But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man's life;
more prominent and more important, at a later stage of his development,
is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civilization a great
part was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, were
not purely spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in the
heart by prayer. They were beings in human form, like, though superior
to ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth,
intervened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted their
undertakings, begat among them sons and daughters, and followed, from
generation to generation, the fortunes of their children's children.
Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from Heracles the
son of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son of
Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin to a "hero",
and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities themselves.
Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society;
from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and the
race; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis was
necessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit of religion.
We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church in
the Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; on
the contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with
its whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception
of a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no
separate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organism
within the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was
itself a church, and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in its
parts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not only
the community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were under
the protection of patron deities. The family centred in the hearth,
where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and
prayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into
which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of
taxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the
worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the
state itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cult
of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous
continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of
Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis,
beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens were
but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of
wisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us the
ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no
ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state.
Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the
Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add
that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political
achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal
defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their
history, was the failure of the various independent city states to
coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion
was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or
another federations of states were formed to support in common the cult
of some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the Delphian
Apollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life was
felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony
could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the
advice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religious
centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that
should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states.
The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the
presupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanction
extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for
example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between
states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the
vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national
assemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers;
the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was so
embraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secular
and religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to a
Greek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution.