GREEK RELIGION
=The Gods. Polytheism.=--The Greeks, like the ancient Aryans, believed
in many gods. They had neither the sentiment of infinity nor that of
eternity; they did not conceive of God as one for whom the heavens are
only a tent and the earth a foot-stool. To the Greeks every force of
nature--the air, the sun, the sea--was divine, and as they did not
conceive of all these phenomena as produced by one cause, they
assigned each to a particular god. This is the reason that they
believed in many gods. They were polytheists.
=Anthropomorphism.=--Each god was a force in nature and carried a
distinct name. The Greeks, having a lively imagination, figured under
this name a living being, of beautiful form and human characteristics.
A god or goddess was represented as a beautiful man or woman. When
Odysseus or Telemachus met a person peculiarly great and beautiful,
they began by asking him if he were not a god. Homer in describing the
army pictured on the shield of Achilles adds, "Ares and Athena led the
army, both clad in gold, beautiful and great, as becomes the gods, for
men were smaller." Greek gods are men; they have clothing, palaces,
bodies similar to ours; if they cannot die, they can at least be
wounded. Homer relates how Ares, the god of war, struck by a warrior,
fled howling with pain. This fashion of making gods like men is what
is called _Anthropomorphism_.
=Mythology.=--The gods, being men, have parents, children, property.
Their mothers were goddesses, their brothers were gods, and their
children other gods or men who were half divine. This genealogy of the
gods is what is called the _Theogony_. The gods have also a history;
we are told the story of their birth, the adventures of their youth,
their exploits. Apollo, for example, was born on the island of Delos
to which his mother Latona had fled; he slew a monster which was
desolating the country at the foot of Parnassus. Each canton of Greece
had thus its tales of the gods. These are called myths; the sum of
them is termed _Mythology_, or the history of the gods.
=The Local Gods.=--The Greek gods, even under their human form,
remained what they were at first, phenomena of nature. They were
thought of both as men and as forces of nature. The Naiad is a young
woman, but at the same time a bubbling fountain. Homer represents the
river Xanthus as a god, and yet he says, "The Xanthus threw itself on
Achilles, boiling with fury, full of tumult, foam, and the bodies of
the dead." The people itself continued to say "Zeus rains" or "Zeus
thunders." To the Greek the god was first of all rain, storm, heaven,
or sun, and not the heaven, sun, or earth in general, but that corner
of the heaven under which he lived, the land of his canton, the river
which traversed it. Each city, then, had its divinities, its sun-god,
its earth-goddess, its sea-god, and these are not to be confounded
with the sun, the earth, and the sea of the neighboring city. The
Zeus of Sparta is not the same as the Zeus of Athens; in the same oath
one sometimes invokes two Athenas or two Apollos. A traveller who
would journey through Greece[51] would therefore meet thousands of
local gods (they called them Poliades, or gods of the city). No
torrent, no wood, no mountain was without its own deity,[52] although
often a minor divinity, adored only by the people of the vicinity and
whose sanctuary was only a grotto in the rock.
=The Great Gods.=--Above the innumerable legion of local gods of each
canton the Greeks imagined certain great divinities--the heaven, the
sun, the earth, and the sea--and these everywhere had the same name,
and had their temple or sanctuary in every place. Each represented one
of the principal forces of nature. These gods common to all the Greeks
were never numerous; if all are included, we have hardly twenty.[53]
We have the bad habit of calling them by the name of a Latin god. The
following are their true names: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Athena
(Minerva), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaistos
(Vulcan), Hestia (Vesta), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), Poseidon
(Neptune), Amphitrite, Proteus, Kronos (Saturn), Rhea (Cybele),
Demeter (Ceres), Persephone (Proserpina), Hades (Pluto), Dionysos
(Bacchus). It is this little group of gods that men worshipped in all
the temples, that men ordinarily invoked in their prayers.
=Attributes of the Gods.=--Each of these great gods had his form, his
costume, his instruments (which we call his attributes); it is thus
that the faithful imagined him and that the sculptors represented him.
Each has his character which is well known to his worshippers. Each
has his role in the world, performing his determined functions,
ordinarily with the aid of secondary divinities who obey him.
Athena, virgin of clear eye, is represented standing, armed with a
lance, a helmet on the head, and gleaming armor on the breast. She is
the goddess of the clear air, of wisdom, and of invention, a goddess
of dignity and majesty.
Hephaistos, the god of fire, is figured with a hammer and in the form
of a lame and ugly blacksmith. It is he who forges the thunderbolt.
Artemis, shy maiden, armed with bow and quiver, courses the forests
hunting with a troop of nymphs. She is the goddess of the woods, of
the chase, and of death.
Hermes, represented with winged sandals, is the god of the fertile
showers. But he has other offices; he is the god of streets and
squares, the god of commerce, of theft, and of eloquence. He it is who
guides the souls of the dead, the messenger of the gods, the deity
presiding over the breeding of cattle.
Almost always a Greek god has several functions, quite dissimilar to
our eyes, but to the Greeks bearing some relation to one another.
=Olympus and Zeus.=--Each one of these gods is like a king in his own
domain. Still the Greeks had remarked that all the forces of nature do
not operate by chance and that they act in harmony; the same word
served them for the idea of order and of universe. They supposed,
then, that the gods were in accord for the administration of the
world, and that they, like men, had laws and government among them.
In the north of Greece there was a mountain to whose snowy summit no
man had ever climbed. This was Olympus. On this summit, which was
hidden by clouds from the eyes of men, it was imagined the gods
assembled. Meeting under the light of heaven, they conferred on the
affairs of the world. Zeus, the mightiest of them, presided over the
gathering: he was god of the heavens and of the light, the god "who
masses the clouds," who launches the thunderbolt--an old man of
majestic mien, with long beard, sitting on a throne of gold. It is he
who commands and the other gods bow before him. Should they essay to
resist, Zeus menaces them; Homer makes him say,[54] "Bind to heaven a
chain of gold, and all of you, gods or goddesses, throw your weight
upon it; all your united efforts cannot draw Zeus, the sovereign
ordainer, to the earth. On the contrary, if I wished to draw the chain
to myself, I should bring with it the earth and the very sea. Then I
would attach it to the summit of Olympus and all the universe would be
suspended. By so much am I superior to gods and men."
=Morality of the Greek Mythology.=--The greater part of their gods
were conceived by the Greeks as violent, sanguinary, deceitful,
dissolute. They ascribed to them scandalous adventures or dishonest
acts. Hermes was notorious for his thieving, Aphrodite for her
coquetry, Ares for his ferocity. All were so vain as to persecute
those who neglected to offer sacrifices to them. Niobe had seen all
her children pierced with arrows by Apollo because she herself had
boasted of her numerous family. The gods were so jealous that they
could not endure seeing a man thoroughly happy; prosperity for the
Greeks was the greatest of dangers, for it never failed to draw the
anger of the gods, and this anger became a goddess (Nemesis) about
whom were told such anecdotes as the following: Once Polycrates of
Samos, become very powerful, feared the jealousy of the gods; and so a
ring of gold which he still retained was cast into the sea that his
good fortune might not be unmixed with evil. Some time after, a
fisherman brought to Polycrates an enormous fish and in its belly was
found the ring. This was a certain presage of evil. Polycrates was
besieged in his city, taken, and crucified. The gods punished him for
his good fortune.
Greek mythology was immoral in that the gods gave bad examples to men.
The Greek philosophers were already saying this and were inveighing
against the poets who had published these stories. A disciple of
Pythagoras affirmed that his master, descending to hell, had seen the
soul of Homer hanging to a tree and that of Hesiod bound to a column
to punish them for calumniating the gods. "Homer and Hesiod," Said
Xenophanes, "attribute to the gods all the acts which among men are
culpable and shameful; there is but one god who neither in body nor in
soul resembles men." And he added this profound remark: "If oxen and
lions had hands and could manipulate like men, they would have made
gods with bodies similar to their own, horses would have framed gods
with horses' bodies, and cattle with cattle's.... Men think that the
gods have their feelings, their voice, and their body." Xenophanes was
right; the primitive Greeks had created their gods in their own image.
As they were then sanguinary, dissolute, jealous, and vain, their gods
were the same. Later, as the people became better, their descendants
were shocked with all these vices; but the history and the character
of the gods were fixed by the ancient traditions, and later
generations, without daring to change them, had received the gross and
dishonest gods of their ancestors.
THE HEROES
=The Hero.=--The hero in Greece is a man who has become illustrious,
and after death a mighty spirit--not a god, but a demi-god. The heroes
do not live on Olympus in the heaven of the gods, they do not direct
the life of the world. And yet they, too, possess a power higher than
that of any human, and this permits them to aid their friends and
destroy their enemies. For this reason the Greeks rendered them
worship as to the gods and implored their protection. There was not a
city, not a tribe, not a family but had its hero, a protecting spirit
which it adored.
=Different Kinds of Heroes.=--Of these heroes many are legendary
persons (Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon); some without doubt never
existed (Herakles, OEdipus); others like Hellen, Dorus, AEolus are only
names. But their worshippers regarded them as men of the olden time;
and, in fact, the most of the heroes lived at one time. Many are
historical personages: generals like Leonidas, Lysander; philosophers
like Democritus and Aristotle; legislators like Lycurgus and Solon.
The people of Croton adored even one of their fellow-citizens, Philip
by name, because he had been in his time the most beautiful man in
Greece. The leader who had guided a band of colonists and founded a
city became for the inhabitants the Founder; a temple was raised to
him and every year sacrifices were offered to him. The Athenian
Miltiades was thus worshipped in a city of Thrace. The Spartiate
Brasidas, killed in the defence of Amphipolis, had divine honors paid
to him in that city, for the inhabitants had come to regard him as
their Founder.
=Presence of the Heroes.=--The hero continued to reside in the place
where his body was interred, either in his tomb or in the
neighborhood. A story told by Herodotus (v. 67) depicts this belief in
a lively way. The city of Sicyon adored the hero Adrastus and in a
public place was a chapel dedicated to his honor. Cleisthenes, the
tyrant of Sicyon, took a fancy to rid himself of this hero. He went to
the oracle at Delphi to ask if it would aid him in expelling Adrastus.
The oracle replied to his question that Adrastus was king of the
Sicyonians and Cleisthenes was a brigand. The tyrant, not daring to
evict the hero, adopted a ruse; he sent to Thebes to seek the bones
of Melanippus, another hero, and installed them with great pomp in the
sanctuary of the city. "He did this," says Herodotus, "because
Melanippus during his life had been the greatest enemy of Adrastus and
had killed his brother and his son-in-law." Then he transferred to
Melanippus the festivals and the sacrifices formerly paid to the honor
of Adrastus. He was persuaded, and all the Greeks with him, that the
hero would be irritated and would flee.
=Intervention of the Heroes.=--The heroes have divine power; like the
gods, they can according to their whim send good or evil. The poet
Stesichorus had spoken ill of the famous Helen (that Helen who the
legend states was carried away to Troy); he suddenly became blind;
when he retracted what he had said, the heroine restored his sight.
The protecting heroes of a city kept it from plagues and famine and
even fought against its enemies. At the battle of the Marathon the
Athenian soldiers saw in the midst of them Theseus, the mythical
founder of Athens, clad in shining armor. During the battle of Salamis
the heroes Ajax and Telamon, once kings of Salamis, appeared on the
highest point of the island extending their hands to the Greek fleet.
"It is not we," said Themistocles, "that have vanquished the Persians;
it is the gods and heroes." In "OEdipus at Colonus," a tragedy of
Sophocles, OEdipus at the point of death receives the visit of the king
of Athens and of the king of Thebes, both of whom as gods request him
to have his body interred in their territory, and to become a
protecting hero. OEdipus at last consents to be buried in the soil of
the Athenians, and says to the king, "Dead, I shall not be a useless
inhabitant of this country, I shall be a rampart for you, stronger
than millions of warriors." In himself alone a hero was as efficient
as a whole army; his spirit was mightier than all living men.
WORSHIP
=Principles of Worship of the Gods.=--Gods and heroes, potent as they
were, bestowed on men all good or evil fortune according to their
will. It was dangerous to have them against you, wise to have them on
your side. They were conceived as like men, irritated if they were
neglected, contented if they were venerated. On this principle worship
was based. It consisted in doing things agreeable to the gods to
obtain their favor. Plato expresses as follows[55] the thought of the
common man, "To know how to say and do those things that are pleasing
to the gods, either in prayers or in offerings, this is piety which
brings prosperity to individuals and to states. The reverse is impiety
which ruins everything." "It is natural," says Xenophon at the end of
his treatise on Cavalry, "that the gods should favor those especially
who not only consult them in need, but honor them in the day of
prosperity." Religion was first of all a contract; the Greek sought to
delight the gods and in return required their services. "For a long
time," says a priest of Apollo to his god, "I have burned fat
bullocks for you; now grant my petitions and discharge your arrows
against my enemies."
=The Great Festivals.=--Since the gods had the feelings of men they
were to be pleased in the same way as men. Wine, cakes, fruits, food
were brought to them. Palaces were built for them. Festivals were
given in their honor, for they were "joyous gods" who loved pleasure
and beautiful spectacles. A festival was not, as with us, purely an
occasion of rejoicing, but a religious ceremony. On those days free
from the daily toil men were required to rejoice in public before the
god. The Greek, without doubt, delighted in these fetes; but it is for
the god and not for himself that he celebrates them. "The Ionians,"
says an ancient hymn to Apollo, "delight thee with trial of strength,
the hymn, and the dance."
=The Sacred Games.=--From these diversions offered to the gods
originated the solemn games. Each city had them to the honor of its
gods; ordinarily only its citizens were admitted to them; but in four
districts of Greece were celebrated games at which all Greeks could be
present and participate. These are called the Four Great Games.
The principal of these four festivals was that at Olympia. This was
given every four years in honor of Zeus and continued five or six
days. The multitude coming from all parts of Greece filled the
amphitheatre. They commenced by sacrificing victims and addressing
prayers to Zeus and the other gods. Then came the contests; they were:
The foot-race around the stadion.
The Pentathlon, so called because it comprised five exercises. The
competitors were to leap, run from one end of the stadion to the
other, make a long throw of the metal discus, hurl the javelin, and
wrestle.
Boxing, in which one fought with arms bound with thongs of hide.
The chariot races, which were held in the hippodrome; the cars were
light and were drawn by four horses.
The judges of the games were clothed in purple, crowned with laurel.
After the combat a herald proclaimed before the whole assembly the
name of the victor and of his city. A crown of olive was the only
reward given him; but his fellow-citizens on his return received him
as a conquering hero; sometimes they threw down a section of the city
wall to give him entrance. He arrived in a chariot drawn by four
horses, clothed in purple, escorted by all the people. "These
victories which we leave today to the athletes of the public shows
appeared then the greatest of all. Poets of greatest renown celebrated
them; Pindar, the most illustrious lyric poet of antiquity, has hardly
done more than sing of chariot races. It is related that a certain
Diagoras, who had seen his two sons crowned on the same day, was borne
in triumph by them in the sight of the spectators. The people, holding
such an honor too great for a mortal, cried out, 'Perish, Diagoras,
for after all you cannot become a god.' Diagoras, suffocated with
emotion, died in the arms of his sons. In his eyes and the eyes of the
Greeks the fact that his sons possessed the stoutest fists and the
nimblest limbs in Greece was the acme of earthly happiness."[56] The
Greeks had their reasons for thus admiring physical prowess: in their
wars in which they fought hand to hand the most vigorous athletes were
the best soldiers.
=Omens.=--In return for so much homage, so many festivals and
offerings, the Greeks expected no small amount of service from their
gods. The gods protected their worshippers, gave them health, riches,
victory. They preserved them from the evils that menaced them, sending
signs which men interpreted. These are called Omens. "When a city,"
says Herodotus,[57] "is about to suffer some great misfortune, this is
usually anticipated by signs. The people of Chios had omens of their
defeat: of a band of one hundred youths sent to Delphi but two
returned; the others had died of the plague. About the same time the
roof of a school of the city fell on the children who were learning to
read; but one escaped of the one hundred and twenty. Such were the
anticipating signs sent them by the deity."
The Greeks regarded as supernatural signs, dreams, the flight of birds
in the heavens, the entrails of animals sacrificed--in a word,
everything that they saw, from the tremblings of the earth and
eclipses to a simple sneeze. In the expedition to Sicily, Nicias, the
general of the Athenians, at the moment of embarking his army for the
retreat, was arrested by an eclipse of the moon; the gods, thought he,
had sent this prodigy to warn the Athenians not to continue their
enterprise. And so Nicias waited; he waited twenty-seven days offering
sacrifices to appease the gods. During this inactivity the enemy
closed the port, destroyed the fleet, and exterminated his army. The
Athenians on learning this news found but one thing with which to
reproach Nicias: he should have known that for an army in retreat the
eclipse of the moon was a favorable sign. During the retreat of the
Ten Thousand, Xenophon, the general, making an address to his
soldiers, uttered this sentiment: "With the help of the gods we have
the surest hope that we shall save ourselves with glory." At this
point a soldier sneezed. At once all adored the god who had sent this
omen. "Since at the very instant when we are deliberating concerning
our safety," exclaimed Xenophon, "Zeus the savior has sent us an omen,
let us with one consent offer sacrifices to him."[58]
=The Oracles.=--Often the god replies to the faithful who consult him
not by a mute sign, but by the mouth of an inspired person. The
faithful enter the sanctuary of the god seeking responses and counsel.
These are Oracles.
There were oracles in many places in Greece and Asia. The most noted
were at Dodona in Epirus, and at Delphi, at the foot of Mount
Parnassus. At Dodona it was Zeus who spoke by the rustling of the
sacred oaks. At Delphi it was Apollo who was consulted. Below his
temple, in a grotto, a current of cool air issued from a rift in the
ground. This air the Greeks thought[59] was sent by the god, for he
threw into a frenzy those who inhaled it. A tripod was placed over the
orifice, a woman (the Pythia), prepared by a bath in the sacred
spring, took her seat on the tripod, and received the inspiration. At
once, seized with a nervous frenzy, she uttered cries and broken
sentences. Priests sitting about her caught these expressions, set
them to verse, and brought them to him who sought advice of the god.
The oracles of the Pythia were often obscure and ambiguous. When
Croesus asked if he should make war on the Persians, the reply was,
"Croesus will destroy a great empire." In fact, a great empire was
destroyed, but it was that of Croesus.
The Spartans had great confidence in the Pythia, and never initiated
an expedition without consulting her. The other Greeks imitated them,
and Delphi thus became a sort of national oracle.
=Amphictyonies.=--To protect the sanctuary of Delphi twelve of the
principal peoples of Greece had formed an association called an
Amphictyony.[60] Every year deputies from these peoples assembled at
Delphi to celebrate the festival of Apollo and see that the temple was
not threatened; for this temple contained immense wealth, a temptation
to pillage it. In the sixth century the people of Cirrha, a
neighboring city of Delphi, appropriated these treasures.[61] The
Amphictyons declared war against them for sacrilege. Cirrha was taken
and destroyed, the inhabitants sold as slaves, the territory left
fallow. In the fourth century the Amphictyons made war on the
Phocidians also who had seized the treasury of Delphi, and on the
people of Amphissa who had tilled a field dedicated to Apollo.
Still it is not necessary to believe that the assembly of the
Amphictyons ever resembled a Greek senate. It was concerned only with
the temple of Apollo, not at all with political affairs. It did not
even prevent members of the Amphictyony fighting one another. The
oracle and the Amphictyony of Delphi were more potent than the other
oracles and the other amphictyonies; but they never united the Greeks
into a single nation.
FOOTNOTES:
[51] See the account of the traveller Pausanias.
[52] "There are," says Hesiod, "30,000 gods on the fruitful earth."
[53] Greek scholars formed a select society of twelve gods and
goddesses, but their choice was arbitrary, and all did not agree on the
same series. The Greeks of different countries and of different epochs
often represented the same god under different forms. Further, the
majority of the gods seem to us to have vague and undetermined
attributes; this is because they were not the same everywhere.
[54] Iliad, viii., 18.
[55] In the dialogue "Eutyphron."
[56] Taine, "Philosophy of Art."
[57] Herodotus, vi., 27
[58] Xenophon, "Anabasis," iii, 2.
[59] This idea gained currency only in the later periods of Grecian
history.--ED.
[60] There were similar amphictyonies at Delos, Calauria, and Onchestus.
[61] The special charge against Cirrha was the levying of toll on
pilgrims coming to Delphi.--ED.