[1] For authorities and criticisms see T. W. Allen in _Classical
Quarterly_ (Jan. and April 1908).
[2] Others attribute it, as well as the _Margites_, to Pigres of
Halicarnassus, the supposed brother of the Carian queen Artemisia,
who fought on the side of Xerxes at the battle of Salamis.
[3] The extant fragments of Solon have been augmented by lengthy
quotations in the _Constitution of Athens_.
[4] Since the above was written, four considerable fragments
generally assigned to Sappho have been discovered: a prayer to the
Nereids for the safe return of her brother Charaxus; the leave-taking
of a favourite pupil; a greeting to Atthis, one of her friends, in
Lydia; the fourth, much mutilated, addressed to another pupil,
Gongyla. They are of great beauty and throw considerable light on the
personality of Sappho and the language and metre of her poems.
[5] Recently increased by specimens of the _Partheneia_ (choral songs
for maidens) and paeans.
[6] His Constitution of Athens (q.v.), of which a papyrus MS. was
found in Egypt and published in 1891, forms part of a larger work on
the constitution of 158 Greek and foreign cities.
[7] See Ad. Bauer and J. Strzygowski, "Eine alexandrinische
Weltchronik" (1905) (_Denkschrift der kaiserlich. Akademie der
Wissenschaften_, li.).
[8] The patriarch Cyrillos Lucares (1572-1638), who had studied for a
time in England and whose sympathies with Protestantism made him many
enemies, established a Greek printing-press at Constantinople, from
which he had the temerity to issue a work condemning the faith of
Mahomet; he was denounced to the Turks by the Jesuits, and his
printing-press was suppressed.
GREEK RELIGION. The recent development of anthropological science and of
the comparative study of religions has enabled us at last to assign to
ancient Greek religion its proper place in the classification of creeds
and to appreciate its importance for the history of civilization. In
spite of all the diversities of local cults we may find a general
definition of the theological system of the Hellenic communities, and
with sufficient accuracy may describe it as an anthropomorphic
polytheism, preserving many traces of a pre-anthropomorphic period,
unchecked by any exacting dogma or tradition of revelation, and
therefore pliantly adapting itself to all the changing circumstance of
the social and political history of the race, and easily able to
assimilate alien ideas and forms. Such a religion, continuing in whole
or in part throughout a period of at least 2000 years, was more capable
of progress than others, possibly higher, that have crystallized at an
early period into a fixed dogmatic type; and as, owing to its essential
character, it could not be convulsed by any inner revolution that might
obliterate the deposits of its earlier life, it was likely to preserve
the imprints of the successive ages of culture, and to reveal more
clearly than any other testimony the evolution of the race from savagery
to civilization. Hence it is that Greek religion appears to teem with
incongruities, the highest forms of religious life being often
confronted with the most primitive. And for this reason the student of
savage anthropology and the student of the higher religions of the
world are equally rewarded by its study.
Modern ethnology has arrived at the conviction that the Hellenic nation,
like others that have played great parts in history, was the product of
a blend of populations, the conquering tribes of Aryan descent coming
from the north and settling among and upon certain pre-Hellenic
Mediterranean stocks. The conclusion that is naturally drawn from this
is that Hellenic religion is also the product of a blend of early Aryan
or Indo-Germanic beliefs with the cult-ideas and practices of the
Mediterranean area that were from of old indigenous in the lands which
the later invaders conquered. But to disentangle these two component
parts of the whole, which might seem to be the first problem for the
history of the development of this religion, is by no means an easy
task; we may advance further towards its solution, when the mysterious
pre-Hellenic Mediterranean language or group of languages, of which
traces remain in Hellenic place-names, and which may be lying
uninterpreted on the brick-tablets of the palace of Cnossus, has found
its interpreter. For the first question is naturally one of language.
But the comparative study of the Indo-European speech-group, great as
its philological triumphs have been, has been meagre in its
contributions to our positive knowledge of the original belief of the
primitive stock. It is not possible to reconstruct a common
Indo-European religion. The greater part of the separate Aryan
cult-systems may have developed after the diffusion and may have been
the result of contact in prehistoric days with non-Aryan peoples. And
many old religious etymological equations, such as [Greek: Ouranos] =
Sanskrit Varuna, [Greek: Hermes] = Saramey[=a]s, Athena = Ahana, were
uncritically made and have been abandoned. The chief fact that philology
has revealed concerning the religious vocabulary of the Aryan peoples is
that many of them are found to have designated a high god by a word
derived from a root meaning "bright," and which appears in Zeus,
Jupiter, Sanskrit _Dyaus_. This is important enough, but we should not
exaggerate its importance, nor draw the unwarranted inference that
therefore the primitive Indo-Europeans worshipped one supreme God, the
Sky-Father. Besides the word "Zeus," the only other names of the
Hellenic pantheon that can be explained wholly or partly as words of
Aryan formation are Poseidon, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysus (whose name and
cult were derived from the Aryan stock of the Thraco-Phrygians) and
probably Pan. But other names, such as Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis,
Hera, Hermes, have no discovered affinities with other Aryan
speech-groups; and yet there is nothing suspiciously non-Aryan in the
formation of these words, and they may all have belonged to the earliest
Hellenic-Aryan vocabulary. In regard to others, such as Rhea, Hephaestus
and Aphrodite, it is somewhat more probable that they belonged to an
older pre-Hellenic stock that survived in Crete and other islands, and
here and there on the mainland; while we know that Zeus derived certain
unintelligible titles in Cretan cult from the indigenous Eteo-cretan
speech.
A minute consideration of a large mass of evidence justifies the
conclusion that the main tribes of the Aryan Hellenes, pushing down from
the north, already possessed certain deities in common such as Zeus,
Poseidon and Apollo with whom they associated certain goddesses, and
that they maintained the cult of Hestia or "Holy Hearth." Further, a
comparison of the developed religions of the respective Aryan peoples
suggests that they tended to give predominance to the male divinity,
although we have equally good reason to assert that the cult of
goddesses, and especially of the earth-goddess, is a genuinely "Aryan"
product. But when the tribes of this family poured into the Greek
peninsula, it is probable that they would find in certain centres of a
very ancient civilization, such as Argolis and Crete, the dominant cult
of a female divinity.[1] The recent excavations on the site of the Hera
temple at Argos prove that a powerful goddess was worshipped here many
centuries before it is probable that the Hellenic invader appeared. He
may have even found the name Hera there, or may have brought it with him
and applied it to the indigenous divinity. Again, we are certain that
the great mother-goddess of Crete, discovered by Dr Arthur Evans, is the
ancestress of Rhea and of the Greek "Mother of the gods": and it is a
reasonable conjecture that she accounts for many of the forms of Artemis
and perhaps for Athena. But the evidence by no means warrants us in
assuming as an axiom that wherever we find a dominant goddess-cult, as
that of Demeter at Eleusis, we are confronted with a non-Hellenic
religious phenomenon. The very name "Demeter" and the study of other
Aryan religions prove the prominence of the worship of the earth-goddess
in our own family of the nations. Finally, we must reckon with the
possibility that the other great nations which fringed the
Mediterranean, Hittite, Semitic and Egyptian peoples, left their impress
on early Greek religion, although former scholars may have made rash use
of this hypothesis.[2]
Animism.
Recognizing then the great perplexity of these problems concerning the
ethnic origins of Hellenic religion, we may at least reduce the tangle
of facts to some order by distinguishing its lower from its higher
forms, and thus provide the material for some theory of evolution. We
may collect and sift the phenomena that remain over from a
pre-anthropomorphic period, the imprints of a savage past, the beliefs
and practices that belong to the animistic or even the pre-animistic
period, fetishism, the worship of animals, human sacrifice. We shall at
once be struck with the contrast between such civilized cults as those
of Zeus, Athena, Apollo, high personal divinities to whom the attributes
of a progressive morality could be attached, and practices that long
survived in backward communities, such as the Arcadian worship of the
thunder and the winds, the cult of Zeus [Greek: Keraunos] "the thunder"
at Mantinea and Zeus [Greek: Kappotas] in Laconia, who is none other
than the mysterious meteoric stone that falls from heaven. These are
examples of a religious view in which certain natural phenomena or
objects are regarded as mysteriously divine or sacred in their own right
and a personal divinity has not yet emerged or been separated from them.
A noteworthy product of primitive animistic feeling is the universally
prevalent cult of Hestia, who is originally "Holy Hearth" pure and
simple, and who even under the developed polytheism, in which she played
no small part, was never established as a separate anthropomorphic
personage.