OUTLINE-HISTORY OF
GREEK RELIGION
BY
LEWIS RICHARD FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.
RECTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; GIFFORD LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
ST. ANDREWS; FORMERLY WILDE LECTURER IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE
RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; HIBBERT LECTURER; HON. D.
LITT. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, AND
UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS; AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK
STATES,” “THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION,” “HIGHER ASPECTS
OF GREEK RELIGION,” “GREECE AND BABYLON”
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
[IMPRINT]
_First issued 1920_
_New Edition 1921_
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
I. The Sources and the Evidence
II. The Prehistoric Period
III. The Second Period, 900-500 B.C.
IV. The Third Period, 500-338 B.C.
V. The Period after Alexander
Literature
Endnotes
OUTLINE-HISTORY OF
GREEK RELIGION
{7}
CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES AND THE EVIDENCE
The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion,
as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to
have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is
only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and
imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be
recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of
religion.
The history of Greek religion means, partly, the account and the
interpretation of the various rites, cults and cult-ideas of the
various Greek families, tribes and communities; partly the estimate of
the religious temperament, both of the masses and of the individuals
who emerged from among them and of whom some record has been
preserved.
Now as the Greek world in the long period of its independence was
never organised as a single State, the attempt to give a summary and
general account of its religion is confronted with the perplexity
arising from the often incalculable diversity of {8} religious forms
and ideas in the different centres of its social life, which was in
the highest degree centrifugal. Nevertheless, as will be shown, we
find in the midst of manifold local variation certain uniformity of
religious psychology, making for uniformity of practice, which enables
us to deliver certain general pronouncements about the whole.
_Ancient Sources: Literary_.--Our real knowledge of any ancient
religion depends obviously on the copiousness and variety of our
records. And it is likely to be more luminous, if the society in
question expressed its religious life not only in surviving
literature, but also in surviving art. Of both these kinds the student
of Greek religion has an unusually rich material.
For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement,
Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in
its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with
religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying
penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental
life. This is obviously true of the epic period, which produced the
two types of the chivalrous and the theologic epic, and which has left
us most valuable material for the religious history of the tenth and
ninth centuries in the Homeric poems, and of the eighth and seventh
centuries in the poems of Hesiod and in the ‘Homeric’ hymns. It is
none the less true of the great lyric movement that followed upon
that, when the greatest poets devoted themselves to the composition of
songs for festal-religious occasions or of hymns for the service of
temple or altar; and besides these whose great names and fragments of
{9} whose great works survive, there was another less distinguished
group of special ‘hieratic’ poets, such as Pamphos and Mousaios, who
composed hymns for the service of certain mystery-cults, and whose
compositions were preserved as liturgical documents by the priestly
families that administered them.
The sententious ethical-political poetry of the sixth century, the
elegiacs of Theognis and Solon, is instinct with religious emotion and
reflection. And the greatest product of the poetic genius of Hellas,
the tragic drama, is of a religious character, both in respect of its
origin and much of its subject-matter. Finally, the later learned
poetry of the Ptolemaic period, the Kassandra of Lycophron, the hymns
and other works of Kallimachos, the epic poem of Apollonios Rhodios,
are full of antiquarian religious lore.
At the same time, our knowledge is much indebted to the great
prose-writers of Greece, the philosophers, historians and orators;
among the philosophers, especially to Plato, who more copiously than
any of the others reveals to us, however much he idealises, the
religious psychology and cult-phenomena of his period; among the
historians, especially to Herodotus, who is the intellectual ancestor
of the modern anthropologist and student of comparative religion and
whose presentation of the facts is coloured with religious conviction.
The works of the Attic orators are of special value for our purpose,
first because the classical orator was far more apt than the modern to
dilate on religious themes and appeal to religious sentiments, as
religion was far more closely interfused with political and social
life; secondly, because we are more sure of the orator than we can be
of the poetic or philosophic {10} writer that his words are attuned to
the average pitch of popular belief and sentiment.
It is true then that all the great fields of Greek literature make
their several contributions to the material of our subject. And
besides the works of the great masters, the student has to reckon with
the secondary and parasitic work of the later scholiasts, compilers
and commentators, which is even more replete with the special
information upon which the history of Greek religion can be built. The
study of it is, in fact, almost coextensive with the whole study of
Greek literature.
But amidst this profusion of material we must specially mark the works
of those ancients who wrote direct treatises on the various religious
phenomena, on the Gods, the cult-practices, the theologic and
mythologic systems of the Hellenic societies. The earliest of such
works that have come down to us are the poems of Hesiod and the
Hesiodic school, the Works and Days and the Theogony, while of parts
of the ‘Homeric’ hymns the special theme is the attributes and
functions of the various divinities. But it was not till the period of
scientific activity after Aristotle that definite treatises in prose
on different departments of the national religion began to be rife. A
chapter on sacrifice by Theophrastos is mainly preserved for us by
Porphyry. The writers of ‘Atthides’ or Attic history and antiquities,
who belonged mainly to the third century, were special workers in this
field; Philochoros, the chief of them, wrote ‘on festivals,’ ‘on
sacred days,’ ‘on divination,’ ‘on the Attic mysteries’; Istros, the
slave and friend of Kallimachos, on the ‘manifestations of Apollo’ and
on {11} ‘the Cretan sacrifices’; while the ‘exegetic work’ of
Kleidemos was, if we may judge from the fragments that remain,
occupied with the problems of religion and mythology. Outside this
circle we hear of other contributions to the history of Greek
religion, such as the treatises of Herakleides, probably the pupil of
Aristotle, usually called ‘Pontikos,’ on ‘the foundations of temples,’
and ‘on oracles’; and a work by an unknown Sokrates of Kos on the
important subject of ‘Invocation-titles of the Gods.’ Lastly may be
mentioned here a treatise of Apollodoros, ‘περι Θεῶν,’ which, if he is
to be identified with the author of the ‘Bibliotheca,’ was probably a
learned account of the popular religion rather than a metaphysical
enquiry.
Of nearly all this scientific post-Aristotelian literature only
isolated fragments survive in quotations by later writers,
lexicographers, and scholiasts, who were no doubt more deeply indebted
to it than they always acknowledged; but it is some compensation for
our loss that the work last mentioned, the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros,
has been preserved, a rich storehouse of myth and folklore with some
infusion of actual cult-record. Among the later literature our subject
is indebted to the geographer, Strabo, for many incidental
observations of local cults and ritual; still more to the philosophic
moralist and _littérateur_, Plutarch, a man of earnest religious
interest and some power of original thought, who knew the religion of
his country at first hand and at a time when it was yet alive, and who
devoted to it much attention and literary industry; hence we must rank
high among our ancient authorities his _Quæstiones Græcæ_ and his
{12} treatises ‘on the Pythian Oracle’ and on ‘the cessation of
oracles.’ Again, much desultory but varied information is afforded by
the compilers Athenæus, in his _Deipnosophistæ_, and Stobæus, in
his _Florilegium_. But of higher value than all these, or in fact than
any work that has been bequeathed to us from antiquity, is the
_Descriptio Græciæ_, by Pausanias, composed about 180 A.D.; for he
travelled somewhat as a modern anthropologist, relying partly on
earlier literature, yet using his own eyes and ears and his own notes;
and his ruling passion was the study of the folk-religion and the
religious monuments; so that it is due mainly to him that we know
something of the village-religion of Hellas as distinct from that of
the great cities, and can frame working theories of the evolution
through immemorial ages of various growths of the polytheism.
The lexicographers Harpokration, Hesychios and Suidas contribute facts
of value, especially in their citation of cult-appellatives, which
owing to the magic value of the special name or title whereby the
deity was invoked throw a revealing light on the significance and
power of many a worship, and help to frame our conception of the
complex character of many a divinity. Again, the various collections
of ‘Scholia’ on the classical texts are a rich quarry for our
reconstruction of the fabric of Hellenic religion; and of chief value
among these are the Scholia on Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides,
Aristophanes and Theocritus, while Servius’ _Commentary on Vergil_
tells us even more about Greek cult and mythology than about Roman;
and high in this class of our authorities we must rank a work of late
Byzantine {13} learning, the _Commentary of Tzetzes_ on Lykophron’s
poem, ‘Kassandra,’ for his scholia are charged with remote antiquarian
lore derived from good sources.
Finally, we gather much of our knowledge from the controversial
treatises of the early Christian Fathers, written with propagandist
zeal in the heat of their struggle against Paganism. They reveal to us
much of the religion that they strove to overthrow by the exposure of
its viciousness and its absurdities. But their statements must be used
with cautious criticism. Their knowledge was by no means always at
first hand, unless--which we rarely know to have been the case--they
were, like Clemens of Alexandria, converted Pagans who had been bred
up in the Græco-Roman polytheism. Their statements, for instance,
about the Greek mysteries are often vague and unconvincing, while in
their desire to include them all in one general condemnation they
confuse Anatolian rites with Eleusinian. And they are pardonably blind
to the often beautiful ritual, the nobler ideas and the higher moral
elements in the older Mediterranean religions. Nevertheless, if we
make due allowance for prejudice and exaggeration, works such as the
_Protreptica_ of Clemens, the treatise of Arnobius, _Adversus Gentes_,
of Firmicus Maternus, _De Errore Profanarum Gentium_, Eusebius’
_Præparatio Evangelica_, Augustine’s _De Civitate Dei_, Athenagoras’
_Legatio_, must be ranked among the primary sources of our history.
A special but very important chapter in the later history of Greek
religion is the account of the growth and diffusion of the religious
brotherhoods, especially the Orphic Dionysiac societies. For these we
have something of direct liturgical evidence in the {14} collection of
Orphic hymns, mainly the products of the later theosophic period, but
throwing light on the theology and ritual of these sects. But our
knowledge of this mystic religion which was engrafted upon Hellenism
has been in recent times enriched by the priceless discovery of an
ancient poetical Orphic liturgy engraved upon gold-leaf found in tombs
of Crete and South Italy and probably a product of the fifth century
B.C.
_Monumental_.--The above is a sketch of our more important literary
sources. The knowledge to be derived from them would, on the whole and
in many important details, remain vague and uncertain, were it not
supplemented and secured by the evidence coming from another source
which we may term semi-literary, the evidence from inscriptions. These
have been accumulated in vast profusion during the last thirty years,
and have been, and are still being, reduced to order for our special
purpose. The public inscriptions, being dry state-documents, do not
reveal to us the heart of any mystery or the religious soul of the
people, but rather the State-organisation and the exact minutiæ of
ritual and sacrifice from which we can sometimes reconstruct an image
of the inward religious thought. And many a local cult of value for
our total impression that was unrecorded by any writer is revealed to
us by these monuments. But the needs and aspirations of the private
man are better attested by the private inscriptions attached to
ex-voto dedications or commemorating divine benefits received.
Yet amidst all this wealth of evidence there seems one thing lacking.
Of actual temple-liturgies, of formal prayers proffered round the
altars, of the {15} hymns chanted in the public service, of all that
might constitute a text of Greek church-service there is comparatively
little preserved. One or two hymns and a few fragments of the
religious lyric of the seventh century--to which we may now add the
important recent find of the pæans of Pindar--a strophe of an ancient
hymn to Dionysos sung by the Elean women, a fourth-century pæan to
Dionysos composed for the Delphic service, the newly discovered hymn
of the Kouretes in Crete, a few formulæ of prayers quoted or
paraphrased by later writers--all this appears meagre material when we
compare it with the profusion of documents of the public and private
religion that are streaming in from Babylon.
But in respect of another source of the history of religion, our Greek
material is unique, namely, the monuments of art. For the greatest art
of Hellas was mainly religious, the greatest artists working for the
religious service of the State. And the surviving works of sculpture,
painting and glyptic, wrought either for public or private purposes,
present us often not only with facts of religion and ritual unrecorded
in literature, but also with an impression hard to gain otherwise of
the religious consciousness of the people and serve also as witnesses
to the strength of the religious feeling. For instance, the knowledge
and appreciation of Athena’s personality that we derive from Attic
monuments is deeper and more vivid than any that we gain from the
literature. Therefore the study of Greek religion is concerned as much
with the art and archæology as with the literature.