THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.
{56}
We can now pursue the enquiry nearer the borderline of the historic
period, as it is conventionally termed.
_Introduction of worship of Dionysos_.--As early as the tenth century
B.C., and probably earlier, a new religion with a new and imposing
divinity was intruding itself into Hellenic lands from Thrace and
Macedonia.[56.1] Dionysos and the Thracian ritual-legend of Lykourgos
are known to Homer; but the poems suggest that he was not yet
definitely received into the Hellenic pantheon. Yet there are reasons
for believing that Bœotia had received the alien worship in the
‘Minyan’ epoch, before the incoming of the ‘Boiotoi’; and Attica
before the Ionic emigration; while in the Peloponnese the Argive
legend associates the advent of the god with the names of Perseus and
the Prœtid dynasty. In spite of local opposition and its natural
antagonism to the nascent spirit of Hellenism, which was now tending
to express itself in certain definite and orderly forms of mood,
thought and feeling, the new religion won its way victoriously, taking
Thebes for its Hellenic metropolis, and some time afterwards securing
its position at Delphi, where the priesthood and the Apolline oracle
become its eager champions. {57} It was distinguished from the
traditional Hellenic in regard to its idea of divine personality, its
ritual and its psychic influence, that is to say, the mood that it
evoked in the votary. In the first place, the figure of Dionysos
belonged indeed to personal theism, certainly in Hellenic cult and
probably in the Thracian; but he was less sharply defined as a
concrete individual than was, for instance, Apollo or Athena; he was
vaguer in outline, a changeful power conceived more in accordance with
daimonistic, later with pantheistic thought, incarnate in many
animal-shapes and operative in the life-processes of the vegetative
world; and an atmosphere of nature-magic accompanied him.
The central motives of his oldest form of ritual were the birth and
death of the God, a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop
in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology,
though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenæan creed.
But the death of this God was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to
pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull
or the goat or the boy whom they rent and devoured was supposed to be
his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage and at times
cannibalistic communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit
and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act and--we may suppose--by
the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants the
psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy,
which might show itself in wild outburst of mental and physical force,
and the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment in which the
worshipper escaped the limits of his own {58} nature and achieved a
temporary sense of identity with the God; and such union with divinity
might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be
used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired
and proclaimed for its own sake, as a more intense mood of life. This
religion preached no morality and could ill adapt itself to civic
life; its ideal was supranormal psychic energy. The process whereby it
was half captured and half tamed by the young Hellenic spirit forms
one of the most interesting chapters in Hellenism.
It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the
period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period
of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces
and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of
this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean
population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired
its definite instincts and bias. The ninth and the eighth centuries
witnessed the diffusion of epic literature, the rise of lyric poetry,
the emergence of the ‘eikon’ or idol in religious art, and generally
the development of cities and civic life; and it is essential to
estimate the religious influence of these forces.
_Influence of epic and lyric poetry_.--That the contribution of
Homeric and of the later Hesiodic literature to the shaping and fixing
of Hellenic religion was most fruitful and effective cannot be
doubted. Only we must not accept the exaggerating view of
Herodotus[58.1] that these two poets were really {59} the founders of
the anthropomorphic religion, creating the orthodox Hellenic theogony
and determining the names and functions and shapes of the special
divinities. By such a statement some scholars have been misled into
regarding the Homeric poems as a kind of Greek Bible, which in respect
to religious matters it might be heresy to disbelieve. But we know
that local temple-legend and local folklore could always maintain its
independence of Homeric, or Hesiodic authority, in respect to the
titles of the Gods, their relationships and genealogies. Artemis was
not everywhere reputed to have the same parentage or Zeus the same
spouse. The early epic poets gathered many of the ἱεροὶ λόγοι of
shrines, but there was much that they did not gather and which yet
survived. There was a noticeable particularism in Greek theology, and
no orthodoxy and no heterodoxy in the sense that it was moral to
believe or immoral to disbelieve any sacred book.
The chief religious achievement of Homer and his fellows was to
intensify the anthropomorphic trend in Greek religion, to sharpen and
individualise the concepts of divinity, and to diffuse throughout the
Hellenic world a certain uniformity of religious imagination. To their
work partly, as well as to the higher synthetic power of the Greek
mind, we may ascribe the fact that in spite of local varieties of myth
and cult-title, in spite of the various elements that the divine
personality may have absorbed from earlier cult-figures and cult-forms
in the various cult-centres, yet the sense of the individual unity of
person was not lost so long as the same name was in vogue; hence
Apollo Lykeios of Argos could not be a {60} different person from the
Apollo Patroös of Athens, nor could hostility arise between them.
That is to say, the higher religious literature imprinted a certain
precision and definiteness upon the personal names of the leading
divinities and endowed them with a certain essential connotation; for
example, the dogma of the virginity of Athena and Artemis, always
presented in the higher poetry, prevailed so far as to suppress the
maternal character that may have attached to them in the prehistoric
period and of which we can still discern a glimmering in certain local
cults.[60.1] And to this task of shaping the divine characters the
rising lyric poetry, which was growing up with the decay of the epic,
and which in obedience to the Hellenic passion for disciplined form
was developing fixed types of song and music appropriate to special
festivals and worships, must have contributed much. The ‘spondaic’
metre was adapted to the invocation or hymn sung at the libation--the
σπονδή--to Zeus, and the solemn gravity of the spondaic fragment
attributed to Terpander fittingly expresses the majesty of the high
God, “the primal cause of all things, the Leader of the world.”[60.2]
The pæan and the ‘nomos’ became instinct with the Apolline, the
Dithyrambos with the Dionysiac spirit,[60.3] the spirit of order and
self-restraint on the one hand, the spirit of ecstasy and passion on
the other. The earlier Greek lyric was in fact mainly religious, being
composed for public or private occasions of worship; its vogue was
therefore wide and in some communities, as in Arcadia, the singing
{61} of these compositions formed part of the national training of the
young.[61.1]
_Idolatry_.--Another phenomenon of importance at the beginning of this
second period is the rise of idolatry, the prevalence of the use of
the ‘eikon’ in actual worship in place of the older aniconic ‘agalma,’
which had sufficed for the Minoan and the Homeric world as a token of
the divine presence or as a magnet attracting it to the worshipper.
This important change in the object of cult may have been beginning in
the tenth century, for we have one indication of it in the Homeric
poems, and recently on one of a series of vases of the early geometric
style found in a grave near Knossos of the post-Minoan period the
figures of an armed God and Goddess are depicted on low bases,
evidently idols, and perhaps the earliest surviving of any Hellenic
divinity.[61.2] Henceforth, although the old fetich-object, the
aniconic ‘agalma,’ lingered long in certain shrines and holy places,
the impulse towards idolatry became imperious and almost universal,
exercising a mighty influence on the religious sentiment of the
Hellenes both before and after the triumph of Christianity. The
worship before the idol intensified the already powerful
anthropomorphic instinct of the polytheism; and was at once a source
of strength and a cause of narrowness. It brought to the people a
strong conviction of the real presence of the concrete and individual
divinity; and, as it gave its mandate to the greatest art of the
world, it evolved the ideal of divinity as the ideal of humanity,
expressible in forms of beauty, strength, and majesty. On the other
hand, it was a force {62} working against the development of a more
mystic, more immaterial religion, or of a consciousness of Godhead as
an all-pervading spirit, such as might arise out of the vaguer
religious perception of those half-personal ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’
which never wholly faded from the popular creed.
_Progress of anthropomorphism_.--It is interesting to mark within this
second period the various effects of the now regnant anthropomorphism.
Those functional ‘daimones’ mentioned above tend to leave the
amorphous twilight of religious perception, in which the Roman
‘Indigitamenta’ remained, and to be attracted into the stronger life
of personal theism. ‘Kourotrophos,’ once perhaps only a vague
functional power that nurtured children, becomes identified with
Artemis or Ge;[62.1] ‘Χλόη,’ ‘Divine verdure,’ when the cult was
introduced from the Marathonian Tetrapolis to the Akropolis of
Athens--if this indeed is a true account of its career, could only
maintain herself as Demeter Χλόη.[62.2]
Again the name Ἥρως comes to be applied to even the most shadowy of
these functional powers, to Μυίαγρος, the Fly-chaser, the most limited
and momentary of them all, to Eunostos, the daimon of good harvest,
about whom a very human tale is told, and to call them ‘Heroes’
implies that they were imagined as semi-divine men who once lived on
the earth. Even the most immaterial forces, some of those which mark
mental phases or social conditions, such as Ἐρως Love, Φιλία
Friendship, Εἰρήνη Peace, became often for the religious imagination
personal individuals with human relationships;[62.3] thus Eirene {63}
emerges almost as a real goddess with the traits of Demeter, Φιλία on
a relief in the Jacobsen Collection is individualised as the mother of
Zeus Philios, in defiance of the traditional theogony.[63.1] Others
such as ‘Αἰδώς’ ‘Compassion’ remained in the borderland between
animating forces and personal deities.
But we observe in many cases that the name itself was an obstacle to
the emergence of a convincingly personal God or Goddess; and where
this is the case the personality never could play a leading part in
the advanced religion. Thus Ἑστία bore a name that denoted nothing
more than ‘the Hearth,’ considered as animate and holy; Greek
anthropomorphism did its utmost for her, but never or rarely succeeded
in establishing her as a fully formed personal goddess. The same
phenomenon is observable in regard to Ge, Helios and Selene; it was
easy to regard them as animate substances or powers and as such to
worship them; such worship they received throughout all periods of
Greek religion, but no direction of the moral, social and spiritual
progress of the race, for their names connoted so obviously substances
unlike and alien to man that they could not with conviction be
imagined as glorified men or women.[63.2] It was otherwise with such
names as Apollo, Hera, Athena, which could become as real and
individual as Miltiades or Themistokles; and it is these humanised
personalities that alone dominate the higher religion of Greece. The
spiritual career of Demeter only began when men forgot the original
meaning of her name and half forgot that she was {64} only Mother
Earth. The ‘Anemoi’ being mere ‘Winds,’ were scarcely fitted for civic
life; but Boreas, having a personal name, could become a citizen and
was actually worshipped as Πολίτης ‘the Citizen’ at Thourioi.[64.1] A
curious and unscientific distinction that Aristophanes makes between
the religions of the Hellenes and the Barbarians[64.2] has its
justification from this point of view.
_Influence of the Polis on religion_.--The spirit of the Polis, the
dominant influence in Greek religion throughout this second period,
worked in the same direction as the anthropomorphic instinct; giving
complexity, varied individuality and an ever-growing social value to
the idea of Godhead. The deities of the wild enter the ring-wall of
the city and shed much of their wild character. Apollo Lykeios the
Wolf-God, enters Argos and becomes the political leader of the State,
in whose temple a perpetual fire was maintained, symbol of the
perpetual life of the community.[64.3] And the advanced civic
imagination tended to transform the primitive theriolatry or
theriomorphic ideas that still survived. Proofs of direct animal
worship in the later period are very rare and generally doubtful; for
the ancient writers apply the term ‘worship’ carelessly, applying it
to any trivial act of reverential treatment.[64.4] In the few cases
where we can still discern the animal receiving cult, we find the
anomaly explained away by some association established between the
animal and the anthropomorphic deity or hero. Thus the wolf became no
longer sacred in {65} its own right--if indeed it ever was--but might
be reverenced here and there as the occasional incarnation of Apollo
or as his guide or companion.
The primitive population of the Troad may once have ‘worshipped’ the
field-mouse, though the authority that attests it is a late and
doubtful one; but when Apollo becomes in this region the civic
guardian of the Æolians and the protector of their crops, he takes a
title from the mouse (Σμινθεύς from σμινθός), and the mouse is carved
at the side of the anthropomorphic image as a propitiatory hint to the
rest of the species not to injure the corn, or as a hint to the God
that mice needed regulating.[65.1]
The serpent worshipped in the cavern, or in some hole or corner of the
house--vaguely, in ‘Aryan’ times, as the Earth-daimon or
House-genius--became interpreted as the embodiment of the ancestor
Erechtheus of Athens, or Kuchreus of Salamis, or Zeus Κτήσιος, the
guardian of the household possessions, or of Zeus Meilichios, the
nether God. When the very human Asklepios came to Athens towards the
end of the fifth century, he brought with him certain dogs who were
ministers of healing; and the Athenians offered sacrificial cakes both
to the God and to his dogs who partook of his sanctity.[65.2] This
may appear a strange imbecility; but at all events we discern in these
facts the prevalent anthropomorphism dominating and transforming what
it could not abolish of the old theriolatry; just as we see the
coin-artist of Phigaleia transforming the uncouth type of the
horse-headed Demeter into a beautiful human form of a goddess {66}
wearing a necklace with a horse-hoof as its pendant. The sacred animal
never wholly died out of Hellas; but it could only maintain its
worship by entering the service of the human gods.
The expansion of the civic system in this second period, due to
extended colonisation and commerce, induced a development of law and
an expansion of moral and religious ideas. One of the most vital
results of the institution of the Polis was the widening of the idea
of kinship. For in theory the city was a congregation of kinsmen, a
combination of tribes, phratries, and families, wider or narrower
associations framed on a kin-basis; and it gradually evolved the
belief, pregnant of legal and moral developments, that every citizen
was of kin to every other.
In consonance with the conception of the State as an extended family,
we find certain ancient family-cults taken over into the religion of
the Polis. As the private family was knit together by the worship of
the Hearth in the hall and of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, ‘the God of the Garth,’ in
the courtyard of the house, so the City has its common Hestia or Holy
Hearth, upon which often a perpetual fire was maintained in its
‘Prytaneion’ or Common Hall; and the Cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος was
established in ancient days on the Akropolis of Athens. The
organisation of the ‘phratries’ was consecrated to the high deities,
Zeus Athena and--among some Ionic communities--to Aphrodite; and the
decisions of the ‘phrateres’ or ‘Brothers’ on questions of adoption
and legitimacy of citizens were delivered from the altar of Zeus
Phratrios; while the union of the local districts or ‘demes’ was
sanctified by the cult of Zeus or {67} Aphrodite Pandemos, the God or
Goddess of ‘all the demes.’ Also, the Polis organised and maintained
the kindred-festivals of commemoration proper to the family or gens or
phratria, the All-Souls celebration of the dead which was held at the
end of the Anthesteria; the γενέσια, the funeral feasts of the γένη;
the ‘Apatouria,’ the joint festival of the phratries; while the great
achievement of the consolidation of the scattered groups into the
single city was celebrated at Athens by the festival of the
Συνοικέσια, the ‘Union of all the Houses,’ and the Panathenaia, the
all-Attic feast of Athena.
The picture that these facts present of a State-religion based on the
idea of the family and of kinship is mainly drawn from Athens, of
which the religious record is always the richest; but it reflects
undoubtedly the system of the other Hellenic states as well. Many of
their records attest the belief that some one of the high divinities
was the ancestor or ancestress of the whole people, and this ancestry
was understood in the physical and literal sense. Thus Apollo
‘Patroös’ was the divine ancestor, being the father of Ion, of the
Ionic population of Attica, and even the non-Ionic stock of that
community, desired for political purposes to affiliate themselves to
this God.[67.1] In the same sense he was called Γενέτωρ, ‘the Father’
in Delos.[67.2] Zeus was the father of Arkas, the eponymous hero of
the Arcadians, and was worshipped as Πατρῶος at Tegea[67.3]; Hermes
also was ancestral God of part of {68} the Arcadian land and
identified with the ancestor Aipytos.[68.1] These religious fictions
came to exert an important influence on morality and also to develop
a certain spiritual significance which will be considered later.
_Hero-cult_.--This aspect of the public religion is further emphasised
by the prevailing custom of hero-worship which appears to have
gathered strength in this second period. The hero in the technical
sense was one whose tomb was honoured with semi-divine rites and who
was regarded either as a glorious man of the past or as the mortal
ancestor of the State or the tribe or the clan. The first clear
evidence of this in literature is in the poem of Arktinos of Miletos
called the ‘Aithiopis,’ that may belong to the end of the eighth
century, in which the apotheosis of Achilles was described. But there
is, as has been said, strong reason for believing that the practice of
‘heroising’ the dead descended from the pre-Homeric age. Nevertheless,
of the multitude of hero and ancestor cults recorded in ancient
Hellas, the greater number are probably post-Homeric. We find the
Delphic oracle giving vigorous encouragement to the institution of
them, and in the sixth century cities begin to negotiate and dispute
about the possession of the relics of heroes. Some of these in the
older cults may have been actual living men, dimly remembered, some
were fictitious ancestors, like Arkas and Lakedaimon, some may have
been faded deities, such as were Eubouleus at Eleusis and Trophonios
at Lebadeia. But all were imagined by the worshipper to have been once
men or women living upon the earth. This, {69} then, becomes a fact of
importance for the religious thought of the world, for it engenders,
or at least encourages, the belief that human beings might through
exceptional merit be exalted after death to a condition of blessed
immortality, not as mere spirits, but as beings with glorified body
and soul. Furthermore, certain ancient heroes, long endeared to the
people as the primeval parent or the war-leader of their forefathers,
become raised to the position of the high God and merged in his being;
Erechtheus shares the altar and even the title of Poseidon and Zeus,
Aipytos of Arcadia becomes Hermes, Agamemnon in Laconia at last is
fused with Zeus.[69.1]
Nor in this second period were such heroic honours reserved for the
remote ancestor or the great king or warrior of old, but were
sometimes paid to the recently dead, to the men who had served the
State well by arms or by counsel. On the assumption that Lykourgos of
Sparta was a real man--and no other theory that bears scrutiny has
been put forward about him--his case is the earliest recorded instance
of the ‘heroising’ of a personage of the historic period. A great
stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion
of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which
reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take
with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their
stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new
citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. The {70} most natural
person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the
colony, the κτίστης or ἀρχηγέτης as he was called; and we may regard
it as the usual rule that, when he died, he would be buried within the
city and his tomb would become a ‘ἡρῶον’ and would be visited yearly
with annual offerings.
That the ordinary head of the private household in this period
received posthumous honours amounting to actual worship cannot be
definitely proved. The tendance of the dead had become indeed a matter
of religion, and at Athens was attached to the ritual of the state by
the commemorative feast of All Souls, the χύτροι, or ‘Feast of Pots,’
the last day of the Anthesteria. But nothing that is recorded of this
ghost-ceremony convicts it of actual worship; the ghosts are invited
to spend the day with the household that holds them in affection; they
are offered pots of porridge, and then at sunset are requested or
commanded to depart. Prayers are proffered in their behalf to the
powers of death, but not directly to the ghosts themselves; no cult is
offered them as to superior beings endowed with supernatural power
over the lives of individuals and states.[70.1] Nevertheless, the
passionate service of lamentation and the extravagant dedication of
gifts which marked the funeral ceremonies of the eighth and seventh
centuries and which certain early legislation was framed to check,
reveals a feeling about the dead bordering on veneration and such as
might inspire actual worship.
We may safely assume that the growing interest of the States in
hero-cult intensified the family {71} aspect of the State-religion;
the hero as the glorious kinsman is invited to the sacrifices of the
higher deities, and to the hospitable ritual known as the ‘theoxenia’
in which the God himself is the host.
It is important for the student of religion to mark the consequences
of this close association of the civic religion with the idea of
kinship that held together the family and tribe. These have been
estimated more at length elsewhere[71.1] and only a few general
observations are possible here. Where a family bond exists between the
deity and the city, the spirit of genial fellowship is likely to
prevail in the ritual and religious emotions, and the family meal
might become the type of the public sacrificial meal with the god.
Such a religion is adverse to proselytism; for as it is the sacred
prerogative of certain kindred stocks, its principle means the
exclusion of the stranger. Its religious and moral feeling is
naturally clannish; the whole group must share in the moral guilt of
the individual, and the sins of the fathers will be visited on the
children. It affords a keen stimulus to local patriotism and quickens
an ardent life within the wall of the city; it has at the same time
the natural defects of narrowness of view. Yet, in the course of
religious evolution, we must regard the old Hellenic conception of the
God the Father of the tribe or the city as pregnant of the larger idea
of God as the Father of mankind, an idea which had already dawned upon
Homer at a time when the tribal spirit of religion was still at its
height.
A further result of such a system is that the {72} State-divinities
become also the patrons and guardians of the family morality, Zeus and
Hera, for instance, the supervisors of the human marriage and of the
duties of married life; and copious records present the High God as
the protector of the father’s right; of the tie that binds together
the brethren, the sisters, the kinsmen. While such a religion was a
living force, it was not likely that the family could assert itself as
against the State; to marry healthfully and early, to beget vigorous
children as defenders of the State and the family graves, to cherish
and honour one’s parents, to protect the orphan, these were patriotic
religious duties that were inspired by the developed State-religion
and strenuously preached by the best ethical teachers of Greece. The
State being the family ‘writ large,’ private morality and public could
not clash. The brutal action of Kreon in the Antigone is equally an
attack on the religion of the State as on that of the family; and it
was not till the fifth century that the claim of private conscience as
against the family and the State could arise or that the question
could be asked “Whether the good man was really the same as the good
citizen.”
_Influence of political religion on law_.--Of still greater interest
is an important advance in criminal law, discernible as early as the
eighth century, which may be traced partly to the growth of the City,
with its extended idea of kinship, partly to the growing intensity of
the belief in the power and significance of the spirits of the dead.
In the most primitive period of Hellas, the shedding of kinsman’s
blood was already a heinous sin; but the slaying of one outside the
kindred {73} circle was neither a sin against God nor a social crime.
But as the public mind of Greece became penetrated with the feeling
that all the citizens of the Polis were in some sense akin, the
slaying of a citizen became a criminal act of which the State, and no
longer merely the clan of the slain man, would take cognisance. And
this expanded concept of law is reflected in the expansion of an
ancient and most significant cult, the cult of Zeus Meilichios.[73.1]
This was the underworld God, who was angered and must be appeased when
kindred blood was shed; as the idea of kinship was enlarged, any civic
massacre might arouse his wrath and rites of atonement might be
offered to him. This keener sensitiveness concerning the sanctity of
human life was accompanied by a feeling that bloodshed might imprint a
stain on the slayer that rendered him ritualistically unclean, that
is, temporarily unfit to approach the Gods or men; it was also
fortified by the growing fear of the ghost-world, which seems to have
lain more heavily on the post-Homeric society than on Homer’s men. It
is hard to give the dates for this section of the mental history of
Hellas. The first record of the thought, which is nowhere explicit in
Homer, that homicide in certain circumstances demands purification is
derived from the Aithiopis of Arktinos, the epic poet of Miletos in
the eighth century.[73.2] Achilles, having slain the worthless
Thersites, must retire from the army for a while to be purified in
Lesbos by Apollo and Artemis; we mark here that the slain man was no
kinsman of the slayer in any true sense {74} of the word, but was a
member of the same Achæan community, and therefore his slaying
brought a religious impurity upon the hero; and we may believe that
the narrative reveals the early religious law of Miletos. But we must,
in passing, recognise the possibility that these apparently new
manifestations may be only a revival of immemorial thought and
feeling, common in the older non-Hellenic societies, and only for a
time suspended.[74.1]
_Influence of Delphi and Crete_.--In this post-Homeric development of
a system of purification from bloodshed, the legends suggest that
Crete and Delphi played a momentous part. In the great island, the
cradle of European culture, the cult of Zeus had early attached to
itself certain Cathartic ideas, probably of Dionysiac origin. And
probably in the pre-Homeric period the influence of Crete had reached
Delphi; while the legend of the migration of Apollo Delphinios from
Crete to Delphi, and the story that the God himself must go to this
island to be purified from the blood of Python, belong to the second
period with which we are dealing.
We have reason to believe that the Delphic God--through the agency of
his politic priesthood--was asserting his claim in the eighth and
seventh centuries to be the dictator in the matter of purification
from homicide, and thus to satisfy the cravings of an awakening
conscience. This claim may have been suggested partly by the fear of
competition with the spreading Dionysiac religion, which also brought
with it a ‘Kathartic’ message, and with which the Delphic priesthood
were wise enough to agree quickly; partly also by the aboriginal
nature of {75} Apollo, who was immemorially φοῖβος or ‘pure.’ Though
the claim was not universally admitted and the Apolline jurisdiction
could not obliterate the function of other divinities in this matter,
yet it was powerful and effective of much that was vital both to law
and religion. Of the early procedure at Delphi we know nothing. If the
god exercised discretion in his grant of purification, if he refused,
for instance, to purify the deliberate and cold-blooded murderer, here
was the opportunity for the emergence of a civilised law of homicide.
It may not have been until the seventh century that any Hellenic state
could express in a legal establishment its consciousness of the
difference between the act of murder and the act of justifiable or
accidental homicide. The earliest that we know of was the law-court,
ἐπί Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the
Dolphin-God”--established at Athens under the patronage of the
Cretan-Delphic God to try cases where the homicide was admitted and
justification was pleaded. In this, as in other Attic courts that
dealt with the same offence, rites of purification were often an
essential adjunct of the ceremony. The typical legend that enshrines
the early ideas of ‘Katharsis’ and turns on the question of
justifiable homicide is the legend of Orestes, which had spread around
the Peloponnese and penetrated Attica as early as the eighth century,
and later became Pan-Hellenic. Apollo, as a divine agent, appears in
it first, as far as we have any literary record, in the lyric of
Stesichoros, and at some indeterminate date in this period undertook
the purification of the matricide.
_Influence of Delphi on colonisation_.--These {76} Cathartic functions
and the general demand for their exercise must have greatly enhanced
the influence of Delphi in the earlier part of the post-Homeric
period. It was doubtless strengthened even more by the great secular
movement of Greek colonisation. With wise foresight the God had
undertaken the guidance and encouragement of this already in the
earliest days when the Hellenes were pushing across the sea; for it
seems as if the first Greek settlements on the Asia Minor coast, the
Lycian and the Æolic, were due to his leadership if not to his
inspiration. The legends that associate him with the Dorian migration
into the Peloponnese are too powerful to be rejected. And after this
event, when light begins to shine on Greek history and the Hellenic
race was rapidly establishing that chain of colonies across and around
the Mediterranean which were to diffuse Greek culture through the
world, the power of Delphi and the Delphic oracle reached its zenith.
For it is clear that it was the prevailing fashion to consult the
Pythian Apollo as to the choice of a site. Hence it came about that in
so many Greek cities Apollo was worshipped as Ἀρχηγέτης, that is, as
the divine founder, and that the flourishing communities of the West
sent back tithe-offerings to his shrine.[76.1] Was it by some
accident or by something essential in his early cult and character
that the God was able to play this momentous political part, such as
no other deity has ever played in the secular history of his people?
The cause may lie far back in the dim antiquity of the Apolline cult,
when he was specially Ἀγυιεύς, a god ‘of the road,’ the leader of the
migratory host. And {77} in pre-Homeric times, if not aboriginally, he
was already an oracular God; nor was any occasion so urgent for a
consultation of the local oracle as when the people were setting forth
on their perilous path to find a new home.[77.1]
_The Delphic oracle_.--The spiritual history of the Hellenic race in
the early history period, when we mark a growing consciousness of
nationality and of kinship in the various stocks, is very much a
record of the career and activity of the Delphic oracle; and this is
too complex and lengthy a theme to be more than adumbrated
here.[77.2] Due partly to the local position and the immemorial
sanctity of the oracle, partly to the devotion and the grateful
remembrance of the powerful Dorian states in the Peloponnese, the
Pythian worship came to overshadow the Delian, and provided the chief
religious centre and the strongest bond of spiritual unity in the
Hellenic world. For political unity it could do little, owing to the
centrifugal bias of Greek politics; yet the Delphic Amphiktyony, the
most powerful of these religious confederations that are recorded here
and there in the early history of Greece, contained within it the
germs of intertribal morality and concord. Its members were not indeed
pledged to perpetual amity, but at least to a certain mutual
forbearance even in their warlike dealings with one another. But the
chief regulative functions of the oracle were concerned with questions
of the institution and administration of cults, with the domains of
legislation, colonisation, public and even private morality and
conduct. In the sphere of religion it doubtless {78} emphasised the
necessity of purification from bloodshed; otherwise it had no high
religious message to deliver; but it was enthusiastic for the
propagation of the cult of Dionysos, and it authorised and sometimes
encouraged the growing tendency towards the posthumous worship of
distinguished men. In the sphere of morality its standard was
generally high and its influence beneficent, especially--if we can
trust the record--in the later period when it played the part of a
State-Confessional and in its utterances reflected generally the
progress of Greek ethics and the spirit of an enlightened
humanitarianism.
But its chief religious achievements were to bring some principle of
unity and authority into the complex and shifting aggregate of Greek
polytheism, and to deepen the impression on the Hellenic mind of the
divine ordering of the world; and the fruits of this teaching we
gather in the works of Attic tragedy and in the history of Herodotus.
In view of the history of other temple institutions of like power
among other peoples--the Mesopotamian, for instance--we may be
surprised that the Delphic priesthood made no attempt to impose Apollo
as the supreme God upon the Hellenic states. The author of the Homeric
hymn, composed partly under Delphic influences, exalts Apollo as high
as he dares; but neither in this nor in any Delphic utterance is
Apollo presented as more than the minister of Zeus, the mouthpiece of
the supreme Father-God, the tradition of whose supremacy among the
Aryan Hellenes had been fixed fast by Homer and the Homeridai.
Nor did the Delphic Apollo succeed in achieving a monopoly of
divination; for the spirit of local {79} independence was opposed to
any divine monopoly in any department of life. And other oracles, such
as some of those on the Asia Minor shore, acquired considerable
prestige, especially in the later period when the influence of Delphi
had declined. But from the eighth till the beginning of the fifth
century, the Pythian is the only one of the many mantic institutions
that is to be regarded as a vital force of Pan-Hellenism.
_The games of Greece_.--As another important phenomenon belonging to
the earlier part of this second period we note the emergence and
development of the great Hellenic games. Some recent theorists have
supposed that all the public athletic contests in Greece arose
directly from some religious ritual belonging to the cult either of
the gods or of the dead hero. The evidence is faulty and the
ritualistic origin of these institutions is unproven. But a common
temple-worship undoubtedly gave the opportunity and the occasion to
the development of the four Great Games, and from the beginning they
were placed beneath the ægis of religion. And these must be reckoned
as among the strongest Pan-Hellenic influences, evoking and
strengthening the consciousness of nationality. For in the sixth
century the whole of Hellas, eastern and western, was represented at
Olympia, Pytho, the Isthmus and Nemea; here was maintained the ‘truce
of God’ between the jealous or hostile communities; and at Olympia
once in every four years the Pan-Hellenes offered a common homage to
their aboriginal Father-God.
We must then regard the great games and the Pythian establishment as
momentous factors in the {80} religious national life, as tending to
evolve a religion of a broader compass than the narrow tribal type of
the remote past. And they concern the higher mental history of the
race because most of them, and notably the Pythian, included
competitions of art and literature; and thus they assisted in
establishing the specially Hellenic theory of the divine character of
the artistic and intellectual life.
There were other festal and public meetings of a more exclusively
religious purpose that also served to deepen in the various states the
consciousness of spiritual unity, and often, where the great lyric
poets composed hymns for the occasion, to exalt and illuminate the
ideal conception of the divinity; the Pan-Ionic Delian festival of
Apollo, for instance, of which the splendour developed in the early
post-Homeric age and with the growing prosperity of the new Ionic
colonies, must have contributed much to the building up of the
peculiarly Hellenic ideal of Apollo; and the Homeric hymn, inspired by
this occasion, is the earliest record of the national consciousness of
the Ionic race.
_Diffusion of Dionysos-worship_.--Another religious phenomenon,
pregnant of consequences for the spiritual history of Hellenism, is
the diffusion of the worship of Dionysos. Faint, though indubitable
traces of this can be discerned in the prehistoric period, but it only
begins to be palpable and important in the early historic. Its
significance has already been indicated in general outlines.[80.1]
Having entered Attica from Bœotia and been adopted into the Attic
state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor
coast, {81} it gradually, in the eighth and seventh centuries captured
most of the States of the Peloponnese, of the islands and the more
distant colonies.
The Hellenic culture of Dionysos forms one of the most interesting
chapters in the spiritual career of Hellenism; for the taming of the
wild Thracian God, the transformation of him into a civic deity, the
disciplining and the adaptation of the thiasoi of the Maenads to the
uses of an orderly state-religion, were not the least among the
achievements of the Hellenic genius. And as the state-religion of
these centuries had no eschatologic theory, so it seems to have
discarded everywhere whatever eschatologic promise the Dionysiac
religion proclaimed on its entrance into Greece. Yet, in spite of the
chastening influence of the civic spirit, the worship preserved much
of its distinctive tone and religious power; evoking a special mood
unknown in the other cults; while even the savage form of sacrament,
in which the God was devoured in his human or animal-incarnation,
survived with some modifications in Tenedos and Chios down to a late
period. The history, then, of the Dionysiac religion concerns the
account of the development of the sacramental idea in the
Mediterranean. It concerns also the history of Hellenic culture; for
one of its modes of expression was a peculiar type of emotional music,
accompanying the Dionysiac hymn known as the dithyramb, which has been
regarded, though probably erroneously, as the parent of Attic tragedy.
Its main contribution to the polytheism of Greece was its stimulation
of a warmer and stronger religious faith; and its special later
service to popular religious theory was the refining and {82}
brightening of men’s thoughts and sentiments concerning the life after
death and the powers of the lower world, with whom the mild and genial
God was generally identified or associated.
_Orphic thiasoi_.--But its highest importance is found rather in the
esoteric than in the external or popular domain of Hellenic religion.
For, perhaps as early as the seventh century, the cult of Dionysos was
raised to a higher power by the rise and diffusion of the Orphic
brotherhoods or ‘thiasoi’ who worshipped this deity under various
mystic names. The study of Orphism is of the highest interest and
complexity; and it is only possible here to indicate its general
features and significance. The preachers of the Orphic doctrines are
the first propagandists or missionaries that we can discover in the
pre-Christian Mediterranean world. For they had a definite message,
and ignoring the gentile and civic barriers of the old political
religion, they preached it, if not to all mankind, at least to all the
Hellenes. It was a message fraught with some new and momentous ideas,
whose real import we have been able to gather in part from the now
famous gold-tablets found in the graves of Crete and South Italy, and
containing parts of a metric Orphic liturgy and creed that is a
product at latest of the fifth, if not the sixth, century B.C.
Combining these with some passages in Pindar’s Odes and Plato’s
Dialogues, we can recover in outline the doctrine of early Orphism. It
proclaimed a theory, unfamiliar to native Greek mythology and
religion, that the soul of man is divine and of divine origin; that
the body is its impure prison-house where it is in danger of
contracting stain; that by elaborate purifications and {83}
abstinences the soul might retain its purity, and by sacramental and
magic methods the pure soul might enjoy in this life and in the next
full communion with God. Preoccupied with the problem of the life
after death, the Orphic mystics evolved the concept of Purgatory, a
mode of posthumous punishment temporary and purificatory; also, if we
can trust certain indications in Pindar and Plato, the dogma of
reincarnation or more specially of a triple cycle of lives both in
this world and the next. Students of religious philosophy have noted
here the striking resemblance to Buddhistic thought; and have
considered whether Indian speculation could have cast its influence so
far westward at so early a time.
It is of more immediate importance for the religious history of the
Greek people to determine--if we could--the measure of success that
these missions achieved, how far they succeeded in capturing the
masses or the élite of the people. They certainly did not succeed in
penetrating the inner circle of the Eleusinian mysteries; there is no
evidence that they even tried, though it is likely that they did; but
we may surmise that their influence was at one time strong at Athens,
as Aristophanes proclaims as a generally accepted tradition that
Orpheus was the apostolic founder of all mysteries. They were
evidently powerful in Crete; but the chief arena of their activity and
the chief scene of their secular and political influence was ‘Western
Hellas’ or Magna Græcia, where Pythagoras was their greatest convert
and the Pythagorean clubs their militant orders. The career of these
forms a page of general Greek history. Their downfall relieved Hellas
from the danger of the establishment {84} of Orphism as a secular
power, which threatened the Hellenic spirit with a bondage to
sacerdotalism and the pharisaic formalism of the purist. Henceforth,
the Orphic religion was a private influence only, and we have no
evidence to determine precisely how great it was at any particular
epoch. Pindar was deeply touched by it. Æschylus and Sophocles, so
far as we can see, remained unmoved, while Euripides may have been at
times attracted and at times repelled but was in no sense its
champion. Plato in a well-known passage[84.1] protests strongly
against the Orphic mystery-mongers as spiritual quacks destitute of
any real morality, who dealt in magic and traded in promises and
threats concerning the other world. Whether this moral estimate of
Orphism was just or not, there is no doubt that Plato’s theory of the
soul as expressed in the Phædrus was indebted to the Orphic
metaphysic. And the part played by these preachers of purity and
salvation in the later spiritual history of Greece was certainly of
high importance. They mark the beginning of a new era of individualism
and of what is called ‘otherworldliness’ in religion; for their
concern was with the personal soul and its destiny.
_Eleusinian mysteries_.--The Eleusinia or Mysteries of Eleusis were a
more national and Pan-Hellenic institution than the Orphica, but of
somewhat similar influence and purpose. Originally they may have been
merely the tribal mysteries of an agrarian society to which only the
adult members of the Eleusinian community were admitted. But when our
earliest record reveals them, namely, the Homeric hymn to Demeter
which cannot be later {85} than the close of the seventh century, they
have already enlarged their borders and their scope. For they appear
there as appealing to the whole Hellenic world, and their special
promise to the initiated is the happiness of the soul after death.
Having once transcended the tribal limits, they seem to have imposed
no conditions on the aspirants for admission except the possession of
Hellenic speech and purity from actual stain; the initiation was open
to women and occasionally to slaves. Nor does their influence and the
power of their appeal appear to have waned until the introduction of
Christianity. Many scholars have laboured to solve the problems
concerning their ritual, their doctrine and their inner significance.
It has been thought that their chief attractiveness may have lain in
their preservation of a higher sacramental conception of the sacrifice
that had died out in the ordinary public ritual; that the initiate
drank of a sacred cup in which were mystically infused the very life
and substance of the kindly Earth-Mother, with whom their own being
was thus transcendentally united. But more careful criticism shows
that, though a simple form of sacrament was part of the preliminary
service, the real pivot of the mystery was not this but a solemn
pageant in which certain sacred things fraught with mystic power were
shown to the eyes of the initiated, who also were allowed to witness
mimetic performances showing the action and passion of a divine drama,
the Abduction of the Daughter, the sorrow and long search of the
Mother, the Holy Marriage of reconciliation, possibly the birth of a
holy infant.
To imagine the thrill and the force of these rites, one must imagine a
mediæval passion-play {86} performed with surpassing stateliness and
solemnity. Those who saw these things in the Hall of the Mysteries at
Eleusis may have carried away with them an abiding sense of a closer
communion with the benign powers of the nether world and a resulting
hope of a happier posthumous lot. We must regard them as the highest
and most spiritual product of the pure Hellenic religion, investing it
with an atmosphere of mystery and awe that was generally lacking in
the public cult, and which was unperturbed at Eleusis by any violence
of morbid ecstasy such as marked the Phrygian and some of the Orphic
rites. We may believe that they exercised a healthful influence on the
moral and spiritual temperament of the Hellene; but it is not clear
that they definitely proclaimed any higher moral theory, nor do they
appear like the Orphica to have preached any dogma of metaphysic or
theology. But, like the Orphica, they tended to widen the horizon of
the religious spirit; for they appealed to a far larger public than
the ordinary cults of the city; and while being Pan-Hellenic in this
sense they belong to the domain of personal religion, for they
satisfied the personal craving of the individual for closer fellowship
with the deity and they soothed the troublous apprehensions that were
growing up in this second period concerning the individual destiny of
the soul. Yet as regards Attica and Athens at least and probably as
regards Hellas, they are not to be ranked, as the Orphica may be,
among the disruptive forces of individualistic religion, undermining
the social fabric of public worship. For the Athenian State
administered them--by the help of Eleusinian officials--in its
corporate capacity; and one of the catechumens--the {87} παῖς ἀφ᾽
ἑστίας--was initiated, according to the most probable view, in behalf
of the whole youth of the city.[87.1]
In the great mysteries the agrarian significance, though discoverable
and associated with simple agrarian magic, was overshadowed by higher
and more spiritual religion. And elsewhere in the State-festivals we
note this same phenomenon of progress in this second period. Old-world
utilitarian rites of agriculture and fertility were often taken over
by the expanding Polis and received an artistic elaboration that
disguised their original significance for the primitive peasant and
raised them to a higher plane of social religion. This interesting
process can be best studied in following the detailed records of the
Laconian Karneia and Hyakinthia, the Delphic Pythia, the Attic
Panathenaia: we can feelingly appreciate in these the potent influence
of the lyric poetry, the music, and the art of early Greece, shaping
and elevating men’s imagination of divinity.
By the close of this second period--_c._ 500 B.C.--the Hellenic
national consciousness had realised itself in respect of intellectual
culture, ethics and religion. Zeus Hellanios, the tribal God, is
becoming Panhellanios. The age of the tyrants contributed much to the
growth of Pan-Hellenism; Peisistratos something to the idea of a
national religion, in that he seems to have worked zealously for the
organisation and expansion of the Eleusinian mysteries. The cult of
Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways
of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the
Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of
civic worship. {88} But the two most striking phenomena in the
spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and
expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly,
the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as
the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces
affecting the life of the popular religion.
_Sixth-century philosophy_.--The relations of Greek philosophy to
Greek religion is a great and complex subject, the theme of many
modern treatises; and in this slight sketch of the whole history of
the polytheism there is no room for more than a few most general
observations. So far as the new speculation, which gave birth to the
free secular science of Europe, was preoccupied with questions of the
physical origins of things and elemental theories of cosmogony, it
would not necessarily clash with any orthodox prejudice of the average
Hellene. For he had no sacred books which dictated to him any views
concerning the origin of the world or the constitution of nature, and
which he would have considered it immoral to disbelieve. In fact when
Herakleitos boldly declared that “neither God nor man made the
Kosmos,” there was no authoritative Greek myth or theologic dogma to
gainsay him. But the great philosophers of the sixth century,
Pythagoras, Empedokles, Xenophanes and Herakleitos were also directly
concerned with the philosophy of religion, with speculations on the
nature and with the true definition of Godhead; and some of the
surviving fragments of their works express ideas and sentiments in
sharp antagonism to the concepts and ritual of the contemporary
polytheism. The main trend of their {89} speculations ran counter to
the anthropomorphic theory of divinity; and they tend to define God
not as a person, but rather as the highest spiritual or metaphysical
or even physical power or function of the universe; and there is a
common tendency in this sixth-century thought away from the theistic
to the pantheistic view. Pythagoras is said to have explained the
conception of God in terms of mathematics and to have been willing to
accept the personages of the popular polytheism on condition of
finding their true mathematical equation.[89.1] But this philosopher
stands apart from the other leaders of this first period of Hellenic
free thought. The mathematical mind is often a prey to mysticism. And
Pythagoras was the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism, the
founder of those secret societies that threatened the secular and the
intellectual freedom of Hellas. Equally on its mystic as on its
rationalistic side the Pythagorean teaching was in tendency inimical
to the public religion of Greece, though the members of this sect
appear always to have compromised with it. In the fragments of
Xenophanes we find the most severe protests against the current
religious conceptions of Hellas; his verses quoted by Clemens[89.2]
polemise strongly against the folly of anthropomorphism, which is the
master-passion of Greek polytheism; and if one or two of his quoted
utterances seem to proclaim monotheism, it is clear that for his
higher thought Godhead was not a person, but a cosmic principle or a
noetic idea. On the whole the same account may be given of the
religious theory of Herakleitos so far as this is revealed at all in
the {90} fragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he
tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary
polytheism;[90.1] but it is probably a truer view that he regarded it
with half-disguised contempt and only used its terms and figures on
occasion as literary expressions; while three of his fragments are
scornful exclamations against the excesses of the Bacchic ritual, the
methods of purification from blood, and the folly of idolatry.[90.2]
Yet in this early speculation of the sixth century the parting of the
ways has not yet been reached for physical science and religion; the
cosmic theory is expressed in spiritual and animistic rather than in
materialistic terms; for Empedokles Love and Strife are creative
principles, in the view of Thales the magnet has a soul and all things
are full of divine potencies. The great movement of Ionic thought was
indeed adaptable to a high pantheistic or animistic creed, but not to
the personal polytheism of the Hellenes, though most of the
philosophers do not appear to have been vehement protestants. And at
first their protests could have influenced only the minds of a few;
not before the fifth century was the popular State-religion obliged to
take notice of it.
_Rise of tragedy_.--The other phenomenon referred to above as marking
the close of this period was the rise of tragedy. The question of its
influence on the whole popular religion belongs to the history of the
fifth century. What concerns us chiefly at this point is its close
association with Dionysos-cult. The traditional view that it actually
originated in some {91} mimetic form of Bacchic ritual is in the
opinion of the present writer still the most reasonable, although this
is now denied by some scholars.[91.1] But even if its connection with
Dionysos-worship is a secondary or accidental fact, it is still a fact
of importance for the history of Greek polytheism. The records
concerning Thespis of the Attic village Ikaria, a place dominated by
ancient Dionysiac legend, the statement of Herodotus concerning
Kleisthenes, the tyrant of Sikyon, who gave to Dionysos the tragic
choruses that hitherto had been devoted to the hero-cult of Adrastos,
are sufficient proofs that this greatest of all the literary
achievements of post-Homeric Hellas was dedicated to the God already
in the sixth century; and throughout the glorious career of the Attic
stage Dionysos remained its patron-God.
His worship, then, must have received a strong stimulus from this new
form of literature which rapidly achieved popularity and appealed
directly to a larger public than the other. And his character thus
undergoes a singular transformation; the wild God of barbaric origin
comes to take rank by the side of Apollo and the Graces as a divinity
of culture and education, the inspirer of one of the greatest of
Hellenic arts. Here again, as in the cults of Apollo, Athena and the
Muses, we mark the characteristically Hellenic fusion of art and
religion; and the history of the dithyramb, the Dionysiac hymn which
may have been the parent of the drama and which was wedded to a
peculiar mode of music and rhythm, is an important chapter in the
history of European music.