For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greek
religion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to the
Roman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. The
plastic genius of the race, that passion to embody ideas in form, which
was at the root, as we saw, of their whole religious outlook, drove them
to enact for their own delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms,
the whole conception they had framed of the world and of themselves. The
changes of the seasons, with the toil they exact and the gifts they
bring, the powers of generation and destruction, the bounty or the
rigours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order and operations of
social phenomena, the divisions of age and sex, of function and of rank
in the state--all these took shape and came, as it were, to self-
consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly ordered _fetes_.
So numerous were these and so diverse in their character that it would
be impossible, even if it were desirable in this place, to give any
general account of them. Our purpose will be better served by a
description of two, selected from the calendar of Athens, and typical,
the one of the relations of man to nature, the other of his relation to
the state. The festivals we have chosen are those known as the
"Anthesteria" [Footnote: This interpretation of the meaning of the
"Anthesteria" is not accepted by modern scholars. It is not, however,
for typographical reasons, convenient to remove it from the text, and
the error is of no importance for the purpose of this book.] and the
"Panathenaea."
The Anthesteria was held at that season of the year when, as Pindar
sings in an ode composed to be sung upon the occasion, "the chamber of
the Hours is opened and the blossoms hear the voice of the fragrant
spring; when violet clusters are flung on the lap of earth, and chaplets
of roses braided in the hair; when the sound of the flute is heard and
choirs chanting hymns to Semele." On the natural side the festival
records the coming of spring and the fermenting of last year's wine; on
the spiritual, its centre is Dionysus, who not only was the god of wine,
but, according to another legend, symbolised in his fate the death of
the year in winter and its rebirth at spring.
The ceremonies open with a scene of abandoned jollity; servants and
slaves are invited to share in the universal revel; the school holidays
begin; and all the place is alive with the bustle and fun of a great
fair. Bargaining, peep-shows, conjuring, and the like fill up the hours
of the day; and towards evening the holiday-makers assemble garlanded
and crowned in preparation for the great procession. The procession
takes place by torch-light; the statue of Dionysus leads the way, and
the revellers follow and swarm about him, in carriages or on foot,
costumed as Hours or Nymphs or Bacchae in the train of the god of wine.
The destination is the temple of the god and there sacrifice is
performed with the usual accompaniment of song and dance; the whole
closing with a banquet and a drinking contest, similar to those in vogue
among the German students. Aristophanes has described the scene for us--
"Couches, tables,
Cushions and coverlets for mattresses,
Dancing and singing-girls for mistresses,
Plum cake and plain, comfits and caraways,
Confectionery, fruits preserved and fresh,
Relishes of all sorts, hot things and bitter,
Savouries and sweets, broiled biscuits and what not;
Flowers and perfumes, and garlands, everything."
[Footnote: Aristoph. Ach. 1090.--Frere's translation.]
and in the midst of this the signal given by the trumpet, the
simultaneous draught of wine, and the prize adjudged to the man who is
the first to empty his cup.
Thus ends the first phase of the festival. So far all has been mirth and
revelry; but now comes a sudden change of tone. Dionysus, god of wine
though he be, has also his tragic aspect; of him too there is recorded a
"descent into hell"; and to the glad celebration of the renewal of life
in spring succeeds a feast in honour of the dead. The ghosts, it is
supposed, come forth to the upper air; every door-post is smeared with
pitch to keep off the wandering shades; and every family sacrifices to
its own departed. Nor are the arts forgotten; a musical festival is
held, and competing choirs sing and dance in honour of the god.
Such, so far as our brief and imperfect records enable us to trace it,
was the ritual of a typical Greek festival. With the many questions that
might be raised as to its origin and development we need not concern
ourselves at present; what we have to note is the broad fact,
characteristic of the genius of the Greeks, that they have taken the
natural emotions excited by the birth of spring, and by connecting them
with the worship of Dionysus have given them expression and form; so
that what in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits is
transmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art, the secret springs
and fountains of physical life flowing into the forms of a spiritual
symbol. It is this that is the real meaning of all ceremonial, and this
that the Greeks better than any other people understood. Their religion,
one may almost say, consisted in ritual; and to attempt to divide the
inner from the outer would be to falsify from the beginning its
distinctive character.
Let us pass to our second illustration, the great city-festival of
Athens. In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized and
idealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, its
distinctions within its embracing unity, that are set forth in their
interdependence as functions of a spiritual life. In this great national
fete, held every four years, all the higher activities of Athenian life
were ideally displayed--contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot and
horse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, military evolutions of
infantry and horse, pyrrhic dances symbolic of attack and defence in
war, mystic chants of women and choruses of youths--the whole
concentring and discharging itself in that great processional act in
which, as it were, the material forms of society became transparent, and
the Whole moved on, illumined and visibly sustained by the spiritual
soul of which it was the complete and harmonious embodiment. Of this
procession we have still in the frieze of the Parthenon a marble
transcript. There we may see the life of ancient Athens moving in stone,
from the first mounting of their horses by isolated youths, like the
slow and dropping prelude of a symphony, on to the thronged and
trampling ranks of cavalry, past the antique chariots reminiscent of
Homeric war, and the marching band of flutes and zithers, by lines of
men and maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded sheep and
oxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on turning the corner that leads
to the eastern front, we find ourselves in the presence of the Olympian
gods themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a people's life.
And if to this marble representation we add the colour it lacks, the
gold and silver of the vessels, the purple and saffron robes; if we set
the music playing and bid the oxen low; if we gird our living picture
with the blaze of an August noon and crown it with the Acropolis of
Athens, we may form a conception, better perhaps than could otherwise be
obtained, of what religion really meant to the citizen of a state whose
activities were thus habitually symbolised in the cult of its patron
deity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling
in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, untouched by the
light of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the material
side of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his
corporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual the
actual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, in
ordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, as we
said before, the state in one of its aspects was a church, and every
layman from one point of view a priest.
The question, "What did a belief in the gods really mean to the Greek"
has now received at least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to our
old phrase, that he was made at home in the world. In place of the
unintelligible powers of nature, he was surrounded by a company of
beings like himself; and these beings who controlled the physical world
were also the creators of human society. From them were descended the
Heroes who founded families and states; and under their guidance and
protection cities prospered and throve. Their histories were recounted
in innumerable myths, and these again were embodied in ritual. The whole
life of man, in its relations both to nature and to society, was
conceived as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and this
dependence was expressed and brought vividly home to him in a series of
religious festivals. Belief in the gods was not to him so much an
intellectual conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he moved;
and to think it away would be to think away the whole structure of Greek
civilisation.