THE MAKING OF A GOD.
‘ἰὼ θεοὶ νεώτεροι, παλαιοὺς νόμους
καθιππάσασθε.’
Frequently, in his wanderings through Greece, Pausanias came upon the
sanctuaries of local heroines, and these sanctuaries are almost uniformly
tombs at which went on the cultus of the dead. At Olympia[831] inside the
Altis he noted the _Hippodameion_ or sanctuary of Hippodameia, a large
enclosure surrounded by a wall. Into this enclosure once a year women
were permitted to enter to sacrifice to Hippodameia and do other rites
in her honour. The tomb of Auge[832] was still to be seen at Pergamos, a
mound of earth enclosed by a stone basement and on the top the figure of
a naked woman. At Leuctra[833] in Laconia there was an actual _temple_
(ναός) of Cassandra with an image; the people of the place called her
Alexandra, ‘Helper of Men.’ At Sparta[834] Helen had a sanctuary, and in
Rhodes she was worshipped as She of the Tree, ‘Dendritis,’ and to her as
Dendritis, if we may trust Theocritus[835], maidens brought offerings. At
her wedding they sing:
‘O fair, O gracious maiden, the while we chant our lay,
A wedded wife art thou. But we, at dawning of the day,
Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place,
And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face,
Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew
Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe.
For thee the first of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low
Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow;
To thee where grows the shadowy plane the first oil shall be poured,
Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored:
And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see,
A message graven Dorian-wise: “Kneel; I am Helen’s tree.”’
[Illustration: FIG. 95.]
Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctuary and a
sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 95 and 96
is from a lekythos[836] in the Louvre, of the kind usually known as
‘proto-Corinthian.’ Its style dates it as not later than the 7th century
B.C., and it is our earliest extant monument of ‘the rape of Helen.’ The
subject seems to have had a certain popularity in archaic art, as it
occurred on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae[837]. In the centre of the
design stands a woman-figure of more than natural size. Two men advance
against her from the right; the foremost seizes her by the wrist. In
his left hand he holds a sceptre. He is Theseus, and behind him comes
Peirithoös, brandishing a great sword. To the left of Helen are her two
brothers, the horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important to note
that Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr Blinkenberg, who
rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ‘ses mains levées
expriment la surprise et l’effroi,’ but since the discovery of the early
image of the Mycenaean goddess with uplifted hands[838] it will at once
be seen that the gesture is hieratic rather than human. This early 7th
century document suggests that ‘the rape of Helen’ was originally perhaps
the rape of a xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a wife from her
husband. Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the
vase is more divine than human.
[Illustration: FIG. 96.]
For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old order of
daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and sinful, yet in
a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether goddess, for she is
Beauty herself:
‘O Light and Shadow of all things that be,
O Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea,
Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name?
O Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee?’
Hebe, another local heroine, has at Phlius[839] a sacred grove and a
sanctuary, ‘most holy from ancient days.’ The goddess of the sanctuary
was called by the earliest authorities of the place Ganymeda, but later
Hebe. Her sanctuary was an asylum, and this was held to be her greatest
honour that ‘slaves who took refuge there were safe and prisoners
released hung their fetters on the trees in her grove.’ That a sanctuary
should be an asylum is a frequent note of antiquity. When the immigrant
conqueror reduces the whole land to subjection, he, probably from
superstitious awe, leaves to the conquered their local sanctuary, the
one place safe from his tyranny. Hebe-Ganymeda, female correlative of
Ganymedes, is promoted to Olympus, but significantly she is admitted only
as cupbearer and wife of Herakles. Olympus here as always mirrors human
relations. Hera by marriage with Zeus is admitted to full patriarchal
citizenship, her shadowy double Hebe is but her Maid of Honour.
As a rule then the local heroine remains merely the object of a local
cult. Where she passed upward to the rank of a real divinity, the steps
of transition are almost wholly lost. We feel inwardly sure that Hera and
Aphrodite were once of mere local import, like Auge or Iphigeneia, but we
lack definite evidence. In the case of Athene the local origin, it has
been shown (p. 301), is fairly clear.
The reason why the local heroine failed to emerge to complete godhead
is sometimes startlingly clear. Her development was checked midway by
the intrusion of a full-blown goddess of the Olympian stock. Near to
Cruni in Arcadia Pausanias[840] saw the grave of Callisto. It was a high
mound on which grew trees, some of them fruit-bearing, some barren. ‘On
the top of the mound,’ Pausanias adds, ‘is a sanctuary of Artemis with
the title Calliste.’ Nothing could be clearer. Over the tomb of the old
Bear-Maiden, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis the Northerner, the
Olympian, has superposed her cult, and to facilitate the shift she calls
herself _Calliste_, the Fairest. Possibly here, as at Athens under the
title of Brauronia, she kept up the ancient bear-service[841].
The passage from ghost to goddess is for the most part lost in the mists
of time, but of the analogous process from ghost to god the steps are
still in historical times clearly traceable. The reason is clear. The
intrusion of the patriarchal system, the practice of tracing descent from
the father instead of the mother, tended to check, if it was powerless
wholly to stop, the worship of eponymous heroines. Conservatism compelled
the worship of old established heroines, but no fresh canonizations
took place. The ideal woman of Pericles was assuredly not the stuff of
which goddesses were made. If we would note the actual process of the
manufacture of divinity, it is to _hero_-worship we must turn[842].
THE HERO AS SNAKE.
The design in fig. 97 is from an archaic relief[843] of the sixth century
B.C., now in the local Museum at Sparta. It forms one of a series of
reliefs found near Sparta, all of which are cast approximately in the
same type. A male and a female figure are seated side by side on a great
throne-like chair. The female figure holds her veil, the male figure a
large cantharus or two-handled cup, as if expecting libation. Worshippers
of diminutive size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that
may be a cake, an egg or a fruit. The reliefs are, for the most part,
uninscribed, but on some of rather later date names are written near the
figure, and they are the names of mortals, e.g. ‘Timocles[844].’ It is
clear that we have in these monuments representations of the dead, but
the dead conceived of as half divine, as heroized—hence their large size
compared with that of their worshipping descendants. They are κρείττονες,
‘Better and Stronger Ones.’
[Illustration: FIG. 97.]
The artist of the relief in fig. 97 is determined to make his meaning
clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated figures, is a
great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. From the edge
of his lower lip hangs down a long beard; a decoration denied by
nature. The intention is clear; he is a _human_ snake, the vehicle,
the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost. Snakes lurk about tombs, they
are uncanny-looking beasts, and the Greeks are not the only people who
have seen in a snake the vehicle of a ghost. M. Henri Jumod[845], in
discussing the beliefs of the Barongas, notes that among this people the
snake is regarded as the _chikonembo_ or ghost of a dead man, usually
of an ancestor. The snake, so regarded, is feared but not worshipped.
A free-thinker among the Barongas, if bored by the too frequent
reappearance of the snake ancestor, will kill it, saying ‘Come now, we
have had enough of you.’
Zeus Meilichios, it has been seen (p. 18), was worshipped as a snake. If
we examine the great snake on his relief in fig. 1 (p. 18) it is seen to
be also bearded. The beard in this case is not at the end of the lip, but
a good deal further back.
The addition of the beard was no doubt mainly due to frank
anthropomorphism; the snake is in a transition stage between animal
and human, and human for the artist means divine. He gives the snake
a beard to mark his anthropomorphic divinity, just as he gave to the
bull river-god on coins a human head with horns. The further question
arises, ‘Was there anything in nature that might have acted as a possible
suggestion of a beard?’ An interesting answer to this question has been
suggested to me by an eminent authority on snakes, Dr Hans Gadow, and to
him I am indebted for the following scientific particulars.
The snake represented in fig. 1 (p. 18) Dr Gadow believes to be the
species known as _Coelopeltis lacertina_. It occurs from Spain to Syria
and specimens of 6 ft. long are not uncommon. The creature’s head,
according to Dr Gadow, is reproduced with admirable fidelity; the name
_lacertina_ is due to the lizard-like, instead of snake-like, depressed
head. Moreover this species is really poisonous, but only to its proper
prey, e.g. mice, rats, lizards, etc., while it is practically harmless to
man, on account of the position of the poison fangs, which are far back
in the mouth instead of near the front. This is a somewhat exceptional
arrangement and probably well known to the ancients. In fact the
_Coelopeltis lacertina_ is a snake with poison that does not ordinarily
strike. On occasion it could bite a man’s hand, i.e. if it opened its
mouth _very_ wide, as wide as a striking cobra. This position of the
dropped jaw, according to Dr Gadow, is very noticeable and must have
been observed by the ancients. The angle of the dropped jaw is just that
of the beard on the snake in fig. 1 (p. 18). It seems possible and even
highly probable that the dropped jaw, seen at a distance, might have
suggested a beard, or that an artist representing an actual dropped jaw
may have been copied by another who misinterpreted the jaw into a beard.
In any case the scheme of the dropped jaw would be ready to hand and
would help to soften the anomaly of the bearded snake[846].
* * * * *
In snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb, and to indicate this fact not
uncommonly on vase-paintings we have a snake depicted on the very grave
mound itself. The design in fig. 98, from a black-figured lekythos[847]
in the Museum at Naples, is a good instance. The funeral mound which
occupies the centre of the design is, on the original vase, white, and on
it is painted a black snake; the mound itself is surmounted by a black
stele: whether the vase-painter regards his snake as painted actually
_outside_ the tomb or as representing the snake-hero actually resident
_within_, is not easy to determine. The figure of a man on the left of
the tomb with uplifted sword points probably to the taking of an oath, it
may be of vengeance.
[Illustration: FIG. 98.]
[Illustration: FIG. 99.]
In the curious design in fig. 99, from a kotylos also in the Naples
Museum[848], we have again a funeral mound, again decorated with a huge
snake, this time represented with dropped jaw and beard. The tomb seems
to have become a sort of mantic shrine. Two men are seated watching
attentively the portent of the eagle and the snake. On the reverse of
the vase, to the right, the tomb-mound is decorated with a stag, and the
portent is an eagle devouring a hare.
Herodotus[849] notes that among the Libyan tribe of the Nasamones tombs
were used for two purposes, for the taking of oaths and for dream
oracles. ‘In their oaths and in the art of divination they observe the
following practice: they take oaths by those among them who are accounted
to be most virtuous and excellent, by touching their tombs, and when
they divine they regularly resort to the monuments of their ancestors,
and having made supplication they go to sleep, and whatever vision they
behold of that they make use.’ Herodotus like many travellers was more
familiar, it would seem, with the customs of foreigners than with those
of his own people. He notes the two customs as though they were alien
curiosities, but the practice of swearing on a tomb must have been
familiar to the Greeks. The slave in the _Choephori_ says to Electra[850]:
‘Reverencing thy father’s tomb like to an altar,
Mine inmost thoughts I speak, doing thy hest.’
By the hero Sosipolis at Olympia[851] oaths were taken ‘on the greatest
occasions’—by Sosipolis who in true hero-fashion was wont to appear in
snake-form. That these oaths were taken on his actual tomb we are not
told, but the sanctuary of a snake-hero can scarcely in its origin have
been other than his tomb. Almost every hero in Greece had his dream
oracle. Later as the hero was conceived of as in human rather than animal
shape the connection between hero and snake is loosened, and we get the
halting, confused theology of Aeneas[852]:
‘Doubtful if he should deem the gliding snake
The genius of the place, or if it were
His father’s ministrant.’
In fig. 100 we have an altar to a hero found in Lesbos[853], not the
old primitive grave mound which was the true original form, but a
late decorative structure such as might have served an Olympian. It
is inscribed in letters of Roman date, ‘The people to Aristandros the
hero, son of Cleotimos,’ and that the service is to a hero is further
emphasized by the snakes sculptured on the top round the hollow cup which
served for libations. There are two snakes; it is no longer realized that
the hero himself is a snake, but the snake reminiscence clings.
[Illustration: FIG. 100.]
* * * * *
If the question be raised, ‘why did the Greeks image the dead hero
as a snake?’ no very certain or satisfactory answer can be offered.
Aelian[854] in his treatise on ‘The Nature of Animals’ says that the
backbone of a dead man when the marrow has decayed turns into a snake.
The chance, sudden apparition of a snake near a dead body may have
started the notion. Plutarch[855] tells how, when the body of Cleomenes
was impaled, the people, seeing a great snake wind itself about his
head, knew that he was ‘more than mortal’ (κρείττονος). Of course, by
the time of Cleomenes, the snake was well established as the vehicle of
a hero, but some such coincidence may very early have given rise to this
association of ideas. Plutarch adds that ‘the men of old time associated
the snake most of all beasts with heroes.’ They did this because, he
says, philosophers had observed that ‘when part of the moisture of the
marrow is evaporated and it becomes of a thicker consistency it produces
serpents.’
The snake was not the only vehicle. As has already been noted (p. 305),
the spirit of the dead could take shape as a human-headed bird or even
perhaps, if a bird happened to perch on a tomb, as a mere natural
hoopoe or swallow. Between the bird-souls and the snake-souls there is
this difference. So far as we know, the human-headed bird was purely a
creature of mythology, whereas the bearded human snake was the object of
a cult. Also the bird-soul, though sometimes male, tends, on the whole,
to be a woman; the snake, even when not bearded, is usually the vehicle
of a male ghost; as such he is the incarnation rather of the hero than
the heroine. So close is the connection that it gave rise to the popular
expression ‘Speckled hero,’ which arose, Photius[856] explains, because
snakes which are speckled are called heroes. Of these snake-heroes and
their cultus Homer knows absolutely nothing, but the belief in them is
essentially primitive and recrudesces with other popular superstitions.
THE CULTUS-TITLES.
The great snake, later worshipped as Zeus Meilichios, was, we have
already seen (p. 21), not Zeus himself, but an underworld being addressed
by the title Meilichios, gracious, kindly, easy to be intreated. It
will now be evident that his snake form marks him as the vehicle or
incarnation of a ghost, a local hero. He was only one of a large class of
local divinities who were invoked not by proper names but by adjectival
epithets, descriptive of their nature, epithets which gradually
crystallized into cultus-titles. That these titles were really adjectival
is shown sometimes by the actual word, e.g. _Meilichios_, which retains
its adjectival sense, sometimes by the fact that it is taken on as a
distinguishing epithet by an Olympian, e.g. Zeus-Amphiaraos. These
cultus-titles mark an important stage in the making of a god and must be
examined somewhat more in detail.
Herodotus[857] in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes the
following significant statement: ‘The Pelasgians formerly made all sorts
of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, as I know from what
I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none of them either name or eponym,
for such they had not yet heard: they addressed them as gods because they
had set all things in order and ruled over all things. Then after a long
lapse of time they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from
Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they inquired of
the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the oracle there is held to
be the most ancient of all the oracles in Greece and was at that time the
only one. When therefore the Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they
should adopt the names that came to them from the barbarians, the oracle
ordained that they should use them. And from that time on they sacrificed
to the gods making use of their names.’
If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, some sort
of name, some mode of address they must have had. Is it not at least
possible that the advance noted by Herodotus is the shift from mere
cultus-title, appropriate to any and every divinity, to actual _proper_
name which defined and crystallized the god addressed? Any and every
hero or divinity might rightly be addressed as _Meilichios_, but a
single individual personality is caught and crystallized in the proper
name _Zeus_. When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case
with Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual god.
Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself, may have been adjectival to begin with,
mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost they have become proper
and personal.
It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place owing to
an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridgeway’s[858] theory, was
the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus and his shadow-wife
Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother with her dove-priestesses;
there surely the Pelasgians with their ‘nameless’ gods, their heroes
and heroines addressed by cultus epithets, met and mingled with the
worshippers of Zeus the Father and Apollo the Son and Artemis his
sister, and learnt to fix the personalities of their formless shifting
divinities, learnt the lesson not from the ancient civilized Egyptians
but from the northern ‘barbarians.’
The word _hero_ itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius[859] tells
us that by hero was meant ‘mighty,’ ‘strong,’ ‘noble,’ ‘venerable.’ In
Homer the hero is the strong man _alive_, mighty in battle; in cultus the
hero is the strong man _after death_, dowered with a greater, because a
ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, κρείττονες, ‘Better
and Stronger Ones.’ The avoidance of the actual proper name of a dead man
is an instructive delicate decency and lives on to-day. The newly dead
becomes, at least for a time, ‘He’ or ‘She’; the actual name is felt too
intimate. It is a part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a
tendency already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost
too close, to call your friend ‘the kind one,’ or ‘the old one,’ or
‘the black one,’ and never name his silent name. Of course the delicate
instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, and
gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of _de mortuis nil
nisi bene_.
* * * * *
It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their heroized
dead and underworld divinities by ‘euphemistic’ titles, Eumenides for
Erinyes, χρηστέ, ‘Good One,’ when they meant ‘Bad One.’ Such is the ugly
misunderstanding view of scholiasts and lexicographers. But a simpler,
more human explanation lies to hand. The dead are, it is true, feared,
but they are also loved, felt to be friendly, they have been _kin_ on
earth, below the earth they will be _kind_. But in primitive days it is
only those who have been kin who will hereafter be kind; the ghosts of
your enemies’ kin will be _un_kind; if to them you apply kindly epithets
it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical usage.
Of such euphemism Homer[860] has left us a curious example. Zeus would
fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and fatuity of mortal man:
‘Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One,
Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon’s son,
Far-famed Orestes, slew.’
Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ‘the Blameless One.’
The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. These
Olympians, these gods ‘who live at ease,’ go too far.
The epithets in Homer are often worn very thin, but here, once the point
is noted[861], it is manifest that ἀμύμων, ‘the Blameless One,’ is a
title perfectly appropriate to Aigisthos _as a dead hero_. Whatever his
life on the upper earth, he has joined the company of the κρείττονες,
‘the Stronger and Better Ones.’ The epithet ἀμύμων in Homer is applied
to individual heroes, to a hero’s tomb[862], to magical, half-mythical
peoples like the Phaeacians and Aethiopians[863] who to the popular
imagination are half canonized, to the magic island[864] of the god
Helios, to the imaginary, half-magical Good Old King[865]. It is used
also of the ‘convoy[866]’ sent by the gods, which of course is magical
in character; it is never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians
themselves. There is about the word a touch of what is dead and demonic
rather than actually divine.
Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, the dark
superstitions of a primitive race; he knows nothing at least ostensibly
of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at his tomb, nothing of
his snake-shape; but Homer’s epithets came to him already crystallized
and came from the underlying stratum of religion which was based on the
worship of the dead. And here comes in a curious complication. To Homer,
though he calls him mechanically, or if we like ‘euphemistically,’ the
‘Blameless One,’ Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black
as Aeschylus painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first
made the epithet? The story of Aigisthos is told _by the mouth of the
conquerors_. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive population,
there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. Thyestes, father of
Aigisthos, had been banished[867] from his home; Aigisthos is reared as
an alien and returns to claim his own. Clytaemnestra too was of the old
order, a princess of the primitive dwellers in the land, regnant in her
own right. Agamemnon leaves her, leaves her significantly in the charge
of a bard[868], one of those bards pledged to sing the glory of the
conquering Achaeans, and the end is inevitable: she reverts to the prince
of the old stock, Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted
before her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a
princess of the land and his too are the sorrows of the king-consort.
The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias[869]. We hear of no cult;
possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it dwindled and died,
but in old days we may be sure ‘the Blameless One’ had his meed of
service at Argos, and the epithet itself remains as eternal witness.
Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ‘Blameless’ than
Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia[870] Odysseus
says:
‘Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see,
Child of Salmoneus, Blameless One, a noble sire he.’
The case of Salmoneus is highly significant. He too belongs to the old
order, as indeed do all the Aeolid figures connected with the group of
dead heroines, and more, in his life he was in violent opposition to the
new gods. To Hesiod[871] he is ‘the Unjust One’ (ἄδικος). He even dared
to counterfeit the thunder and lightning of Zeus, and Zeus enraged slew
him with a thunderbolt. The vase-painting already discussed (p. 60) is
the very mirror of the picture drawn by Vergil[872] of the insolent king:
‘Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town
In triumph went he; for himself, mad man,
Honours divine he claimed.’
To every worshipper of the new order his crime must have seemed heinous
and blasphemous, but among his own people he was glorious before death
and probably ‘Blameless’ after.
The case of Tityos, Son of Earth, presents a close parallel, though
Tityos never bore the title of ‘Blameless.’ To the orthodox worshipper of
the Olympians he was the vilest of criminals; as such Homer[873] knew him:
‘For he laid hands on Leto, the famous bride of Zeus,
What time she fared to Pytho through the glades of Panopeus.’
And for this his sin he lay in Hades tortured for ever. This is from
the Olympian point of view very satisfactory and instructive, but when
we turn to local tradition Tityos is envisaged from quite another point
of view. Strabo[874], when he visited Panopeus, learnt that it was the
fabled abode of Tityos. He reminds us that it was to the island of Euboea
that, according to Homer[875], the Phaeacians conducted fair-haired
Rhadamanthys that he might see Tityos, Son of Earth. We wonder for a
moment why the just Rhadamanthys should care to visit the criminal.
Homer leaves us in doubt, but Strabo makes the mystery clear. On Euboea,
he says, they show a ‘cave called Elarion from Elara who was mother
to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind of honours are
mentioned which are paid to him.’ One ‘blameless’ hero visits another,
that is all. Golden-haired Rhadamanthys found favour with the fair-haired
Achaeans; but for Tityos, _the son of Earth_, there is no place in the
Northern Elysium.
* * * * *
We may take it then that the ‘euphemistic’ epithets were applied at first
in all simplicity and faith to heroes and underworld gods by the race
that worshipped them. The devotees of the new Achaean religion naturally
regarded the heroes and saints of the old as demons. Such was in later
days the charitable view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian
gods in their turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the
black side of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the
divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the unconscious use
of a crystallized epithet like ‘Blameless’ lets out the real truth. The
ritual prescription that heroes should be worshipped by night, their
sacrifice consumed before dawn, no doubt helped the conviction that as
they loved the night their deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic
and not lacking in savage touches. At Daulis[876] Pausanias tells of the
shrine of a hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the
people of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was; some said
Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, and when
animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the blood of the victim
through a hole into the grave; the flesh was consumed on the spot. Such
plain-spoken ritual would go far to promote the notion that the hero was
bloodthirsty.
Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy between old
and new, between the hero and the Olympian. Pausanias[877] describes in
detail the elaborate ceremonial observed in sacrificing to Pelops at
Olympia. The hero had a large _temenos_ containing trees and statues
and surrounded by a stone wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a
hero, was towards the west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim
was a black ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words:
‘Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, whether he
be of Elis or a stranger, _may not enter the temple of Zeus_.’ But we are
glad to know from Pindar[878] that no spiteful ritual prescription of
the Olympian could dim the splendour of the local hero:
‘In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured
Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios’ ford,
Now hath he still his share;
Frequent and full the throng that worship there.’
The scholiast comments on the passage: ‘Some say that it was not (merely)
a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the followers of Herakles
sacrificed to him before Zeus.’
At yet another great Pan-Hellenic centre there is the memory, though more
faded, of the like superposition of cults. The scholiast on Pindar[879]
says that the contest at Nemea was of the nature of funeral games
(ἐπιτάφιος) and that it was in honour of Archemoros, but that later,
after Herakles had slain the Nemean lion, he ‘took the games in hand and
put many things to rights and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.’
More commonly there is between the Olympian and the hero all appearance
of decent friendliness. A compromise is effected; the main ritual is
in honour of the Olympian, but to the hero is offered a preliminary
sacrifice. A good instance of this procedure is the worship of Apollo at
Amyclae[880] superposed on that of the local hero Hyakinthos. The great
bronze statue of Apollo stood on a splendid throne, the decorations
of which Pausanias describes in detail. The image itself was rude and
ancient, the lower part pillar-shaped, but for all that the god was
a new-comer. ‘The basis of the image was in form like an altar, and
they say that Hyakinthos was buried in it, and at the festival of the
Hyakinthia _before_ the burnt sacrifice (θυσίας) to Apollo, they devote
offerings (ἐναγίζουσιν) to Hyakinthos into this altar through a bronze
door.’
Apollo and Hyakinthos established a _modus vivendi_. Apollo instituted
his regular Olympian sacrifices (θυσίαι) and left to Hyakinthos his
underworld offerings (ἐναγίσματα). But not every Olympian was so
successful. Ritual is always tenacious. So too at Delphi, Apollo may
seat himself on the omphalos, but he is still forced to utter his
oracles through the mouth of the _priestess_ of Gaia. Zeus, we have
seen, arrogated to himself the title of Meilichios; he had the old snake
reliefs dedicated to him, but he was powerless to change the ritual
of the hero, and had to content himself, like an underworld god, with
holocausts. All that he could do was to emphasize the untruth that he,
not the hero, was Meilichios, Easy to be intreated.
All that could be effected by theological _animus_ was done. It has
been seen (p. 9) how in the fable of Babrius the hero-ancestor is
positively forbidden to give good things, and meekly submits; and, long
before Babrius, the blackening process had set in. The bird-chorus in
Aristophanes[881] tells of the strange sights it has seen on earth:
‘We know of an uncanny spot,
Very dark, where the candles are not;
There to feast with the heroes men go
By day, but at evening, oh no!
For the night time is risky you know.
If the hero Orestes should meet with a mortal by night,
He’d strip him and beat him and leave him an elegant sight.’
Orestes was of course a notable local thief, but the point of the joke
is the ill-omened character of a hero. The scholiast says that ‘heroes
are irascible and truculent to those they meet and possess no power
over what is beneficial.’ He cites Menander as his authority, but adds
on his own account that this explains the fact that ‘those who go past
hero-shrines keep silence.’ So easy is it to read a bad meaning into a
reverent custom. So possessed are scholiasts and lexicographers by the
Olympian prejudice that, even when the word they explain is dead against
a bad interpretation, they still maintain it. Hesychius[882], explaining
κρείττονας, ‘Better or Stronger Ones,’ says ‘they apply the title to
heroes, and they seem to be a bad sort of persons; it is on this account
that those who pass hero-shrines keep silence lest the heroes should do
them some harm.’ Among gods, as among mortals, one rule holds good: the
king can do no wrong and the conquered no right.
ASKLEPIOS AND THE HEROES OF HEALING.
Heroes, like the ghosts from which they sprang, had of course their
black angry side, but, setting aside the prejudice of an Olympianized
literature, it is easy to see that in local cultus they would tend rather
to beneficence. The ghost you worship and who by your worship is erected
into a hero is your kinsman, and the ties of kinship are still strong in
the world below. ‘In almost all West African districts,’ says Miss Mary
Kingsley[883], ‘is a class of spirits called “Well-disposed Ones” and
this class is clearly differentiated from “Them,” the generic term for
non-human spirits. These “Well-disposed Ones” are ancestors and they do
what they can to benefit their particular village or family fetish who is
not a human spirit or ancestor.’ So it was with the Greek; he was careful
not to neglect or offend his local hero, but on the whole he relied on
his benevolence:
‘When a man dies we all begin to say
The sainted one has passed away, he has ‘fallen asleep,’
Blessed therein that he is vexed no more.
And straight with funeral offerings we do sacrifice
As to a god and pour libations, bidding
Him send good things up here from down below[884].’
The cult of heroes had in it more of human ‘tendance’ than of demonic
‘aversion.’
The hero had for his sphere of beneficence the whole circle of human
activities. Like all primitive divinities he was of necessity a
god-of-all-work; a primitive community cannot afford to departmentalize
its gods. The local hero had to help his family to fight, to secure
fertility for their crops and for themselves, act as oracle when the
community was perplexed, be ready for any emergency that might arise, and
even on occasion he must mend a broken jug. But most of all he was adored
as a Healer. As a Healer he rises very nearly to the rank of an Olympian,
but through the gentleness of his office he keeps a certain humanity that
prevents complete deification. A typical instance of the Hero-Healer is
the god Asklepios.
* * * * *
We conceive of Asklepios as he is figured in many a Greek and
Graeco-Roman statue, a reverend bearded god, somewhat of the type of
Zeus, but characterized by the staff on which he leans and about which is
twined a snake. The snake, our hand-books tell us, is the ‘symbol of the
healing art,’ and hence the attribute of Asklepios, god of medicine.
[Illustration: FIG. 101.]
The design in fig. 101, from a votive relief[885] found in the
Asklepieion and now in the National Museum at Athens, gives cause for
reflection. The god himself stands in his familiar attitude, waiting
the family of worshippers who approach with offerings. A little happy
honoured boy is allowed to lead the procession bringing a sheep to the
altar. Behind the god is his attribute, a huge coiled snake, his head
erect and level _with the god he is_. Take away the human Asklepios and
the scene is yet complete, complete as on the Meilichios relief in fig.
2, the great hero snake and his worshippers.
[Illustration: FIG. 102.]
The relief in fig. 101 is under a foot in length, the offering probably
of some poor man who clung to his old faith in the healing snake-hero. It
forces us in its plain-spoken simplicity to face just the fact that the
dedicator of the next relief[886] (fig. 102) is so anxious to conceal.
This second relief is the offering of a rich man, the figures are about
half life-size; it was found in the same Asklepieion on the S. slope of
the Acropolis. Asklepios no longer stands citizen-fashion leaning on
his staff: he is seated in splendour, and beside him is coiled a very
humble attributive snake. Behind are two figures, probably of a son and
a daughter, and they all three occupy a separate chapel aloof from their
human worshippers.
In token of his humble birth as the ghost of a mortal the snake always
clings to Asklepios, but it is not the only evidence. An essential part
of his healing ritual was always and everywhere the ἐγκοίμησις[887],
the ‘sleeping in’ his sanctuary. The patient who came to be cured must
sleep and in a dream the god either healed him or revealed the means of
healing. It was the dream oracle sent by Earth herself[888] that Apollo
the Olympian came to supersede. All the strange web of human chicanery
that was woven round the dream cure it would here be irrelevant to
examine: only the simple fact need be noted that the prescribed ritual
of sleep was merely a survival of the old dream oracle of the hero.
It was nowise peculiar to Asklepios. When men came to the beautiful
little sanctuary of Amphiaraos[889] at Oropus they purified themselves,
sacrificed a ram, and spreading the skin under them they went to sleep
‘awaiting a revelation in a dream.’
The dream oracle remained always proper to the earth-born heroes; we
hear of no one _sleeping_ in the precinct of Zeus, or of Apollo, and the
belief in the magic of sleep long outlasted the service of the Olympians.
To-day year by year on the festival of the Panagia a throng of sick
from the islands round about make their pilgrimage to Tenos, and the
sick sleep in the Church and in the precinct and are healed, and in the
morning is published the long list of miraculous cures (θαύματα). It is
only the truth and the true gods that lived. The Panagia has taken to
herself all that was real in ancient faith, in her are still incarnate
the Mother and the Maid and Asklepios the Saviour. Like most primitive
faiths the belief in the dream cure appealed to something very deep-down
and real, however misunderstood and perverted, something in the secret
bidding of nature that said, that always will say:
‘Sleep Heart, a little free
From thoughts that kill.
Nothing now hard to thee
Or good or ill.
And when the shut eyes see
Sleep’s mansions fill,
Night might bring that to be
Day never will.’
The worship of Asklepios, we know from the evidence of an
inscription[890], was introduced at Athens about 421 B.C.: it was still
no doubt something of a new excitement when Aristophanes wrote his
_Plutus_. But Athens was not left till 421 B.C. without a Hero-Healer.
Asklepios came to Athens as a full-blown god, came first from Thessaly,
where he was the rival of Apollo, and finally from his great sanctuary
at Epidauros, and, when he came, we have definite evidence that his
cult was superimposed on that of a more ancient hero. ‘Affiliated’ is
perhaps the juster word, for when a hero from without took over the cult
of an indigenous hero there is no clash of ritual as in the case of an
Olympian, no conflict between θυσίαι and ἐναγισμοί; both heroes alike are
content with the simple offering of the _pelanos_.
* * * * *
In the course of the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations Dr Dörpfeld came upon
a small sanctuary consisting of a precinct, an altar, and a well[891].
The precinct wall, the well and the conduit leading to it were clearly,
from the style of their masonry, of the date of Peisistratos. Within and
around the precinct were votive offerings that pointed to the worship of
a god of healing, reliefs representing parts of the human body, breasts
and the like, a man holding a huge leg marked with a varicose vein,
reliefs of the usual ‘Asklepios’ type, and above all votive snakes. Had
there been no inscriptions the precinct could have been at once claimed
as ‘sacred to Asklepios,’ and we should have been left with the curious
problems, ‘Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the south, one on
the west of the Akropolis; and, if the god had already a shrine on the
west slope in the days of Peisistratos, why did he trouble to make a
triumphant entry into Athens on the south slope in 421 B.C.?’
Happily we are left in no such dilemma. On a stele found in the precinct
we have the following inscription[892]: ‘Mnesiptolemè on behalf of
Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.’ If the inscription
stood alone, we should probably decide that Asklepios was worshipped
in the precinct _under the title of Amynos_, the Protector. Whatever
the original meaning of the word Asklepios—and we may conjecture it was
merely a cultus-title—it soon became a proper name, and could therefore
easily be associated with an adjectival epithet.
A second inscription[893] happily makes it certain that Amynos was not
merely an adjective, but an adjectival title of a person distinct
from Asklepios. It runs as follows: ‘Certain citizens held it just to
commemorate concerning the common weal of the members of the thiasos
of Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion.’ Here we have the names of
three personalities manifestly separate and enumerated in significant
order. We know Asklepios and most fortunately Dexion. The author of the
_Etymologicon Magnum_[894], in explaining the word _Dexion_, says: ‘The
title was given by the Athenians to Sophocles after his death. They say
that when Sophocles was dead the Athenians, wishing to give him added
honours, built him a hero-shrine and named him Dexion, the Receiver, from
his reception of Asklepios—for he received the god in his own house and
set up an altar to him.’ For the heroization of Sophocles we have earlier
evidence than the _Etymologicon Magnum_. The historian Istros[895] (3rd
cent. B.C.) is quoted as saying that the Athenians ‘on account of the
man’s virtue passed a vote that yearly sacrifice should be made to him.’
It seems an extraordinary story, but, if we do not press too hard the
words of the panegyrist, the explanation is natural enough. Sophocles
was not exactly canonised ‘because of his virtue.’ He became a hero,
officially, because he had officially received Asklepios, and the
‘Receiver’ of a god, like the ‘Founder’ of a town, had a right to ritual
recognition. ‘Dexion’ is the Receiver of the god, and from the fact
that the inscription with his name is set up in the little precinct
on the west slope of the Acropolis we may be sure his worship went on
there. It was in that little precinct, we may conjecture, that he served
as priest. This conjecture is made almost certain by the fact that a
later inscription[896] (1st cent. B.C.), with a dedication to Amynos
and Asklepios, is dated by the priesthood of a ‘Sophocles,’ probably a
descendant of the poet. Sophocles as a hero was not a success, probably
he was too alive and human as a poet; he was in his own precinct
completely submerged by the god he ‘received.’
The theological history of the little precinct is quite clear. The
inscription preserves the ritual order of precedence. The sanctuary
began, not later than Peisistratos, as an Amyneion, shrine of a local
hero worshipped under the title of Amynos, Protector. At some time,
probably owing to the recent pestilence which the local hero had failed
to avert, it was thought well to affiliate a Healer-god who had attained
enormous prestige in the Peloponnesus. The experiment was quietly and
carefully tried in the little Amyneion before the foundation of the great
Asklepieion on the south slope. It was a very simple matter. A sacred
snake would be sent for[897] from Epidauros, to join the local snake of
Amynos. Both were snakes, both were healers; the same offerings served
for both, the votive limbs, the _pelanoi_. Sophocles the human Receiver,
who had introduced Asklepios in due course, naturally enough dies, and
a third healing hero is added to the list. Dexion fades, and Asklepios
gradually effaces Amynos and takes his name as a ceremonial title.
* * * * *
Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know Sophocles as
human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of Amynos, Asklepios,
Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing. But we must take it
only as one instance of the ladder from earth to heaven that had its
lowest rungs planted in every village scattered over Greece—a ladder
that reached sometimes, but not always or even often, up to high Olympus
itself. Whether a local hero became a god depended on a multitude of
chances and conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became
famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every effort to
meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive Pelasgian[898] stock.
His name, if the most recent etymology[899] be accepted, means only
_the_ young dear Hero—_the_ Hero _par excellence_. No pains were spared
to affiliate him. He is allowed the Olympian burnt sacrifice[900], he
is passed through the folds of Hera’s robe to make him her child by
adoption[901], he is married in Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly
translated, the vase-painter[902] diligently paints his reception into
Olympus, he is always elaborately entering, yet he is never really
_in_, he is too much a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian,
and literature, always over-Olympianized, makes him too often the
laughing-stock of the stage.
[Illustration: FIG. 103.]
More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity of
healing, but never to emerge as a Pan-Hellenic god. In the design in
fig. 103 we have a good instance—from a vase[903] found in Boeotia and
now in the National Museum at Athens. On the obverse a bearded man,
wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. A table with cakes stands by his
couch. An enormous coiled snake is about to drink from the wine-cup in
his hand. On the reverse a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a
girl brings offerings—an oinochoë, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung
votive offerings—a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints
in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the complexity
of hero-cults would at once name the god with the snake on the obverse
Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs on the reverse Hygieia;
but to these names they have no sort of right. Found as the vase was in
Boeotia, the vase-painter more probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly
Trophonios, and Agathe Tyche. All we can say is that they are a couple of
healing divinities—hero and heroine divinized.
[Illustration: FIG. 104.]
The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the snake is
the hero; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, feeding out of the
wine-cup. The snake is not bearded, but he has a touch of human unreality
in that he is about to drink out of the wine-cup. These humanized snakes
are fed with human food; their natural food would be a live bird or a
rabbit. Dr Gadow kindly tells me that a snake will lap milk, but if he is
to eat his sacrificial food, the _pelanos_, it must be made _exceedingly
thin_; anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not
swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly due a
‘honey cake,’ and at Lebadeia[904] in the shrine of Trophonios, where it
was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the country ‘cast into
his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.’
Representations of the hero reclining at a feast occur very frequently
on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They appear very
rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good instance is
the design in fig. 104 from a late red-figured krater in the Berlin
Museum[905]. The attempt to give a name to the recumbent man is quite
fruitless: the great snake marks him as a dead hero. The woman and boy
can scarcely be said to be worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and
fruit; it is rather the feast that went on in life figured as continuing
after death.
* * * * *
It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely
analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 104, reliefs usually known as
‘Hero-Feasts’ or ‘Funeral Banquets.’ They are monuments especially
instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is seen so clearly the
transition from hero to god, and also the gradual superposition of the
Olympians over local hero-cults.
THE ‘HERO-FEASTS.’
Plato[906] in the _Laws_ arranges the objects of divine worship in a
regular sequence: first the Olympian gods together with those who keep
the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of unlucky
omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized as ‘orgiastic’;
fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes the list with
living parents to whom much honour should be offered. As early as
Hesiod[907] theology attempted some differentiation between heroes and
daemons; daemons being accounted divine in some higher sense. Of all
this minute departmentalism ritual knows nothing. The only recognized
distinction is that burnt offerings are the meed of the Olympians,
offerings _devoted_ (ἐναγισμοί) of the chthonic gods. Between the
chthonic gods and the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the
only distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic
gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas it is
apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons not fully
divinized.
In like fashion votive reliefs of the type known as Hero-Feasts
draw no distinction between hero and daemon, nor indeed do they
clearly distinguish between ordinary dead man and hero. As a rule the
‘Hero-Feasts’ are depicted on reliefs set up in sanctuaries rather than
graveyards, but they occur sometimes on actual tombstones[908] set up in
actual cemeteries.
[Illustration: FIG. 105.]
The ‘Hero-Feast’ is found broadcast over Attica, the Peloponnese and
the islands; there is scarcely a local museum that does not contain
specimens. The design in fig. 105 is from a relief in the local museum
at Samos[909]. Three heroes are lying at the banquet; one holds a large
rhyton. A snake coiled about a tree is about to drink from it. Snake
and tree mark a sanctuary, otherwise the scene is very homelike and
_non_-hieratic. Of the inscription only two letters remain, and they tell
nothing. The round shield and the horse’s head and the dog tell us we
have to do with actual heroes, but who they were it is impossible to say.
[Illustration: FIG. 106.]
The relief in fig. 106 is also from Samos[910]. It is of the usual
type—the recumbent man, the seated woman, the boy about to draw wine. The
field is full of characteristic tokens; for the man, the horse’s head,
the cuirass, helm, shield and greaves; for the woman, the work-basket of
the shape so often occurring on Athenian grave-reliefs, and, it may be,
the tame bird which stands on the casket pecking at a fruit. The snake
is for both, for both are dead. The inscription at first surprises us;
it is as follows: ‘Lais daughter of Phoenix, heroine, hail.’ There is no
mention of the hero, but on examination of the stone it is seen that a
previous inscription has been erased[911]. Some one cared more for Lais
than for her husband, hence the palimpsest.
These two specimens from Samos have been selected out of countless
others because in them it is quite certain that heroized mortals are
represented. The earliest specimens of the ‘Hero-Feast’ discovered had no
inscriptions, and though horse and snake were present an attempt was made
to interpret them as sacred to Asklepios; the snake was ‘the symbol of
healing,’ the horse that mysterious creature the ‘horse of Hades[912].’
The most ardent devotee of symbolic interpretation can scarcely make
mythology out of the greaves and the work-basket.
* * * * *
Reliefs of the ‘Hero-Feast’ type are all of late date. The earliest one
is doubtfully assigned to the end of the 5th century; the great majority
are much later. The reason is not far to seek. In the fine period of
Greek Art, the period to which we owe most of the grave-reliefs found at
Athens, hero-worship is submerged. It is a time of rationalism, and the
funeral monuments of that time tend to represent this life rather than
the next. I have tried elsewhere to show that early Attic grave-reliefs
are cast in the _type_ of the Sparta hero-reliefs, but nowhere in Attic
grave-reliefs of the 5th century do we find the dead heroized. But once
the age of reason past, hero-worship re-emerged, and it would seem in
greater force than before.
In the fine period of art hero-reliefs do exist, but not as funeral
monuments. One of the earliest and finest[913] we possess is represented
in fig. 107. It is not at all of the same type as the ‘Hero-Feast,’ and
is figured here partly for its beauty and interest, partly to mark the
contrast. A hero occupies the central place, leading his horse, followed
by his hound. That he _is_ a hero we are sure, for in front of him is
his low, omphalos-like altar, and to the left a worshipper approaches.
Unhappily there is no inscription, but yet we are tempted to give the
hero a name.
[Illustration: FIG. 107.]
Horse and horseman are set against a rocky background. The marble
of which the relief is made is Pentelic, the style Attic, with many
reminiscences of the Parthenon marbles. It is therefore not too bold to
see in the rocky background a slope of the Acropolis. To the right above
the hero is a seated figure, with only the lower part of the body draped.
Zeus is so represented and Asklepios. Zeus has no shrine in the slopes
of the Acropolis, nor is it probable he would be depicted on a relief of
this date seated in casual fashion as a spectator. The figure is almost
certainly Asklepios. Given that the figure is Asklepios, the narrative of
Pausanias[914] supplies the clue to the remaining figures. ‘Approaching
the Acropolis by this road, next after the sanctuary of Asklepios is the
temple of Themis, and in front of this temple is a mound upreared as a
monument to Hippolytos.’ Then Pausanias tells the story of Phaedra and
Hippolytos; he does not actually mention the sanctuary of Aphrodite, but
he says ‘the old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were
the work of no obscure artists.’ Images of course presuppose a sanctuary,
and such a sanctuary we now know from inscriptions and votive offerings
found on the spot to have existed, and that it was dedicated to Aphrodite
Pandemos. The figures on the relief exactly correspond to the account
of Pausanias. To the right, i.e. to the East, the figure of Asklepios;
next Themis with her temple, clearly indicated by the two columns between
which she stands; immediately in front of her Hippolytos with his sacred
altar-mound. Above it Aphrodite, literally ‘_over_ Hippolytos’ (Ἱππολύτῳ
δ’ ἔπι). It is as Euripides[915] knew it:
‘And Phaedra then, his father’s Queen high born,
Saw him, and as she saw her heart was torn
With great love by the working of my will.
And there, when he was gone, on Pallas’ hill
Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam,
She built a shrine and named it _Love-at-Home_.
And the rock held it, but its face always
Seeks Trozen o’er the seas.’
It is worth noting that the relief, now in the Torlonia Museum at
Rome, was found not far from Aricia, where the hero Virbius, the Latin
equivalent of Hippolytos, was worshipped.
It is possible that in the tragedy of the wrath of Aphrodite against
the hero who worshipped Artemis, and in the title of the goddess ‘over
Hippolytos,’ later misunderstood as ‘because of,’ ‘for the sake of’
Hippolytos, we have a reminiscence of a superposition of cults—that the
actual contest was between a local hero and Aphrodite who had waxed to
the glory of an Olympian. Such a view can however scarcely be deduced
from the relief in question, which seems to present relations merely
topographical and perfectly peaceful.
* * * * *
The design in fig. 108, from a relief in the Jacobsen[916] collection
at Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen, shows a clearer case of supersession. The
design is not earlier than the 4th century B.C. and of the usual type
of ‘Hero-Feast’; we have the reclining man, seated wife, attendant
cupbearer, and, to make the scene quite complete, three worshippers of
smaller size. The procession of worshippers is a frequent, though not
uniform, element in the reliefs representing ‘Hero-Feasts.’ When present
they serve to show very clearly that the hero and his wife are objects
of worship. As a rule it is, we have seen, safest not to name the hero.
In the cases so far where he or the heroine is inscribed, the name has
been that of a mortal. In the present case the inscription has a surprise
in store for us. Assuredly no one, without the inscriptions, would have
ventured to conjecture the inscribed names. The inscription runs as
follows:
‘Aristomache and Theoris dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios
Philios, and to Philia the mother of the god, and to Tyche
Agathe the wife of the god.’
[Illustration: FIG. 108.]
Philia, the Friendly One, is mother not wife of Zeus Philios, ‘Zeus the
Friendly’; it is the old matriarchal relation of Mother and Son (p. 273).
But the dedicators, wedded themselves no doubt after patriarchal fashion,
seem to feel a need that Zeus Philios should be married; they give him
not his natural shadow-wife Philia—she has been used up as mother—but
Tyche Agathe, ‘Good Fortune.’ In the procession of worshippers there are
two women with a man between them: probably they are his mother and wife
and wish to see their relation to him mirrored in their dedication. But
they are content with the traditional type of Hero-Feasts, possibly the
only type that the conservative workman kept in stock in his workshop.
It is worth noting that this interesting relief came from a precinct
of Asklepios in Munychia down at the Peiraeus, the same precinct which
yielded the snake reliefs (figs. 1 and 2) dedicated to Meilichios. There
were also found the relief in fig. 4, several reliefs adorned with
snakes only, some reliefs representing Asklepios, and various ritual
inscriptions. The precinct seems to have become a sort of melting-pot of
gods and heroes. Tyche we know at Lebadeia as the wife of the Agathos
Daimon, the Good or Rich Spirit, and it is curious to note that Zeus
on the relief holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. His other title
_Epiteleios_ points the same way. Hesychius[917] tells us that the word
ἐπιτελείωσις means the same as αὔξησις, ‘increase,’ and Plato[918] gives
the name ἐπιτελειώσεις, ‘accomplishments,’ to family feasts held in
thanksgiving for the birth _and welfare_ of children.
It seems obvious that the precinct once belonged to a hero, worshipped
under the form of a snake, and as Meilichios, god of the wealth of the
underworld—a sort of Agathos Daimon or Good Spirit. He must have had two
other titles—Epiteleios, the Accomplished, and Philios, the Friendly
One. At some time or other Asklepios took over the shrine of Meilichios,
Philios, Epiteleios, as he took over the shrine of Amynos, but Zeus also
put in a claim and the two divided the honours of the place. The old
snake-hero was forgotten, overshadowed by the Olympian and the great
immigrant healer; but the Olympian does not wholly triumph. He cannot
change the local ritual, and he must consent to a certain interchange of
attributes.
[Illustration: FIG. 109.]
This is quaintly shown in the two reliefs placed side by side in
fig. 109[919]. The larger one to the left shows a seated god holding
a cornucopia; beneath his chair is an eagle. In deference to this
characteristically Olympian bird we should expect the dedication
to be to Zeus. We find it is to the ‘Good Spirit.’ In the smaller
relief a similar bird is perched below the chair, and a humble pig is
the sacrifice, as it is to Zeus Meilichios; the inscription tells us
that ‘the Club-men dedicated it to Zeus Philios in the archonship of
Hegesios.’ The relief is dated by this archonship as set up in the year
324/3 B.C. The Friendly Zeus was the god of good fellowship and was of
wide popularity[920]. To cheerful, hilarious souls it was comforting to
think that there was another Zeus, less remote, more of the cornucopia
and less of the thunderbolt, and that he was ready to join a human feast.
The diner-out needs and finds a god in his own image, and Zeus—Zeus with
his title of Philios, accustomed as he was to Homeric banquets, was ready
for the post. So the comic parasite reasons[921]:
‘I wish to explain clearly
What a holy orthodox business this dining-out is—
An invention of the gods; the other arts
Were invented by men of talent, not by the gods.
But dining-out was invented by Zeus the Friendly,
By common consent the greatest of all the gods.
Now good old Zeus comes straight into people’s houses
In his free and easy way, rich and poor alike.
Wherever he sees a comfortable couch set out
And by its side a table properly laid,
Down he sits to a regular dinner with courses,
Wine and dessert and all, and then off he goes
Straight back home, and he never pays his shot.’
The fooling is obviously based on ritual practice in the ‘Hero-Feast’
that developed into the Feasts of the Gods, the Theoxenia.
* * * * *
Our argument ends where it began—with Zeus Meilichios, an early chthonic
stratum of worship, a later Olympian supersession. The two religions,
alien in ritual, alien in significance, never more than mechanically
fused. We have also seen that the new religion was powerless to alter the
old save in name; the Diasia becomes the festival of Zeus, the ritual
is a holocaust offered to a snake; Apollo and Artemis take over the
Thargelia, but it remains a savage ceremony of magical purification.
It might seem that we had reached the end. In reality, for religion in
any deep and mystical sense, we have yet to watch the beginning; we have
yet to see the coming of a god, who came from the North and yet was no
Achaean, no Olympian, who belonging to the ancient stock revived the
ancient ritual, the sacrifice that was in its inner content a sacrifice
of purification, but revived it with a significance all his own, the god
who took over the ritual of the Anthesteria, Dionysos.
DIONYSOS ON HERO-RELIEFS.
The passing from the old to the new is very curiously and instructively
shown in the two designs in figs. 110 and 111. The design in fig. 110 is
from a relief found in the harbour of Peiraeus and now in the National
Museum at Athens[922]. The material is Pentelic marble; in places the
surface has suffered considerably from the corrosion of sea-water. The
fine style of the relief dates it as probably belonging to the end of 5th
century B.C.
[Illustration: FIG. 110.]
The general type of the relief is of course the same as that of the
‘Hero-Feast[923].’ A youth on a couch holds a rhyton, the usual woman
is seated at his feet, the usual procession stands to the left. But it
is a ‘Hero-Feast’ with a difference. The group of ‘worshippers’ are not
worshippers; they are talking among themselves, they hold not victims or
other offerings, but the implements of the drama—a mask, a tambourine.
This is clearly seen in the case of the middle figure, a woman[924]. The
worshippers are tragic actors. This prepares us for the fact disclosed
by the inscriptions beneath the figures of the youth and the attendant
woman. Under the youth is written quite clearly _Dionysos_: under the
woman was an inscription of which only two certain letters remain, the
two last, ια. These inscriptions, it should clearly be noted, are later
than the relief itself, probably not earlier than 300 B.C. The name of
the woman attendant cannot certainly be made out: the most probable
conjecture is (Paid)ia, Play, a natural enough name for a nymph attendant
on Dionysos.
The name of the god is certain, and, though the inscription is an
afterthought, it certainly voices the intention of the original artist.
It is to the honour of Dionysos, not to that of a hero, that the actors
with their masks assemble—to his _honour_ rather than to his definite
worship. But none the less there remains the significant fact that the
god has taken over the art-type of the ‘Hero-Feast.’
The second relief[925] in fig. 111 tells in slightly different and more
elaborate form the same tale. The design is from a relief in the Museum
at Naples, and is an instance of a type long known as the ‘Ikarios
reliefs.’ Its style dates it as about the 2nd cent. B.C. It clearly
presents a blend of the ‘Hero-Feast’ to the left and the triumphal entry
of Dionysos, drunken, elderly, attended by a train of worshippers to
the right. The immigrant god is received by the local hero. What local
hero receives him we cannot say. Legend tells of such receptions by
Ikarios, by Pegasos, by Amphictyon, by Semachos. The hero must remain
unnamed; anyhow he plays to Dionysos the part played by Sophocles, he
is _Dexion_, Receiver, Host. It is a Theoxenia, a feasting of the god.
The ‘Ikarios’ reliefs are late, and, in the euphemistic manner of the
time, the representation is all peace and harmony. The hero, be he who
he may, receives in awe and reverence and gladness the incoming divine
guest. But Herodotus tells another tale—a tale of the forcible wresting
of the honours of the hero to the glory of the god. In telling the early
history of Sekyon under the tyrant Cleisthenes he[926] makes this notable
statement: ‘The inhabitants of Sekyon paid other honours to Adrastos and
they celebrated his misfortunes by tragic choruses, for at that time
they did not honour Dionysos, but honoured Adrastos. Now Cleisthenes
_transferred these choruses_ (from Adrastos) _to Dionysos_, but the rest
of the sacrifice he gave to Melanippos.’ It is a sudden glimpse into a
very human state of affairs. To put down the cult of Adrastos, the hero
of a family alien to his own, Cleisthenes introduced the worship of a
Theban hero Melanippos. He dared not for some reason give the tragic
choruses to Melanippos; rather than the local enemy should still have
them he hands them over to a popular immigrant god, Dionysos.
[Illustration: FIG. 111.]
The recumbent hero in the ‘Hero-Feasts’ is usually represented as
reclining at a feast and as drinking from a large wine-cup, attended by
a cupbearer. It may be conjectured that this type, which does not appear
till late in the 5th century, came in with the worship of Dionysos. The
idea of future bliss as an ‘eternal drunkenness’ came, it will later
be seen (Chap. XI.), with the religion of Dionysos from the North. By
anticipation we may note a curious fact. On the late Roman coins of
the Bizuae[927], a Thracian tribe, the type of the Hero-Feast occurs.
An instance is given in fig. 112. A hero is represented—of that we are
sure from the cuirass suspended on the tree, from the horse and from the
snake—but a hero, I would conjecture, conceived of as transfigured into
the feasting god, Dionysos himself.
[Illustration: FIG. 112.]
To the examination in detail of the cult of Dionysos we must now turn.