“Homer and Hesiod created the generations of the gods for the
Greeks; they gave the divinities their names, assigned to them their
prerogatives and functions, and made their forms known.” So Herodotus
describes the service of these poets to the centuries which followed
them.[1] But the modern historian of Greek religion cannot accept
the statement of the father of history as wholly satisfactory; he
knows that the excavations of the last forty years have revealed to
us civilizations of the third and second millenia before Christ, the
Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, of which the historical Greeks were
hardly conscious, but which nevertheless made large contributions to
religion in the period after Homer. Yet at the most the Mycenaean and
Minoan Ages were for the Greek of the sixth and fifth centuries only a
kind of dim background for the remote history of his race. The Homeric
poems represented for him the earliest stage of Hellenic social life
and religion. We are justified, then, in taking the Iliad and Odyssey
as starting points in our present considerations. These matchless epics
cast an ineffable spell over the imaginations of the Greeks themselves
and influenced religion hardly less than literature.
It is obvious that in this course of lectures we cannot consider
together all the multitudinous phases of Greek religion: it will be
impossible to discuss those large primitive elements in the practices
and beliefs of the ancient Greek folk which are so attractive to many
students of religion today, for these things were, by and large, only
survivals from a ruder past and did not contribute to the religious
progress from age to age; nor can we rehearse the details of worship,
or review all the varieties of religious belief which we find in
different places and in successive centuries; still less can we concern
ourselves with mythology. Alluring as these things are they do not
concern our present purpose. I shall invite you rather to trace with
me the development of Greek religious thought through something over a
thousand years, from the period of the Homeric poems to the triumph of
Christianity. In such a survey we must be occupied for the most part
with the larger movements and the higher ranges of Greek thought, with
the advance which was made from century to century; and we shall try
to see how each stage of religious development came to fruition in the
next period. To accomplish this purpose we must take into due account
the social, economic, and political changes in the Greek world which
influenced the course of Hellenic thinking. Ultimately, if our study
is successful, we shall have discovered in some measure, I trust, what
permanent contributions the Greeks made to our own religious ideas.
With these things in mind, therefore, let us return to the Homeric
Poems.
Whatever the date at which the Iliad and the Odyssey received their
final form, the common view that they belong to a period somewhere
between 850 and 700 B.C. is substantially correct. They
represent the culmination of a long period of poetic development
and picture so to speak on one canvas scenes and deeds from many
centuries. Yet the composite life is wrought by poetic art into one
splendid whole, so that the ordinary reader, in antiquity as today,
was unconscious of the variety and contradictions in the poems; only
the analytic mind of the scholar detects the traces of the varied
materials which the epic poet made his own. It is important that we
should realize the fact that the Homeric poems made the impression of a
consistent unity upon the popular mind in antiquity, for the influence
of these epics through the recitations of rhapsodes at great public
festivals and through their use in school was enormous. The statement
of Herodotus, with which I began, was very largely true.
These poems were composed to be recited at the courts of princes in
Ionia for the entertainment of the nobles at the banquet or after the
feast was over. This purpose naturally influenced the poet in depicting
life and religion, for the incidents chosen, the adventures recounted,
all the life represented, of necessity had to be consonant with the
interests and life of the bard’s audience. His lays were for the ears
of men who had not yet lost the consciousness that they were in a new
land, who knew that they were living in stirring times, and who feeling
the spirit of adventure still fresh within them responded joyously to
tales of heroic combat. This fact explains in part why it is that we
find so little that is primitive or savage in Homer. Such elements
were deliberately left out by the bard as unsuited to his audience;
he chose to neglect them, not because of any antagonism toward them,
but because they did not agree with his artistic aim. Again, the
antiquity of the themes, even at the time of composition, made a
freedom and picturesqueness of treatment possible, which a narrative of
contemporaneous events could never have possessed. Furthermore since
the peoples of Ionia, on migrating from the mainland of Greece, had
left behind their sacred places and had carried with them their gods,
severed from their ancient homes, the epic poet could treat religion
with a liberty and could exercise a freedom of selection among the
divinities, could use his poetic imagination to modify forms and to
emphasize certain attributes, as he never could have done if singing
for a people long resident in an ancient home where their gods had been
localized and fixed in character time out of mind. A poet singing of
Hera in the Argolid would have found himself bound by the traditions of
the Heraeum where the goddess had been domiciled from prehistoric time,
but the Homeric bard in Ionia was under no such limitation.
Therefore we find that the Iliad and Odyssey present to us a picture of
life and religion composed of selected elements and so universalized
that it was understood everywhere and at all later times. Exactly as
the Homeric dialect, probably never spoken in any place or period, was
universally comprehended, so the contents of the poems seemed nothing
strange or difficult to audiences in the remotest parts of the Greek
world; in the Greek colonies in Sicily, along the western shores of the
Mediterranean, or on the borders of the Black Sea, the epic tales were
as easily understood as at Delos, Olympia, or Athens.
Yet we have no warrant for using the Homeric poems as sources for
the full history of Greek religion in the ninth and eighth centuries
B.C. We must remember that the epic bard was least of all
composing systematic treatises about religion; on the contrary he
was narrating heroic tales, such as the wrath of Achilles, the death
of Hector and the ransoming of his body, and the return of Odysseus;
he introduced the gods solely as mighty actors in the struggles and
adventures of his mortal heroes. The divinities who play their parts in
the Iliad, for example, were summoned, like the Achaean princes, so to
speak, from many places to take part in the combat before Troy, and in
the Odyssey only those gods appear who are required by the story. In
short, the poet used the gods and religion exactly as he used his other
materials, drawing from a great stock of beliefs and practices that
which suited his tale, disregarding all the rest, and troubling little
about consistency. Homer’s aim, like that of most poets, was primarily
artistic, and least of all didactic.
Furthermore every reader of the Homeric epics is struck by the
freshness of the treatment; indeed, scholars of an earlier day thought
that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the first fruits of European poetic
inspiration. Today we know that Homer represents the culmination of a
long fine of bards, that his artistry was won by effort and was not
simply the incredible inspiration of one untaught; but this knowledge
does not diminish in the slightest degree our appreciation of the
freshness and directness of treatment which that art realized. These
qualities are obtained in part by a freedom from reflection, by a lack
of self-consciousness in the poems. They do not deal with the origin
of the gods, they present no theogonies, any more than they concern
themselves with the descent of man. It is true that Zeus is the son
of Cronos, as Hera is the daughter of Cronos and Rhea, and that it is
said that Zeus drove Cronos beneath the earth and sea, but we have no
account of the rule of the elder gods or of the struggle by which Zeus
won his place. For the epic poet the world of gods, men, and nature
simply is; he does not indulge in speculation himself nor does he make
his heroes debate questions of whence or whither; the living present
with its actions, its struggles, victories, and defeats filled the
compass of the poet’s thought and of his audience’s desire.
The Iliad and the Odyssey then must not be considered as treatises
or as reflective and philosophical works. This elementary point must
be emphasized here, for there is always danger of losing the true
perspective when we are considering a single theme. The poems derive
their great significance for the history of Greek religion from the
fact that through recitations they became the chief popular literature
of Greece, and that from the sixth century they were the basis of
education, as I have already said. Thus they were universally known
and universally influential; they created a common Olympic religion
beside the local religions; and through the individualities which they
gave the gods they fixed the types which poets were to recall and which
artists were to embody in marble or in wood, ivory, and gold at the
centers of the Greek world.
With these facts in mind we may ask what are the nature and
characteristics of the gods in Homer. Excavations have shown us that
the Mycenaean Age had already passed beyond the ruder stages and had
conceived some at least of its divinities in anthropomorphic fashion.
In Homer the gods are frankly made in man’s image. They are beings
larger, wiser, and stronger than mortals; they have a superhuman but
not complete control over nature and mankind. Their chief preëminence
over man lies in this superior power and in the possession of
immortality as well as of that eternal youth and beauty which is
appropriate to immortals. In their veins flows a divine ichor instead
of blood; their food and drink are not the bread and wine which mortals
need. Yet for all this they are hardly more independent of physical
needs than men: they must sleep and eat, and they need the light of
the sun. The passions hold sway over them to such an extent that the
morality of the gods, of Zeus in particular, is distinctly inferior to
that of mortal princes. The divinities can suffer pain and indignities.
Diomedes was able to wound both Aphrodite and Ares, whereat the valiant
god of war bawled out as loud, the poet says, “as nine or ten thousand
men shout in battle,” and fled into the broad heaven to appeal to
Zeus.[2] In the twenty-first book of the Iliad Athena hits Ares in the
neck with a large boundary stone and overthrows him, adding insult
to injury by laughing merrily at the god’s discomfiture; then when
Aphrodite would lead him off groaning, Athena hurries after and with a
blow of her stout hand lays goddess and god prostrate on the ground.[3]
Nor are the gods more just and honorable than men; they are moved by
caprice; and their godhead does not prevent their quarreling or making
up their differences in very human fashion, as the domestic jar between
Zeus and Hera in the first book of the Iliad shows.[4]
Furthermore the Homeric gods are neither omniscient nor omnipotent.
“The gods know all things” is a pious tribute of the poet, but the
narrative shows it to be untrue. In the thirteenth book of the Iliad,
when Zeus is gazing off into Thrace he fails to notice that Poseidon
enters the battle on the plain immediately below him.[5] In the fifth
book of the Odyssey the tables are turned in a sense, for Poseidon
finds that during his absence among the Ethiopians the Olympians have
taken action favorable to Odysseus, whose return the god of the sea
would fain prevent.[6] For nine years Thetis and Eurynome alone among
the gods knew where Hephaestus was concealed: when he had been thrown
from heaven by his mother in shame for his lameness, they hid him in a
grotto where the sound of the stream of Oceanus drowned the noise of
his smithy.[7] Apollo arrives too late to save Rhesus from his fate;[8]
and we are told that in the previous generation Ares was imprisoned by
the giants Otus and Ephialtes in a bronze jar, like an Oriental jinn,
for thirteen months. There he had perished if it had not been for the
friendly aid of Hermes who stole him from his prison.[9] The gods at
times thwart one another’s purposes, and, as we have seen, they may
even be wounded or frightened like human beings.[10] In such ways as
these do the Homeric divinities show their limitations.
Not only can the gods thwart one another, but they are all at times
subject to Fate or Destiny, which, although vaguely conceived by
the poet, is none the less inexorable. It seems usually to be an
impersonal power, although sometimes it is identified with the will
of an indefinite god (δαἰμονος αἶσα) or with that of Zeus
himself (Διὸς αἶσα). It was fated that Sarpedon, the son of
Zeus, should die, and Zeus, in spite of his grief, yielded him up to
his doom, not because he could not have opposed Fate successfully,
but because he feared that other divinities would wish to save their
children if he saved his.[11] Yet in the Odyssey Athena disguised as
Mentor declares to Telemachus that not even the gods can save a man
they love whenever the fatal doom of death lays hold on him.[12] So
naturally inconsistent is the poet, for in his day men had not reached
the stage where they could form any adequate notion of unity in the
world. Fate therefore is not conceived to be an inexorable power which
is constantly operative, as we find it represented at a later time
among the Greeks and among the Romans, notably in Virgil.
At times we find a more or less fatalistic view of life, Fate being
conceived as a destiny fixed at birth, for the notion that the thread
of life was spun already existed. So Hecuba, wailing for her son, cries
that mighty Fate spun Hector’s doom at the hour she gave him birth;[13]
and Alcinous declares that under Phaeacian escort Odysseus shall reach
his home, but that there he will suffer all that Fate and the cruel
spinsters spun for him when his mother bore him.[14] This fatalism is
most clearly expressed in passages such as that where Odysseus on
Circe’s isle cheers his companions by reminding them that they shall
not enter the house of Hades until their fated day shall come,[15] and
especially in those lines in which Hector comforts his wife Andromache
who would have restrained his impetuous desire for battle:[16] “My good
wife, grieve not overmuch for me in thy heart, for no man shall send
me to Hades contrary to my fate; and I say that none, be he a coward
or brave, has ever escaped his doom, when once it comes.” Still the
Homeric bard had not arrived at any consistent view of destiny; he
gave utterance to that feeling which men had vaguely then as now, that
beyond all lies something fixed and invariable to which all things and
beings are ultimately subject.
As we have seen, the divinities may work at cross purposes; there is
nothing in the Homeric poems like monotheism or pantheism in any true
sense. When the Homeric man said that a thing happened “with god’s
help,” he was simply recognizing the agency of the gods in everything.
Not knowing the special divinity concerned, he left him nameless;
least of all had he any concept of a complete divine polity. There
is, therefore, no such thing in the epics as a divine providence in
the way of a definite purpose or plan such as we shall later find in
the fifth century. Like mortals the Homeric gods discuss their plans,
without being able to see the end from the beginning; they are moved
by caprice, so that Zeus changes sides twice on the second day of the
great battle between the Achaeans and Trojans.[17] The vacillating and
capricious character of the gods is not offset by the protection that
a divinity may give a favorite, such as Athena gave to Odysseus in his
long wanderings and on his return to Ithaca. Throughout both poems we
find the assumption constantly held that every blessing comes from the
gods, that they give every distinction. In like fashion men believed
that all misfortunes were due to divine anger or hostility. So Odysseus
was kept from home for nearly ten years by Poseidon’s hate; the favor
of Athena toward the Achaeans turned to wrath because of the violence
done her shrine in the sack of Troy so that she caused an evil return
for her former favorites. Indeed in misfortune the Homeric hero’s
first question was as to what god he had offended. The problem of evil
therefore was a simple one—all depended on the will or whim of some
divinity.
But there are other things which we should note with regard to these
divinities. As has been said, they are universalized, not attached
to definite localities; in fact the epics contain few traces of that
localization which was the rule in the common religion of Greece.
Although Hera declares:[18] “Verily three cities there are most dear to
me, Argos and Sparta and broad-streeted Mycenae,” she is in no sense
regarded as bound to these localities. In Demodocus’ song of the love
of Ares and Aphrodite it is said that when released from the bonds in
which Hephaestus had ensnared them, the god of war fled to Thrace and
laughter-loving Aphrodite to Paphos in Cyprus,[19] but these places
are not their homes in any strict sense. And so with the other gods.
The Olympians are rather free, universal divinities, unhampered by
local attachments. Olympus itself is in the upper heaven more than in
Thessaly. It is of course true that lesser divinities, like river-gods
and mountain-nymphs, are localized, but these beings have little
influence on the affairs of men.
Let us now consider briefly the most important Homeric gods. At the
head of the divine order stands Zeus, “father of gods and of men”
(πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε), “most exalted of rulers” (ὔπατε κρειόντων),
“most glorious and most mighty” (κύδιστε μέγιστε), as he is called.[20]
To him the elements are subject and at his nod great Olympus trembles.
He is the guardian of oaths, the protector of the stranger and the
suppliant. Famed for his prowess and might he never in person enters
battle, but indirectly he takes a hand in the strife between the Greeks
and the Trojans. Although he surpasses all in wisdom and power, at
times he is outwitted by other divinities. Like a mortal chieftain
he presides at council on Olympus in his great hall, whither he may
on occasion summon the divinities of every class to attend a general
assembly.[21] Olympus indeed is conceived as loosely organized after
the fashion of an aristocratic state with Zeus as chief (βασιλεύς),
the Olympians as members of the council (βουλή), and the whole body of
minor divinities as making up the assembly (ἀγορή).
Hera, the queen of Olympus, is at once both sister and wife of Zeus;
they are the only wedded pair on Olympus. She belongs, however,
distinctly to the second class of Olympians. She takes no part in
the Odyssey; and in the Iliad, although she favors the Achaeans most
vehemently, she is less active than Athena. In character she is a good
deal of a scold, so that Zeus fears her jealous anger.[22] He knows that
she is accustomed to block his plans, although on one occasion he had
punished her by stringing her up by the wrists and tying anvils to her
feet! Of this he indignantly reminds her: “Dost thou not remember
when I strung thee up aloft and from thy feet I hung two anvils, and
round thy wrists I bound a golden bond unbreakable? And thou wast hung
in the upper air and the clouds. Wroth were the gods throughout high
Olympus, but still they could not approach and free thee.”[23] Again he
had beaten her, and when Hephaestus tried to intervene, Zeus seized the
meddler by the foot and threw him out of Olympus. Hephaestus himself
recalls the experience: “All the day long I fell and at setting of the
sun I dropped in Lemnos, and there was little life left in me.”[24]
Athena is above all the goddess of war, and she plays a large part
in both the Iliad and Odyssey. In the latter poem she is the special
guardian of Odysseus, whose ready mind wins her admiration. She is
also the most skilled of all divinities, the patroness of every
handicraft.[25] She is perhaps the chief divinity of Troy; on the Trojan
citadel stands her temple to which the noble matrons bring a gift of a
beautiful robe with the promise of generous sacrifice if the goddess
will give them her protection against Diomedes.[26] She also has a home
on the acropolis at Athens.[27]
Apollo, the archer god, is a patron of war and of bowmen. In the Iliad
he is a violent enemy of the Achaeans and gives most effective aid
to the Trojans; but in the Odyssey he plays no active part. He also
inspires seers and prophets; and he is the god of the lyre and the
teacher of bards. In prayers he is named with Zeus and Athena when an
object is most earnestly desired.[28]
These three are the greatest of the Homeric divinities, although there
is no close connection among them. Apollo’s virgin sister, Artemis,
plays a part much inferior to that of her brother, but in many ways she
is similar to him. Her arrows bring a quick and peaceful end to women
as Apollo’s do to men. In the chase she is preëminent: she is the fair
goddess of wood and mountain.
Ares and Aphrodite also belong to a lower rank. In function they
are limited to an appeal to a single passion each, Ares to rage for
slaughter, Aphrodite to the passion of love. They are both treated with
a certain contempt and are mocked by the other gods.
Hephaestus is the god of fire, the lame craftsman of Olympus. It was
he who built the homes of the gods; but his skill was especially shown
in the wondrous works he wrought in gold and silver. Such were the
mixing-bowl which Phaedimus, the Sidonian king, gave to Menelaus;[29]
wonderful automata, twenty golden tripods, which on occasion would go
of their own accord to the assemblage of the gods and then return;[30]
or the gold and silver dogs which guarded the palace of Alcinous.[31]
Still more marvellous were the golden maidens endowed with reason,
speech, and cunning knowledge, which supported their maker as he limped
from his forge to his chair;[32] and above all the splendid armor
wrought for Achilles.[33]
Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, has as his special province the sea;
but he appears on Olympus at the councils of the gods. In the Iliad he
supports the Achaeans vigorously; no doubt from anger at the Trojans
whose king Laomedon had once cheated him of the pay which was his
due for building the walls of Troy;[34] in the Odyssey, angry at the
blinding of his son, Polyphemus, he holds Odysseus far from Ithaca,
until at last the Phaeacians bring him home. Then in wrath he turns
their vessel into stone.[35]
Such in brief are the eight great gods of the Homeric poems. Of these
Zeus is easily the first, but in the first rank also are Athena and
Apollo; Hera and Poseidon hold a second place; and Hephaestus, Ares,
and Aphrodite belong to the third class. Many other divinities there
are, but all of lesser rank, like Hermes whose duties are those of a
higher servant or messenger. He is sent to escort King Priam to the
tent of Achilles to ransom Hector’s body,[36] and he is despatched
to Calypso’s isle to bid her let Odysseus go.[37] There are some
indications that he is already the patron of thieves, as he is of
servants. Dionysus and Demeter, so prominent in later Greece, have not
yet won a place in the Olympic circle. There is no hint in the epics of
the mysteries and the orgiastic cults which were afterwards of great
significance. Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, holds as his
realm the dark abode of the dead, where he reigns with Persephone as
queen. His murky kingdom is now represented as beneath the earth, again
as far out on the bounds of Oceanus. But Hades takes no active part in
either poem.
Besides these there is a host of divinities, some named but most
unnamed, who cause all the phenomena of the visible world. In fact,
the Homeric man could not conceive of a natural world obeying laws
whose operation was fixed; on the contrary, he could only think of
animated beings as the causes of all events. For him every occurrence
was the manifestation of the will of some divinity; the natural and the
miraculous were one.
It is evident from this hasty review of the Homeric gods that we
have in the epics no complete and fully organized pantheon. Zeus is
regarded as supreme but he is thwarted and outwitted by lesser members
of the Olympic circle, even as they block one another. In fact Homer’s
view of the gods abounds in contradictions of which however only the
scholar and the critic have ever been very conscious. From our modern
standpoint we notice the moral inconsistencies above all. Although Zeus
is the guardian of justice, he is deceitful and treacherous if occasion
arises, as when at the request of Thetis he sends a delusive dream to
Agamemnon to urge him to give battle, in spite of the fact that he
cannot be successful.[38] It is Zeus also who is responsible for the
faithless breaking of the truce between the Achaeans and Trojans[39];
and many other instances might be cited to illustrate his utter
untrustworthiness. On his lack of domestic morality I need hardly dwell.
Yet we must remind ourselves that to the Homeric Age there was
little connection, if any, between morals and religion. Religion is
concerned with man’s relation to the gods, morality with his relation
to his fellow men. Morality is therefore developed through the social
relations first of all, and only later is brought into relation to
religion. In Homer the sense of social obligations is much more keenly
realized than is that of religious sanctions. The cardinal virtues are
bravery, wisdom, love of home and family, and regard for hospitality.
In a life of action, filled with war, bravery is of prime importance;
by it wealth, power, and honor are won. Proper to such a life are
practical wisdom and even cunning. The highest praise is to be called
“first in council and first in battle.”[40] Agamemnon is lauded by Helen
as “both a good king and a mighty warrior.”[41] The standing epithets
of Odysseus, “very crafty” (πολύμητις) and “the man of many devices”
(πολυμήχανος), show the qualities which were deemed praiseworthy.
Yet Odysseus had won this distinction by his skill in lying and
deceiving—practices still deemed highly laudable in our own world if
employed against a foe, or sometimes even when used as acts of caution.
Yet if our modern views do not wholly coincide with the ancient on
these points, we can feel only admiration for the regard for home and
family, the unselfish generosity, and the universal hospitality toward
strangers which the epic heroes display.
The poems also set a high value on personal honor. The outrage done
Menelaus by Paris, who violated the most sacred laws of hospitality
by carrying away his host’s wife, was the whole cause of the Trojan
War. To avenge this outrage all the princes of the Achaeans rallied
as if the wrong suffered had been their own. Agamemnon’s high-handed
act in taking the captive Briseis from Achilles roused that wrath
which is the first word of the Iliad. The Odyssey is the epic of a
personal will which, triumphing over all disasters, finally wreaked
a terrible vengeance on the insolent suitors who had wooed Odysseus’
wife, devoured his substance, plotted against his son, and at the end
shamefully insulted Odysseus himself. The punishment of the suitors
is the victory of justice over lawlessness, and possesses a moral
significance which was not lost on antiquity.
In what I have just been saying I have already implied that man’s
relation to the gods was not ethical but ritualistic. We must
remember that when we speak of “sin” or a “consciousness of guilt,”
we are presupposing a self-conscious and self-searching individual.
This the Homeric man was not; on the contrary he was in the highest
degree natural, unreflective, and unconscious of self. In fact the
Homeric concept of sin touches our moral ideas at hardly more than
three points. Disregard for an oath, failure to honor one’s father
and mother, and disrespect for the stranger and suppliant were high
offenses against heaven and brought down divine wrath on the
transgressor. But in general sin is failure to recognize man’s absolute
dependence on the immortals, to give them due honor, to pay them proper
sacrifice, and to walk humbly on the earth. Sacrifice is tribute
whereby man acquires merit with divinity; of such meritorious credit
the priest Chryses reminds Apollo in his prayer at the beginning of
the Iliad:[42] “Hear me, Lord of the silver bow, ... if ever I have
roofed over a temple pleasing to thee, or if ever I have burnt in thy
honor fat thighs of bulls or of goats, then accomplish this my prayer.”
Agamemnon in the stress of battle reproaches Zeus for bringing his
present disaster upon him in spite of the fact that he made sacrifice
on every altar as he hurried to Ilion;[43] and many other illustrations
might be cited. Failure to make due offering might bring serious
disaster. Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, omitted sacrifice before
leaving Egypt; so he was forced to return from the island of Pharos and
repair his failure, after which he accomplished his voyage easily.[44]
When Oeneus neglected Artemis, she sent the Calydonian boar to afflict
his land: “Artemis of the golden throne sent a plague upon them, angry
that Oeneus did not offer her the first fruits of his rich land. All
the other gods had their feast of hecatombs, and only to the daughter
of mighty Zeus did he fail to make offering, whether he forgot or had
no thought of the matter. But he showed great folly in his soul.”[45]
Again the plague sent by Apollo on the Achaean host before Troy suggests
to Achilles that the god may be angered at a failure to perform some
vow or to offer a hecatomb.[46] It is little wonder that the enlightened
Plato felt horror and disgust at such notions as these and that he
condemned this kind of worship as an “art of trafficking” (ἐμπορικὴ
τέχνη).[47] Still this Homeric idea of the relations between men
and gods—an idea which has not wholly disappeared from the world
today—rests on the notion that gods and men belong to one common
society in which the obligations are binding on both sides.
Especially to be avoided was insolent pride; man must not boast himself
overmuch; there were fixed bounds set for him which he might not
transgress. So Ajax met his fate because of his insolent defiance:
“Even so he had escaped his doom, hateful though he was to Athena, if
he had not let fall an insolent speech and committed great folly. He
said that in spite of the gods he had escaped the great gulf of the
sea; but Poseidon heard his loud boasting. Straightway then he took his
trident in his mighty hands and struck the Gyraean rock and cleft it in
twain. Part remained in its place, but a portion fell in the deep, that
part on which Ajax first sat and uttered his great folly; but it now
bore him down beneath the vast billowy sea.”[48] But Achilles showed
the approved attitude of mind when he thus addressed the dead Hector:
“Lie now dead; but my doom I will accept whenever it please Zeus and
the other immortal gods to send it.”[49] This fear of punishment from
heaven, of that which Aeschylus and Herodotus call “the envy of the
gods,” long operated to keep in check excess of speech and added no
doubt to the comfort of Greek society. Of magic whereby man can compel
the gods there is nothing in Homer; the inferiority of mortals to the
immortals is complete.
We may now properly consider the Homeric view of life after death.
The epic psychology made no sharp distinction between the soul and
the body; on the whole the body was identified with the self rather
than the soul (ψυχή), which goes to the realm of Hades when the man is
dead. There in the world of shadows beneath the earth or far out by the
stream of Oceanus the shades, pale images of the men who were, exist;
they do not live. The pathetic plaints of the shades that come up to
Odysseus in the eleventh book of the Odyssey show how hopeless is their
lot. Though Orion pursue the wild beasts over the cheerless plains of
asphodel and Minos hold his golden staff and sit in judgment over the
dead, yet all is insubstantial and far less than life. The often quoted
words of Achilles’ shade sum up the whole matter: “Speak not to me of
death, glorious Odysseus. For so I might be on earth, I would rather be
the servant of another, of a poor man who had little substance, than to
be lord over all the dead.”[50]
There is no system of future punishment or rewards, although a few
individuals have won supreme suffering like Tityus, Sisyphus, and
Tantalus or gained high station like Minos, the judge. Therefore beyond
the grave there was for the Homeric man no hope, no satisfaction. Only
here under the light of the sun and in the glory of action could the
epic hero find his joy. This is, in no small measure, the cause of
that pathos which strikes us occasionally in the poems. Man is spoken
of as the most pitiful of creatures, the feeblest of all beings which
the earth nourishes. Evil and suffering sent by the gods are his lot,
unrelieved by any prospect of the future.[51]
Let us now summarize briefly the matter we have thus far been
considering together. As I said at the beginning of this lecture,
religion in the Homeric poems shows the influence of the conditions
under which the poems were composed. Intended for Ionian princes of
Asia Minor, emigrants who had lost the support which local attachment
always gives, the Iliad and Odyssey present those traits of religion
which were everywhere understood and which made a universal appeal.
Therefore the Homeric gods have a synthetic character; they are,
as has been aptly said, “composite photographs” of local Zeus’s,
Apollos, Athenas, and so on. Again since the epics were intended for
entertainment, the gods are represented not as remote, but human and
real; they have characters and personalities which local divinities
did not possess. In picturing them as more human, in rehearsing their
quarrels, intrigues, passions, and even physical peculiarities, the
poet not only amused his carefree audience, but brought the gods closer
to men; he made them more comfortable creatures to live with, even if
they were moved by whims and fancies. Their worship was sacrifice
associated with the banquet which men and gods shared in common
fellowship; the gods were thought to wish man’s offerings and service
just as man desired communion with them. Malevolent divinities, daemons
of the earth, rites of riddance by which man seeks to avert the wrath
of some spiteful or angry being, all the great mass of practices
unquestionably common to the folk-religion of the age, were for the
most part omitted by the poet as unsuited or uninteresting to his
aristocratic audience. There is almost nothing bearing on the cult of
the dead save possibly in connection with the funeral of Patroclus;
incantation proper is mentioned only once; and Circe’s potent herbs by
which she transformed Odysseus’s companions into beasts, like Circe
herself, belong to fairyland. The Homeric religion, therefore, is
largely a social religion of this world, of sunlight and of action.
Yet if Homer’s gods are human, they are still impressive; they have the
dignity which comes from unchanging age and superhuman power; they are
conceived in the grand way. So true was this that as the Homeric poems
became popular literature, studied in school and known to all men, they
created a universal religion. They also influenced the types under
which the Greek artists represented their great gods. Tradition says
that when Phidias was asked by his associate Panaenus what type he had
selected for his Zeus at Olympia, he replied with Homer’s lines: “The
son of Cronos spoke and nodded under his dark brows; and the ambrosial
locks of the king fell down from his immortal head, and he shook great
Olympus.”[52] Such was the effect of this statue after it had stood for
five centuries and a half that the orator Dio Chrysostom said of it:
“Whoever among mankind is wholly weary in soul, whoever has experienced
many misfortunes and sorrows in life, and may not find sweet sleep,
he, methinks, if he stood before this statue, would forget all the
calamities and griefs that come in the life of man.”[53]
We must, however, recognize that the spiritual contribution of the
Homeric poems to later Greece was inevitably less than the artistic. No
inspired bard was needed to teach the lessons of man’s inferiority to
the gods and of his dependence on them, although these are constantly
emphasized; yet the epics also inculcate the necessity of moderation
in act and speech; and they teach that Zeus is the guardian of oaths
and of hospitality. Furthermore they express the half-realized belief
that Zeus is the protector of all justice; and they bring home the
fact that the individual must pay for his sin, however he may have
been led into it. But the greatest contribution which the poems made
to later religious thought was paradoxically due to the fact that they
made their gods so thoroughly human, for it inevitably followed in due
season that the gods were measured by the same standards of right and
wrong that were applied to men. This eventually ennobled man’s concept
of divinity, so that he required of the gods a perfection to match
their immortal nature.
Herodotus names Homer and Hesiod together as the great theological
teachers of Greece. But when we compare the later poet with the
earlier we find a marked contrast between them. Homer looks backward
to an earlier day; his poems reflect the glory of that splendid age
when the Achaean princes, like Agamemnon in golden Mycenae, ruled at
home in power, or on the plains of Troy contended with divine and
human foes. Homer is aristocratic, universal, objective, with little
self-consciousness, hardly concerned with the origins of gods and men
or with the possible goals toward which the world was moving. Hesiod
was the son of a farmer, who according to tradition had come from Cyme
in Asia Minor to Boeotian Ascra which lay on a spur of the range of
Helicon near a shrine of the Muses. When Hesiod wrote, the land had
felt the exhaustion of war, the coming of ruder tribes from the north
and west had swamped the earlier civilization, and both noble and
peasant were finding life harder. These conditions are reflected in the
Hesiodic poetry: it deals with fact rather than fancy; for the splendid
dramatic deeds of men and gods it substitutes homely adage, reasoned
reflection, and moral tale. Hesiod is self-conscious and reflective. He
uses the first person, whereas Homer never names himself. A dour son
of the soil, born in gloomy days, he is the first writer of Europe to
speak for the common man.
The two chief poems which bear the name of Hesiod are the Theogony and
the Works and Days. The former deals with the origin of the world and
the generations of the gods. It is an attempt to bring order into
current myths by sifting and arranging them into a system. The material
Hesiod found ready to his hand; his task was to systematize and set
it forth to his audience. The Theogony is the first extant work of
European literature to present the idea that dynasties of the gods have
succeeded each other in time, the rule of Uranus giving way to the sway
of Cronos, who in his turn was displaced by Zeus. We have seen that
Homer did not concern himself about such matters as these; that only
vague references to such ideas are found in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Hesiod, however, represents another age and another aspect of the Greek
mind, a desire to bring harmony into the varied and inconsistent tales
of current mythology and thus in a way to render the gods intelligible
to men.
The gods of the Theogony are hardly moral beings; on the contrary much
of the theology there presented is far ruder than that of the Iliad and
Odyssey. Some of the tales are on the level of primitive mythology,
such as the account of the way in which earth and heaven were separated
and of the manner in which the earth was fertilized; others retain
more offensive elements like that of Cronos devouring his children,
or of Zeus swallowing his wife Metis when she was about to give birth
to Athena, for it was fated that her child should be the equal of its
father in wit and cunning. In general the poet gives no sign of being
conscious that this work might have moral or religious significance.
The word justice (δίκη), which is so frequent in the Works and Days,
occurs but twice in the Theogony. The wives of Zeus are in succession
Wisdom (Μῆτις) and Right (Θέμις), but his constant attendants
are Violence (Κράτος) and Force (Βίη). In neither case, however,
is any moral conclusion drawn therefrom. The only beings to whom
moral functions are assigned are the Fates, “Goddesses who visit
transgressions of men and gods and never cease from their fearful wrath
until they have inflicted dire punishment on the sinner.”[54] Save for
this passage and one in which the punishment of the gods for perjury
is described, the Theogony is less ethical than even the Iliad and
Odyssey, for they have regard for certain social sanctions. The work
is nevertheless significant and requires notice here because it bears
witness to the critical mind that set the myths in order, and because
it shows that the age of Hesiod was a reflective one.
Hesiod’s other poem, the Works and Days, is of high moral import. It
owes its title to the fact that it gives directions for various kinds
of occupations and that it also contains a kind of peasant’s calendar.
By bribing his judges the poet’s brother Perses had deprived the poet
of the inheritance which was properly his. To this unjust brother
Hesiod addresses his poem, but he rises constantly from the particular
case to general moral considerations; indeed the poet’s ethical lessons
gain in force because they start with a personal application.
Work, justice, right social relations, and piety toward the gods are
the cardinal themes of the Works and Days. At the very opening of the
poem Hesiod points out that there are two kinds of Strife or Rivalry
on earth, the one good and praiseworthy, the other evil. Evil strife
leads to war and to discord, but the good, implanted by Zeus in the
very order of things, ever urges men on to work. Hesiod delights in
emphasizing the value of toil; he has given enduring expression to the
natural dignity of labor in the verse,
Εργον δ' οὐδὲν ὂνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ' ὂνειδος.