumption of divine
honors, to which he no doubt sincerely believed he had every claim. We
know how he derived his descent, without contradiction from his mother
Olympias. It was novel doctrine for Greeks, but the avidity with which
it was accepted and imitated showed that it did not absolutely clash
with Greek manner of thought.
After Alexander, every king or princelet who appeared with sufficient
force to overawe a town could scarcely avoid the formal decree of
divinity. The Ptolemies quietly stepped—though not at once—into the
throne and prerogatives of Ra. Seleucus adopted Apollo as his ancestor,
and his grandson took Θεός, “the God,” as his title. His
line maintained a shadowy relation with Marduk and Nebo of Babylon.
Demetrius the Besieger had only to show himself at Athens to be advanced
into Olympus.
The religion briefly and imperfectly sketched in this chapter was not
really a system at all. There is a deal of incoherency in it, of
cross-purposes and contradiction. There was no priestly caste among the
Greeks to gather into a system the confused threads of religious
thinking. Its ethical bearings came largely through the idea of the
state, in which religion was a highly important constituent. There was
also a personal and emotional side to Greek religion, and in particular
cases the adoration of the worshiper was doubtless the sacrifice of a
broken and contrite heart, and not the blood of bullocks. But the
crudities of animism cropped out in many places, and in the loftiest of
Greek prayers there is no note like “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy might.” In its most
developed form a Greek’s dependence on his god was resignation, not
self-immolation.
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