THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.
{92}
The third period of Greek religion may conveniently include the
fifth century and that part of the fourth that ends with the downfall
of the system of civic autonomy at the battle of Chaironeia. For the
history of Greek religion as of Greek culture, it is of the highest
interest, being the richest in respect of religious monuments and
literature and the most forceful and momentous in regard to the
influences at work. In the sphere of external history it witnessed
such world-crises as the struggle of Hellenism against barbarism, the
rise and fall of the Imperial City-State, and the emergence of Macedon
as a world-power; in the sphere of culture it witnessed the
culmination of the greatest art of the world, the bloom and maturity
of the Attic drama and Pindar’s lyric, the diffusion of education and
the spirit of enquiry through the activity of the Sophists, and the
higher development of philosophy and science. To show how the
religious practice and theory of the higher and lower members of
Hellenic society were affected by the great events and achievements of
this greatest period of human history is a necessary but a difficult
task.
_Fifth-century religion contrasted with the Homeric_.--If we take
Athens as the typical religious community of the fifth century and
compare the {93} structure and forms of her state-polytheism with
those of the old Homeric world, we find the personalities of the
prehistoric pantheon still worshipped and cherished; no prehistoric
cult of that epic world has as yet fallen into desuetude; nor had the
most civilised city of Hellas discarded the immemorial rites of the
simple peasant religion, the worship of rivers and streams, nor some
of the most naïve practices of animism. And it is clear that this
conservatism was no hieratic convention, but a living faith,
expressing a religious intuition of the people, who were as yet
untouched by the cooling influences of science and philosophic
scepticism. In fact, for the greater part of the fifth century, the
life of the polytheism was probably stronger than it had been ever in
the past. It was strengthened by the admission of a few new figures
and by the development of some of the old.[93.1]
It is rather in respect to its spirit, tone and outlook that the
religion of the fifth century presents some striking contrasts to the
Homeric. Its anthropomorphism is even more pronounced, thanks to its
great art-power, but it reveals a deeper conviction concerning the
part played by moral agencies and powers in the affairs of men. The
writings of Herodotus expound a religious view of history of which
only faint indications were found in the earlier epic literature. The
historian of the fifth century regards the momentous contest of Greece
with Persia as a conflict of moral forces, the issue being worked out
by unseen powers, such as Nemesis, Violence and Justice, with Zeus as
the {94} righteous Judge. And in weaving into his narrative the
stories of Æacid heroes and the Eleusinian deities speeding to the
help of the Hellenes at Salamis, he doubtless represents the faith of
the average Greek. A similar view was also impressed on the religious
imagination of the people by oracular utterances, such as that which
was imputed to the prophet Bakis--Δῖα Δίκη σβέσσει κρατερὸν Κόρον,
Ὑβριος υἱόν,[94.1] “Justice divine shall quench fell Koros, the child
of Insolence,” Koros standing for Persia, the tyranny born of satiety.
It is expressed pictorially on the famous vase at Naples, representing
Hellas and Asia pleading their cause before the High God with Ἀπάτη,
as a tempting demon, standing by Asia.[94.2] In this scene we trace
also the influence of the famous tragedy of Æschylus, the ‘Persæ,’
which in more than one passage of deep religious conviction pronounces
moral judgment on the great event.[94.3] The same view is expressed
and the same tone heard in the striking poem of Pindar’s eighth
Pythian ode, where he exults over the triumph of ‘Hesychia,’ the armed
Peace of Hellas, who has cast Insolence into the sea, even as Zeus
quelled the monster Typhœus.
_Pan-Hellenism_.--The Hellenic confederate effort against Persia was
the nearest approach ever made by the Hellenic race to Pan-Hellenic
action; and in a striking chapter of Herodotus, eulogising the loyalty
of the Athenians to the cause of Greece, emphasis is laid on the name
of Zeus Hellenios.[94.4] This is the highest political title of the
High God; {95} and its history is interesting. Originally the narrow
tribal name of the God of the Hellenes, a small Thessalian group under
the leadership of the Aiakidai, it was transported to Aigina by a
migration of the same tribe, whose ancestor Aiakos was the high-priest
of Zeus Hellanios; already in the sixth century, when the denotation
of Hellas was enlarged, the title may have taken on a wider meaning.
But it was the danger of the Persian wars, and the part played in
them--we may believe--by the men and the old heroes of Aigina that
brought the cult into prominence, investing the cult-name with a wider
significance and a more potent appeal. Here, then, was Hellenic
religion giving voice to an ideal that might be realised by the poet,
the artist, and the thinker, but never by any statesman or state.
Another cult belonging to the same range as this was that of Zeus
Eleutherios, the God of Hellenic freedom. “Having driven out the
Persian they raised an altar to Zeus, the God of the free, a fair
monument of freedom for Hellas.”[95.1] These lines of Simonides
commemorate the dedication of the Greeks after the victory at Platæa,
when they had purified the land and its shrines from the polluting
presence of the barbarian by means of sacred fire brought from Delphi.
The significance of this has been pointed out elsewhere[95.2] by the
present writer; the fight for liberty was prompted by more than a mere
secular passion, but by an idea inherent in the civic religion. The
title Ελευθέριος is only known before the Persian wars in the
Zeus-worship of Laconia; henceforth it was widely diffused,
commemorating not only the deliverance of Greece from {96} the
barbarian, but, in Sicily for instance, emancipation from the domestic
tyrant.
In contrast with the deterioration of the old Roman religion, caused
by the Hannibalic wars, the successful struggle of Greece against
barbarism in the east and the west undoubtedly quickened for a time
the fervour and devotion inspired by the national cults. The
sufferings of Hellas were easily repaired; the Gods in whom they had
trusted had not failed them, and much of the spoils won from the
barbarian were gratefully dedicated to the embellishment of the
shrines. The vacillating and time-serving policy of Delphi at the hour
of the greatest peril was condoned or unnoted by the victors, and
Apollo received an ample share of the fruits of victory. The champions
of Hellenism in the West, Gelo and Hiero, commemorated their victories
over the Carthaginian and Etruscan powers at Himera and Kyme by
thankofferings sent to Apollo at Delphi and Zeus at Olympia. The
bronze helmet found at Olympia, and now in the British Museum,
inscribed with the simple dedication, “Hieron the son of Deinomenes
and the Syracusans send Tuscan spoils to Zeus from Kyme,” is an
epoch-marking monument of Pan-Hellenic history and religion. The
gratitude of Hellas was paid in the first instance to the High God
Zeus; to him was consecrated the ‘feast of freedom’ at Platæa, which
was still commemorated with pathetic fervour even in the last days of
Hellenic decay;[96.1] to him, under the national title of Olympios,
was dedicated the mighty temple at Akragas, from the spoils won by
Gelo at Himera. But the outflow of national {97} thankfulness was
directed to other divinities as well; notably and naturally to the
War-Goddess of the Athenians, and the spoils of Persia at Athens and
Platæa were partly devoted to the erection of two striking statues of
Athena. Nor were the lesser powers of the elements forgotten; the
winds that assisted the Greek fleet at Artemision and the nymphs of
the soil on which the battle of Platæa was fought; the grateful
Athenians instituted a cult of Boreas, their kinsman, in their
restored city and assisted in the worship of the Nymphs at Kithairon.
The Arcadian goatherd-God, the rustic Pan, was admitted into Athens
shortly before the battle of Marathon, and the story to which the
Athenians gave currency of the help he rendered them at the great
battle contributed something no doubt to the subsequent diffusion of
his cult.
A further religious consequence of these great events was the stimulus
given to hero-worship; Gelo, the victor at Himera, and some of the
Hellenes who fell at Thermopylæ, Marathon and Platæa received heroic
honours. This ‘heroising’ of the recently defunct had its moral value
as a strong stimulus to patriotism, when they had died in the service
of their country; and though it was degraded in the fifth century to
the exaltation of the useless athlete, yet it must be reckoned among
the life-forces of later polytheism and as a momentous factor of
higher religious history.
Finally, we may with probability ascribe to the triumph of Hellas and
to the expanding glory and greatness of Athens a marked increase in
the Hellenic popularity of the Eleusinian mysteries. For this the
Athenians might thank Herodotus and his thrilling {98} narrative of
the vision of a heavenly host seen moving from Eleusis towards
Salamis, for the salvation of Hellas; they might also thank their own
far-sighted policy of encouraging the whole Hellenic world to take
part in the worship at Eleusis, aspiring thus to make the Hall of the
Mysteries, a recent architectural work of the Periclean
administration, the centre of a Pan-Hellenic faith.[98.1] And their
attempt in great measure succeeded.
_Influence of religious art_.--The study of the polytheism of this
century is essentially also a study of the great religious art which
culminated in the handiwork of Pheidias, but which continued forceful
and prolific till the age of Alexander. The general effect of the
iconic art upon Greek religion has been briefly indicated above; and
long before this century the religious bias of the race was committed
to idolatry;[98.2] the people craved an image that they could love
and cherish, though here and there they might retain the uncouth
fetich, the block of wood or rudely hewn stone, because of the
immemorial magic which it had acquired through ages of shy half-savage
veneration. The achievement of Pheidias and his contemporaries was
only the culmination in a process of ideal anthropomorphism that began
with Homer and was helped forward by the lyric poetry and music of the
post-Homeric age and by the art of the sixth century. Strictly
estimated and studied in all its fullness, in the marvellous products
of vase-painting, glyptic and sculpture that even the shattered fabric
of antiquity presents to us, the art of the fifth and early fourth
century must be called the most perfect religious art {99} of the
world. A more spiritual or more mystic religion could not have
produced or could not have borne with such an art. But it was the best
and most satisfying expression of the best that the religious spirit
of Hellenism admitted; for this polytheism had been built up by the
teachers of the people, poets and artists obeying the race-instinct,
not on vague conceptions of infinite Godhead ineffable for art and
inexpressible in clear speech, but on vivid perceptions of concrete
divine personages, distinct in form, attributes and character robust
and very real. The Greek artist, with his miraculous cunning of hand,
could deal with such types as he could not have dealt with ‘the Word’
or with the ‘Buddha.’ Nor was he merely the exponent of the highest
popular imagination, but, unconsciously perhaps and in obedience to a
true art-tradition, at times a reformer and in any case a creator. For
us his works have this value among others that, even more than the
poetic literature, they reveal to us how the people at their best
imagined their deities. But they also helped the people to imagine
them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that
takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic
vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of
Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary
above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of
self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here
more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of
Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone.
It was not till the time of Skopas in the fourth {100} century that
Greek sculpture could so deal with this orgiastic theme. The plastic
work of the fifth century dealing with divine forms is mainly
tranquil, majestic, ethical, intellectual; the physical perfection of
the divinities sculptured on the Parthenon impresses us not merely and
not so much with the sense of physical beauty and strength, but rather
with the sense of a higher and nobler vital power; so instinct is the
beauty with that quality that the Greeks called σεμνότης, a quality
partly ethical, partly spiritual, but palpable in material forms that
hint at a tranquil reserve of strength. The expressive power of such
an art can show benignity and mildness of mood without sentimentality,
because without voluptuousness, intellectual thought without
morbidness, majesty without self-display.
The gentle and tranquillising spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries
speaks in the famous Eleusinian relief showing the mother and the maid
giving his mission to Triptolemos. The Pheidian Athena Parthenos was a
more deeply conceived ideal than the Athena of the poets, for it
showed her as the Madonna of the Athenian people, with a softer touch
of maternal gentleness in the face. The Zeus Olympios of Pheidias
transcended the portrait of the High God as given by Homer or even by
Æschylus; for the chryselephantine statue impressed the later Greeks
as the ideal of the benign and friendly deity, the divine patron of a
Hellas united and at peace with itself; an image that appeared “to add
something to the traditional religion,”[100.1] embodying, as Dio
Chrysostom says, a conception of the God so {101} convincing and
complete that “having once seen it one could not imagine him
otherwise.”[101.1]
Nor had any of the poets presented Hera in forms so winning and
gracious as those in which the best art of this age embodied her, as
the Argive Goddess ‘of good works’ “in whose face and person
brightness appeared by the side of majesty.”[101.2] The poetic
presentation of Apollo is blurred and incomplete compared with such
plastic types as the Apollo of the Parthenon frieze and the Pheidian
statue in the Museo delle Terme. The older poetic ideal of Aphrodite
was shallow and trite compared to the Aphrodite of the Pheidian type,
such as we see presented by the Laborde head in the Louvre; here is
something of the majesty of the great cosmic goddess imagined by
Æschylus in his Danaides, but combined with an emotion of human love
in the countenance and a winning appeal that the verses of the great
poet do not clearly convey. And we may surmise that the ‘Ourania’
Aphrodite of Pheidias had some influence on the theory of Plato and
his distinction between the heavenly and the sensual love. The full
imagination of the personality of Kore would combine the radiance and
the grace of the young cornfield with the awe and mystery of the lower
world; the former is masterfully presented by a coin[101.3] of
Lampsakos that shows her rising from among the cornstalks with
uplifted yearning face; the unknown artist of the great Syracusan
medallion struck towards the close of the fifth century combines this
aspect of her, in a type of surpassing {102} loveliness, with a touch
of melancholy that hints at the character of the Goddess of
death.[102.1]
And yet this triumphant anthropomorphic art must have failed, and
judged by the fragments that survive did fail, when it tried to reveal
in clear outline and full light the half-shrouded forms of the nether
world, the Chthonian Goddesses and the Eumenides whose nature appealed
to the sense of religious awe, to what the Greeks called τὸ φρικῶδες,
and did not brook to be wholly revealed. We may doubt therefore if
even the statues of the Holy Ones, the Semnai, carved by Kalamis and
Skopas, were types so expressive of the real moral-religious
imagination that fashioned these figures of cult as were certain
awestruck verses of Sophocles in the Œdipus Coloneus. Nevertheless,
this ideal Greek art, by expressing in palpable forms of benign beauty
the half-palpable personages of the lower world, did one service to
religion and the religious imagination; it banished the uncouth and
the terrible and helped to purge and tranquillise the Greek mind by
investing the Chthonian powers with benevolence and grace. We discern
here the influence of the Bacchic and Demeter mysteries working upon
the artist and of the artist upon the popular faith. That the average
Greek of the classic period was saved from the vampire terrors that
Mr. Lawson has discovered in modern Greece[102.2] was due equally to
the religion and to the art that he saw around him.
Apart from this special fact, a phenomenon so momentous in the
spiritual world as the flowering of this religious art in the fifth
century claims {103} prominent notice even in the slightest sketch of
the whole history of Greek religion; for it must have worked an effect
which no student of insight would be tempted to belittle upon the
religious mood and thought of the people. Greek records sufficiently
attest its religious working; even the alien Roman, Æmilius Paulus,
when he approached the Pheidian masterpiece of Zeus Olympios felt the
thrill of the ‘real presence’[103.1]; when Aristophanes fervently
calls on Athena as “the Maiden who holdeth our city in her hand and
alone hath visible power and might and is called the Warder of the
Gate,”[103.2] he is thinking of the bronze statue carved by Pheidias
and set to guard the entrance to the Akropolis.
It is impossible, then, that this beautiful idolatry, against which
the philosophers might occasionally protest,[103.3] could have
weakened the popular faith in the native deities. Introduced suddenly
into Rome it helped to destroy the old Roman animistic religion. But
the religious instinct and history of Greece was wholly different from
that of Rome. Greek polytheism would probably have perished or been
transformed by alien systems of cult far sooner than it was, if Greek
art had not fortified and ennobled it, rooting it deeply in the
æsthetic-religious emotions and perceptions of the people. By
establishing so convincingly the individuality of the Greek
divinities, it preserved them from a too rapid absorption into the
personalities of Oriental religions, when the fusion of west and east
had been achieved by Alexander and his successors.
{104}
_Influence of Literature: Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles_.--More
familiar and apparently more answerable is the question concerning the
influence of the poetic masterpieces of this period, the works of
Pindar and the Attic drama, on the general history of Greek religion.
The subject is obviously too complex for the scope of this summary,
and has been handled by many scholars in large treatises. There is
only room here for the most general statement of facts, tendencies and
effects. As exponents of the highest contemporary religious thought
the names of Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are those of
primary authority. It is easy and interesting to collect religious
citations from their works, to compare these one with another and with
the current polytheism. It is far more difficult to decide generally
and in regard to any special point how far any one of them could have
influenced or modified the popular religion. Nor are all these four on
the same footing in respect of opportunity. For Pindar writes for
dynasts and aristocrats and, being a hireling, might be thought
fettered in the free expression of his sentiments; and in any case his
public was more limited than that which the three dramatists
addressed. Therefore their message was likely to reach further and to
penetrate the Greek mind more deeply than anything that Pindar had to
say; and that this was actually the case can be proved. Nevertheless,
Pindar must be reckoned with as an original thinker who spoke words of
power; in spite of his profession, his mind remained imperial and
free; and in his attitude to the public religion he is to be grouped
with Æschylus and Sophocles; and all three stand together and apart
{105} from Euripides. All three show the virility, the mental
tranquillity combined with imagination and audacity, that marked the
typical character of the greatest age of Hellas. And all three
genially and without querulous protest, though with some freedom of
criticism, accept the existing religious order, desiring to ennoble
it, not to destroy it. Pindar himself was the establisher of certain
new cults, and the first great literary preacher in Greece of Orphic
eschatology, and, we may say, the first great poet in Europe who
raised the theme of Paradise to the level of the highest poetry. Such
a marvel of song on the mysteries of life and death as the second
Olympian ode was a new voice in Hellas; how far it echoed, and with
what influence on the faith of the people, is impossible to measure
with accuracy. For the progress of this new eschatology, which is a
weighty subject for the history of later Hellenism, we have some
important negative evidence in the fact that neither Æschylus nor
Sophocles show any knowledge of Orphism or interest in it, or any
preoccupying concern with the state of the soul after death; nor in
their occasional utterances concerning posthumous judgment do they go
beyond the popular traditional view: though the thoughtful refinement
of Sophocles suggested to him that there might be forgiveness of sins
and reconciliation after death.[105.1] Nor do we find anywhere in the
works of the two dramatists any hint of that pregnant Orphic doctrine
to which Pindar gives voice, that humanity is of divine origin--ἓν
ἀνδρῶν ἓν Θεῶν γένος--a doctrine which passed into the higher thought
of later Greece.
{106}
Leaving aside this special question, we find a certain general
resemblance in the religious view of these earlier poets of the fifth
century. All three preach the supremacy of Zeus, his omnipotence and
perfect justice, while Sophocles lays stress on his mercy. The effect
of this poetic message was probably great and certainly timely; for
the growing power and frequency of hero-cult, which Pindar himself and
the dramatists indirectly encouraged, was a danger to the higher
religion; and the backward and less cultured Hellenes were doubtless
liable to the propensity of the savage mind to prefer the worship of
the local daimon to that of the high God. Against such degeneracy the
works of the greatest fifth-century poets, like the masterpiece of the
greatest fifth-century sculptor, served at least as an enduring
protest in Hellas.
And it would be of interest to consider how far the sculptor, in
regard to the general conception of his mighty theme and in the choice
of mystic bywork whereby he made it articulate, drew certain
suggestions from the poetry of Æschylus.
These poets also deal with the question of Fate and Destiny. The
personal, or half-personal, Μοῖρα was an old but insignificant figure
of the popular religion and mythology, and Homer is aware of her and
has to reckon with her. She might become more formidable under the
philosophic conception of τὸ εἱμαρμένον which appeared in the
philosophy of Herakleitos; and we know that later philosophy and
cultivated thought was much perplexed over the problem of the
reconciliation of Fate with the idea of a free divine Providence. The
great Attic poets, taking their cue from Homer, “follow a short {107}
cut,” interpreting Moira as the voice or agent or emanation of the
power of Zeus.[107.1] And the pupil of Pheidias, Theokosmos of
Megara, was working out the same idea when he carved the Fates with
the Hours as subordinate adjuncts to the great form of Zeus.[107.1]
We may say, then, that both the poetry and the art of this period
worked for the deliverance of the polytheism from the burden of
fatalism, which tends to lower the value and sap the force of all
personal religion.
The Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus expresses indeed a view of Zeus
that conflicts with the higher religious thought of the poet. But
Æschylus has here taken up a crude story that he cannot wholly
moralise. On the other hand, his handling of the idea of the curse in
the house of Pelops is not worked out on the lines of mechanical
fatalism; one is made to feel it as a spiritual atmosphere which
engenders a bias towards evil, but does not overpower the freedom of
the individual.
Again, each of these poets, while accepting and in certain points
purifying the traditional polytheism, was capable of religious thought
that worked on other lines than anthropomorphism. The High God, Zeus,
is generally for them a definite personal Being; but once at least
Æschylus transcends this apprehension of him and defines Zeus
pantheistically as a supreme cosmic force; a fragment of his
‘Heliades’ speaks of him thus: “Zeus is air, earth, heaven; Zeus is
the whole of things, and whatsoever is higher still than these.”
Moreover, the other divine forces that shape our lives are presented
by him and his fellow-poets, not always as θεοί, but as moral {108}
powers that are only half-personal, not as concrete individual
deities, but as emanations of the divinity. We may call them
‘personifications of moral ideas,’ and some are no more than what this
phrase implies, such as those for instance with which Euripides
capriciously plays. But some may be rather described as the
Soul-powers of the High God, like, in some ways, to the Persian
Fravashi; such are Pindar’s Σώτειρα Διὸς Ξενίου Θέμις,[108.1] the
Dike of Æschylus, “Justice, the Maiden Daughter of God,”[108.2] who
“shines in the poor man’s smoke-dimmed cabin”;[108.3] Mercy in the
verse of Sophocles,[108.4] “Mercy shares the throne of God to deal
with all the deeds of men.” While Pindar’s genius inclines to the
brighter of these emanations, Æschylus broods rather over the gloomy
forces of the shadowy world, which he might at times be constrained to
present in palpable concrete form for stage purposes and yet his own
deeper thought could grasp as half-outlined spiritual powers, not the
less real because impalpable. The ordinary Hellene in his religious
perceptions laid too much stress on personal individuality, as if this
were the only criterion of ideal reality; from his point of view if
Eros was to be a real power of the divine world, then Eros must be
imagined as a beautiful youth. But Kypris or Aphrodite in a striking
Sophoclean fragment is no longer presented as a personal goddess, but
as a diffused pantheistic force.[108.5] And the Attic drama may have
enlarged the mental outlook of the succeeding generations in this
matter; for the author of the speech against Aristogeiton in the
fourth {109} century must have been sure that his audience would
understand him when he said, “all mankind have altars dedicated to
Justice, Law-abidingness and Pity, the fairest and holiest (being
those) in the very soul and the nature of each individual.”[109.1]
This is just how Euripides might speak.
The great fifth-century poets were all moralists each in his own way.
The history of Greek ethics only concerns us at the several points
where it touches religion; and to this history, both generally and on
its religious side, the works of Pindar and the three dramatists make
important contributions. Of special interest is their attitude to
Greek mythology which, in spite of its general brightness and beauty,
seriously needed in parts the puritanical reformer, if it was to be
harmonised with the higher religious thought. But none of these poets,
not even the grave Æschylus, was willing to undertake such a rôle.
Pindar of all the three comes nearest to preaching, for his _métier_
allowed him more personal freedom of comment. While following, on the
whole, the beaten path of tradition, he could innovate or invent if a
moral purpose was to be gained; for instance, he preaches to a friend
the doctrine of forgiveness of injuries and confirms it by the example
of Zeus, who forgave and released the Titans, a myth for which he is
the sole authority.[109.2] We find him anticipating Plato in his
protest against some grotesque and repulsive stories, such as the
cannibalism of the Gods in the myth of Pelops, or blasphemous stories,
such as the theomachies and the combats of heroes against divinities:
“let all war and strife stand far apart from the immortals”[109.3]
{110} is a good sententious maxim for the expurgation of Greek
mythology and for the enrichment of Greek ethico-religious thought.
But neither Pindar nor the two older dramatists protest against the
more licentious myths, and they accept at need various legends about
the amours of the Gods. In fact, the axiom that sexual purity was an
essential attribute of all divinity was not yet accepted by the higher
thought of Greece.
Pindar’s freedom and sense of irresponsibility in regard to myths has
a certain value in that it shows that the futilities and improprieties
of mythology--the “unhappy stories of bards”--were not necessarily a
burden on the stronger religious minds of Hellas, and that they could
be greatly excised from the polytheism without endangering the popular
worship and faith, which in the main was independent of them.
As for the two dramatists, his contemporaries, mythology was their
public business, and they accepted it genially because they were not,
in the first place, moral teachers, but dramatists; it did not
therefore occur to them to protest or violently to reform. But they
might select, discard and reshape; they could take the great legends
of the past, legends of Thebes, the story of the Niobids, of
Prometheus, the death of Ajax, all of them irreconcilable in parts
with higher morality and religion, and invest them with as much
morality as the tradition admitted. This they did with force and
subtlety. And generally the moral spirit and imagination of Æschylus
and Sophocles must be counted among the spiritual facts of this period
with which the history of Greek ethics and religion must {111} deal.
Doubtless the older and robuster poet was the stronger moral and
religious force; his protests against the non-moral doctrine of
Nemesis, his profound utterances concerning moral responsibility and
the moral continuity that links our lives and actions, his discovery
that suffering brings moral wisdom--these are landmarks in the ethical
story of Greece; while with Sophocles the conviction is no less deep
of the eternity and divinity of the moral law.
They were the last spokesmen of a civic-imperial system with a civic
religion and morality that had not yet passed its zenith.
_Euripides_.--The part played by Euripides in this spiritual history
of Hellas was wholly different. Younger contemporary of Sophocles as
he was, he seems to belong to a different age. In his work and thought
is reflected far more vividly than in the older poets of the same
century the new mental life which was fostered by the philosophers and
the sophists. The influence of the physical speculations of the sixth
century and of those of Demokritos and Anaxagoras of the fifth, which
at some points advanced further in materialism, has had time to
penetrate the more gifted minds and to compel the public to a certain
attention. The paid ‘Sophist,’ the pioneer of modern education and the
first champion of the critical spirit, was travelling around. And
after 470 B.C. the imperial greatness of Athens had begun to attract
the greatest teachers and thinkers of the age. It was of great moment
for Euripides that such men as Anaxagoras and Protagoras were active
in Athens for many years, and that he had enjoyed familiar intercourse
with them {112} as he also enjoyed with Sokrates. It is clear that the
poet imbibed deeply their teaching and their spirit; he was also
learned in Orphism, antiquarianism and remote folklore. Being by
nature a great poet, he has also something of the weakness of the
‘polymath’ or the ‘intellectual’; he had not the steadiness of brain
or strong conviction enough to evolve a systematic philosophy or clear
religious faith; his was, in fact, the stimulating, eager, critical
spirit, not the constructive. His mental sympathies and interests
shift and range from pole to pole. He is a secularist in his view of a
physical universe, and he foreshadows a secular treatment of ethics
based on ideas of φύσις and heredity, though a chorus of his maidens
may praise chastity as “the fairest gift of the Gods.” It was
therefore possible, though most unjust, that Aristophanes should call
him an atheist. On the other hand, he is capable of profound religious
sentiment and exalted religious utterance, and strikes out flashes of
light that might kindle and illuminate a higher religion. Therefore it
was possible for Clemens of Alexandria to find in some of his words a
foreshadowing of Christ.[112.1] He remains for us an enigma, and
probably no final judgment will ever be pronounced upon him, in which
we shall all agree.
But the student of Greek religion must confront these two questions
about him: (_a_) What was his real sentiment concerning the popular
religion? (_b_) What were his contributions to religious thought, and
what was likely to be his influence on the religious temperament? To
make up one’s mind on these questions demands a long and critical
study, {113} also a tactful sense of the distinction between Euripides
the playwright and Euripides the thinker. It is the confusion of this
distinction that leads, for instance, to the strangely erroneous views
held concerning the religious significance of his ‘Bacchæ.’ A
sympathetic reading of many of the plays must convey the impression
that certain cult-figures and legends of the polytheism filled the
poet with scorn and loathing; and at times he seems to compose as if
he had a personal hatred of Apollo and Aphrodite in particular, for
instance, in the Ion and Hippolytus. When he can interpret Aphrodite
as a cosmic force he can dilate on this as beautifully and ardently as
Lucretius; if he could have believed that Apollo was merely the Sun,
as he tells us ‘the wise’ were well aware, he might have forgiven him.
But it is the real personal Aphrodite of Homer and Helen, the personal
Apollo, the father of Ion, the seducer of Kreusa, and the beloved
ancestor of the Athenians, that rankled in his mind. When he handles
the story of the madness of Herakles and brings madness on the stage,
he uses her first as his mouthpiece to convey to the Athenians what he
thought of Hera;[113.1] just as he puts into the mouth of Amphitryon
his own mordant criticism of the action of Zeus.[113.2] Yet with
other parts of the polytheism he seems at times in the most glowing
sympathy; in the Hippolytus, for instance, where he expresses for the
first time in literature the religious rapture of purity; in the
Bacchæ where he discovers the necessary phrase for the expression of
the Bacchic communion, for the ecstasy of the Mænad-revel on the
mountain, in verses that tingle with the nature-magic {114} which was
at the root of this wild cult. Yet no one should be deceived into
thinking that he is preaching the cause of Dionysiac worship; for the
Bacchæ closes with that depressing anti-climax, where Dionysos plays
the sorriest part, and Euripides’ own sour dislike of the personal
traditional God gives an unpleasant flavour to the last scene. It is
this bitterness of protestantism and criticism in this poet that
strikes a new note in Greece; and Euripides may be regarded as the
first in European history to be possessed with the theologic temper.
It cannot be said that he preached a new religion; he was no votary
even of Orphism, for though, as the Bacchæ and the fragment of his
‘Cretans’ attest, he felt something of its spell, he was not of that
cast of mind that could be deceived by its pharisaic ritual and laws
of diet, and he certainly cherished no mystic belief concerning the
life after death; for even in the ‘Bacchæ’ there is no reference to
this attractive dogma, which was the main anchor of the Orphic faith.
Nor can he be truly described as a zealous reformer of the people’s
faith and practice; for the reformer must have some belief in that
which he wishes to reform; and that Euripides firmly believed in any
part of the polytheism is hard to maintain; his final attitude is
generally a doubt. Nevertheless, his protests might have been of value
to the more cultured citizen who still clave to his civic worship.
They are directed mainly and most forcibly against the stories of
divine vindictiveness and divine licentiousness. He is evidently
touched with the new idea that vengeance is alien to the perfect
nature of God; this was still more insistently proclaimed by Plato and
by the Pythagoreans and {115} later philosophers.[115.1] On the
second count his protest is suggested by the notion that was dawning
in him that purity in every sense was essential to the divine nature;
he is then the herald in literature of a thought which Orphism may
have prompted and which was to play a leading part in later religion
and religious speculation, but which was unfamiliar to his
contemporaries either in Hellas or anywhere in the Mediterranean
except in Israel. His leading principle of criticism in all these
matters is expressed in the Iphigeneia in Tauris, namely, that the
evil in religious practice and legend arises from men imputing their
own evil nature to God.[115.2] We owe much to the man who first
uttered this warning against a debasing anthropomorphism.
The immoral elements in Greek mythology, which have been constantly
reprobated by ancient and modern writers, have often blinded them to
the fact that Greek religion in its forms of worship and sacred
formulæ was mainly pure and refined. The stories about the Gods,
often of the type natural to savage folklore, did not constitute
ancient religion; and they were the less able to choke the growth of a
higher ethical-religious spirit in that they were not enshrined in
sacred books that could speak with authority to the people. Yet we
have not infrequent proofs in Greek literature, notably in Plato’s
_Euthyphron_, that they might exercise at times an immoral influence
on men’s conduct. Meantime the educational movement in the sixth and
fifth centuries had awakened men’s minds to the importance of the
moral question in literature. And the protests of Euripides are
developed by Plato in his {116} scheme of education in the _Republic_,
and the same point of view prompts him to his puritanical legislation
against poets. Such moral movements in the polytheistic societies of
Greece are interesting to mark, though their effect is often difficult
to estimate. The new puritanical spirit had probably a wholesome
influence on the more cultured minds; it had little influence on the
mass of the people, nor does the later poetry of the Hellenistic
period show much trace of it.
As regards the actual forms of Greek ritual and worship, Euripides has
nothing revolutionary to say. He appears to have a strong dislike for
prophets, and in this he was in some accord with Æschylus, Sophocles,
and the Athenian people. He shows great distrust for Delphi; and its
influence was doubtless impaired at Athens during the Peloponnesian
war. He protests against human sacrifice as a barbaric and
non-Hellenic institution[116.1]--though he appears fond of it as a
dramatic motive--and on one occasion the speaker argues that the Gods
need nothing from mortals at all;[116.2] the thought was suggested
merely by dramatic exigencies; and Euripides nowhere attempts a
crusade against the value of sacrifice in general. He has only one
important thing to say about it, namely that the small sacrifice of
the pious often outweighs the hecatomb.[116.3] This thought implies a
more spiritual view of the divine nature and is not infrequently
expressed in the later literature; according to Theophrastos and
Theopompos this higher view of sacrifice was even encouraged by the
Delphic oracle.[116.4]
{117}
There is much indeed in the sententious poetry of Euripides that might
have elevated and cleared the religious thoughts of his age; but it is
doubtful if his ultimate conception of Godhead, as it tends towards
pantheism, could have been reconciled with the anthropomorphic
polytheism of the people or if those most conversant with his tone and
inspired by his spirit could have remained long in sympathy with
orthodoxy. And there is an instinct in Euripides which enhances his
value for the modern man, but which was to be subversive in the
longrun of the old civic religion, namely, the humanitarian or
cosmopolitan instinct; that which allowed him to sympathise with
Trojans, women, children and slaves, which inspired him with the
beautiful thought that “the whole earth is the good man’s fatherland,”
which also prompted him to despise the life of civic duty and activity
and to recommend, as Aristotle does, the secluded and contemplative
life. The further development of this cosmopolitan spirit and its
effect on the old civic religion will be noted below.
It has been necessary to dwell so long on Euripides, not only for the
reasons mentioned above, but also because owing to the vogue that he
won in his lifetime and that was greatly to increase after his death,
he more than any other of the great men of letters must be regarded as
the populariser of the new enlightenment.
Whether he individually exercised any immediate religious influence
upon the popular religious mind, for good or for harm, is not easy to
decide with precision; for there were other exponents than he of the
same freer and more advanced thought, which {118} began to express
itself early in the sixth century. As a result we are able to discern
the religious view of human life and conduct, becoming what we should
term more spiritual, more inward. The moral judgment begins to look to
the soul or the inner principle; the doctrine begins to be proclaimed
that God as a spiritual power can read the heart of man and judges him
by that; that sin lies not in the external act alone; that external
ritualistic purity is of less avail than purity of soul. Such thoughts
as these which could serve as the foundation-stones of a new religion
and which helped to shape the later religious history of Europe were
mainly a heritage from the speculation of the sixth century and were
in the air of the fifth. We cannot think that they were confined to
the philosophic circles until Euripides gave them publicity; for the
notable oracle quoted and commented on by Herodotus had proclaimed to
the people the novel view that a sinful purpose was the same in the
sight of God as a sinful act;[118.1] Epicharmos, the Sicilian poet of
the earlier fifth century, had preached the higher ideal of
purity--“if thou art pure in mind, thou art pure in thy whole body.”
It was probably in the latter part of the same century that some
rhetorician of the school of Gorgias interpolated the proem of
Hesiod’s _Works and Days_, which reveals an exalted view of the High
God.[118.2]
We may believe, then, that this higher religious ethic had a certain
elevating influence on the popular imagination. The question of
immediate interest is whether we can trace any effects of this in
actual worship. Did the new enlightenment, for instance, {119} lead to
the abolition or reform of cruel or impure or absurd forms of ritual?
_Human sacrifice_.--This question involves the consideration of the
practice of human sacrifice, which had been certainly prevalent in
prehistoric and early historic Greece, as in other Mediterranean
communities. We have evidence that in the fifth and fourth centuries
the practice was of rare occurrence in the Greek societies and was
repugnant to the religious morality of all but the most backward. The
feeling about the sacrifice of Iphigeneia manifested in the Agamemnon
of Æschylus, the story about the Bœotian generals and the sacrifice
of a maiden before the battle of Leuktra are sufficient proof.[119.1]
The Platonic dialogue of the Minos contrasts the Greeks with the
barbarians in this matter,[119.2] yet implies that the Arcadians in
the cult of Zeus Lykaios and the men of Halos in that of Zeus
Laphystios[119.3] continued the cruel offerings that disgraced their
Hellenism. Euripides attests that the human sacrifice once customary
in the rites of Artemis, near Brauron, had been, before his day,
transformed to a mere fiction,[119.4] and at some time earlier than
this the Athenians must have ceased to immolate human scapegoats,
called φαρμακοί, in their Thargelia.[119.5] The Rhodians eased their
consciences and at the same time maintained their immemorial rite by
choosing a malefactor who had been condemned to death as a human
victim to Kronos.[119.6] According to Porphyry the practice {120}
survived here and there under the Roman Empire until the time of
Hadrian.[120.1] And Plutarch[120.2] declares that the yearly custom
of exposing the two Locrian maidens to the chance of a cruel death on
the shore of Ilium, in expiation of the sin of Aias the Less against
Athena Ilias, had been abandoned not very long before his time.
But the better sentiment of Greece in respect of such rites had
probably begun to work as early as the time of Homer, for certain
legends concerning the abolition of this ritual and the substitution
of the animal for the human life point back to the prehistoric period;
and the merciful reform was ascribed to the High God himself in a
Laconian legend that closely resembles the story of the sacrifice of
Isaac.[120.3] The humanitarian spirit, then, had asserted itself
before the sixth century; but doubtless the higher teaching and
thinking of this and the succeeding age quickened its influence.
_Phallic ritual_.--As regards that element in Greek ritual which the
modern taste pronounces impure, there is little trace of any attempt
at reform in any period of the polytheism. The element was indeed but
slight. The forms of worship were, on the whole, decorous, often
stately and beautiful; ancient legend reveals the anxious care of the
early Hellenes to preserve their temples from any sexual defilement;
where a ἱερὸς γάμος, or Holy Marriage, was enacted in any of the
shrines, there is no need to suspect any licentiousness;[120.4] no
such feature is discernible in the Eleusinian or other Hellenic
mysteries, although {121} the Christian fathers are eager in their
insinuations; the Hellenic[121.1] cults of the Oriental Aphrodite
were generally innocent of that ritual of temple-prostitution which
was found in certain Anatolian cults and which scandalised the Greek
as much as the Christian writers; the few impure titles attaching to
this goddess may well have arisen in the later period of the decadent
polytheism.[121.2] In the early ages, it is clear, the wholesome and
temperate influence of the Hellenic spirit had worked upon the forms
of the polytheism. Nevertheless, in the ritual of a few divinities,
Demeter, Hermes, Dionysos, and even of Artemis herself,[121.3] sexual
emblems were occasionally in vogue, dances of a more or less
licentious character are mentioned, though these were very rare; while
in the Thesmophoria and other services of Demeter, what was called
αἰσχρολογία, indecent and scurrilous badinage, was indulged in by the
women among themselves or more rarely with the men also. We note that
such ritual is practically confined to vegetation-cults, and in some
it is merely vegetation magic hardly attaching to the divinity, nor
affecting his or her moral aspect. The phallic emblem and the
procession called the φαλλαγωγία or φαλλοφορία were specially
associated with Dionysos and Hermes; and Plutarch, a man of more than
the average culture and refinement and strikingly susceptible to the
spiritual influences of the more mystic religions, describes it as a
harmless adjunct of the ancestral and cheerful ritual of the {122}
Bœotian peasant.[122.1] Now it is worth noting that against this
element in Greek ritual there is scarcely a word of protest in all the
ethical and philosophic literature of Greece. The exception is only a
fragmentary utterance of Herakleitos, in which he seems to rail
against the phallic procession of Dionysos; but the exact sense of his
words is not quite clear.[122.2] The higher moral thought of Greece
on this matter is probably more nearly represented in the utterance of
Aristotle in the Politics,[122.3] where he lays down austere rules
for the training of the young: “No impure emblem or painting or any
representation of impropriety is to be allowed by the archons, except
in the cults of those divinities to whom the law attaches the ritual
of scurrility (τωθασμός): in their case the law allows those of more
advanced age to perform the divine service in behalf of themselves,
their children and their wives.” Even in the last three centuries
before Christ, when greater stress was continually being laid upon
purity in cult, no protest is heard against these old-world forms,
which have maintained themselves in many parts of Europe down to the
present day in spite of the denunciations of Christianity. The seeming
paradox is explained when we reflect that the idea of purity changes
its content in the different generations; and secondly that the
Hellenic, like all the other Mediterranean religions, except the
Hebraic, regarded the physical procreative power as belonging to the
divine character and as part of his cosmic creative force; therefore
an emblem that was secularly impure might be made holy by cult and
consecration. It is in this respect that the modern {123} ideas of
refinement differ most markedly from the classic.
_Survival of other primitive ritual_.--There is much besides in old
Greek ritual that appears to us harmless but uncouth and irrational;
strange and naïve things were done that primitive ideas of magic and
animism inspired; and one may be surprised to find that the higher
culture of the fifth and succeeding centuries is not known to have
suppressed a single one of these. Still, in the time of Theophrastos,
and indefinitely later, the Athenians were capable of the quaint
old-world ritual of the Bouphonia, that strange medley of worship and
magic and dramatic make-belief[123.1]; still in the time of
Demosthenes[123.2] they were capable of bringing up to judgment in
the law court an axe or any other inanimate thing that had caused the
death of a man or of the sacred ox and solemnly condemning it to be
thrown into the sea; the driving out of sin or famine, incarnate in a
human being, was a ceremony in vogue at Massilia[123.3] and probably
also at Athens long after the beginning of our era. Nor did the higher
anthropomorphism, powerful as its working was, entirely obliterate the
worship or half-worship of animals in the later centuries.[123.4]
Even Zeus might still be conceived by the men of the fourth century as
occasionally incarnate in the snake; and in a ritual law regulating
the cult of Asclepios at Athens, composed shortly after 400 B.C., a
sacrifice was ordered to certain sacred dogs; the pious votary would
comply, however the act might awaken the laughter of a comic poet.
Herakleitos protested against the {124} absurdity of praying to idols;
but no voice of the new enlightenment is heard against these far more
irrational and backward ceremonies. The average public thought of the
fifth century did not repudiate the use of magic; in fact, it is not
till the fifth century that its efficacy is known to have been
recognised by legislation.[124.1] And Plato,[124.2] speaking about
it in his Laws, a work of his declining years and intellect, is not
sure whether he believes or disbelieves in its power. There is nothing
more conservative than ritual; and Greece produced no ardent
Protestant reformer. Therefore, the average educated Athenian even of
the fourth century would doubtless agree with the orator Lysias, that
“it is prudent to maintain the same sacrifices as had been ordained by
our ancestors who made our city great, if for no other reason, for the
sake of the city’s luck.”[124.3]
_Strength of the traditional religion in the fifth century_.--The
question naturally occurs--were the mass of the citizens touched at
all in their inward theory of things by the spirit of modernism which
breathed from Ionia and inspired the sophists? The culture that was
the stock-in-trade of the latter was only offered to those who could
pay; and upon these the poorer Athenian looked askance. He heard of it
at first with a dislike that might become dangerous. Fanaticism, as we
are familiar with it in the pages of European and Semitic history, was
happily alien to the Greek temperament. But the banishment of
Anaxagoras and Protagoras, and the execution of Sokrates by the city
that was to become {125} the schoolmistress of Greece, might seem to
savour somewhat of this temper of mind. These acts, indeed, were not
inspired solely by religious feelings; but they are clear proofs that
the polytheism was by no means moribund and could be dangerous in its
own defence. Nothing is more erroneous than the view which is
sometimes expressed, that the popular devotion to the old religion was
abating and its divine personalities and forms losing life and value
towards the close of the fifth century. In their dark days the
Athenians bided truer to their old faith than did Rome in her time of
terror. We do not find a prostrate Athens turning desperately for aid
to alien Oriental cults. We hear indeed of the beginnings of
Adonis-cult in the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, the first
ripple of a wave of Orientalism that was to surge westward later. But
this feminine excess was unauthorised, and Aristophanes hates it and
mocks at it. And the shallow view mentioned above would be
sufficiently refuted by his comedy of ‘the Clouds,’ in which he, the
greatest literary genius of his time, poses as the champion of the
reaction against modernism. It is refuted also by other incidents in
Athenian history that fall within the last decades of this century;
for the rage of the people at the mutilation of the Hermai, at the
supposed insult to the Eleusinian mysteries, at the neglect of the
dead after the battle of Arginousai, may be evidence of morbid
religiosity, and is surely inconsistent with a general prevalence of
scepticism. In these episodes the whole people reveal a passionate
attachment to their holy mysteries, to their quaint phallic
Herme-images on which the luck and the life of the State depended, to
{126} the duties of the loving tendance of the dead. Even their
animistic beliefs concerning the common phenomena of the physical
world had not yet been extirpated or purged by the physical philosophy
of Ionia; for according to Plato it was still a dangerous paradox,
which his Sokrates disclaims before the jury, to maintain with
Anaxagoras that the Sun and the Moon were merely material bodies and
not in themselves divine. Intellectually Nikias appears inferior to
Homer’s Hektor. It was Athens that produced in the fourth century the
‘superstitious man’ of Theophrastos; but it is right to bear in mind
that she also produced the man who could so genially and tolerantly
expose that character.
_Influence of comedy_.--Those who believed that the faith in the
polytheism was falling into rapid decay by 400 B.C. sometimes quote by
way of evidence the astonishing licence of Attic comedy in dealing
with the divine personalities; the notorious example is the ludicrous
figure and part of Dionysos in the Frogs of Aristophanes. Yet the
people who enjoyed the humour of the play were more devoted to
Dionysos than to most of the other persons of their pantheon. If the
‘excellent fooling’ of Aristophanes is a proof of popular unbelief,
what shall we say of that Attic terra-cotta of the sixth century that
represents him half asleep and half drunk on the back of a mule and
supported by an anxious Seilenos?[126.1] The present writer has
suggested that “this is some peasant’s dedication, who feared his god
little but loved him much and treated him _en bon camarade_.”
Epicharmos in Sicily had been beforehand with Aristophanes in
venturing on the burlesque of divine actions, Hephaistos and Herakles
{127} specially lending themselves to ridiculous situations. Even in
the epic period the same gay irreverence had occasionally appeared, as
in the Homeric hymn to Hermes. These things do not necessarily arise
from an anti-religious spirit, but they may be taken as indication of
a certain vein in the Hellenic character, a light-heartedness and a
reckless freedom in dealing on certain occasions with things divine
that is markedly in contrast to the Oriental spirit. Nevertheless, it
is not improbable that comedy at Athens and elsewhere did gradually
exercise a weakening or a debasing influence on the popular faith. For
the other poets of Attic comedy took greater liberties than even
Aristophanes; Kratinos and Telekleides of the fifth century, Amphis of
the fourth, did not shrink from introducing the High God himself on
the stage in ridiculous and licentious situations. There probably was
some reserve and no gross indecency in the presentation of these
plots. And much is conceded to the spirit of the carnival, especially
when a certain αἰσχρολογία was sanctified by custom and ritual.
Nevertheless, the more earnest-minded of the Athenians may have agreed
with Plato’s condemnation of such a handling of divine
personages,[127.1] and though the popular faith may have been robust
enough to endure such shocks, one cannot but suspect that the people’s
religious imagination suffered a debasement in moral tone. A few
South-Italian vases of the fourth century, on which are scenes that
appear to have been inspired by such comedies, are the worst examples
of Hellenic vulgarity.
The history of Greek religion, then, must reckon with Attic comedy as
among the possible causes of {128} religious corruption and decay; but
at the worst this is only one side of the picture, for the fragments
of the comedies of Menander, as will be shown, contain many a striking
expression of the higher religious spirit and advanced ethical
sentiment.
_Waning of the political value of Delphi_.--There are certain external
events in the history of Greek religion towards the close of the fifth
century that must be noted in a general sketch of its career. One is
the waning of the political influence of the Delphic oracle; its
secular mission appeared to have been accomplished when the era of
Greek colonial expansion had closed; at the first terror of the
Persian invasion the great states anxiously resorted to Delphi for
guidance, but the priesthood failed to rise to the Pan-Hellenic
occasion and played a double game. During the Peloponnesian war it was
obvious that they were ‘Laconising’; nor were they ever given again an
opportunity of leading _la haute politique_ of Hellas, and in the
middle of the fourth century Demosthenes could speak contemptuously of
‘the shadow at Delphi,’ although the Amphictyonic League, as the only
federal council of Hellas, still retained a nominal value sufficient
to induce Philip to scheme for admission. Generally, in the fourth,
third and second centuries, the oracle retained influence only in the
spheres of religion and morality. Plato still regards the Delphic God
as the natural director of the religious institutions of the State.
And we have interesting examples in the later literature of
consultation of the oracle by individuals whose minds were troubled by
religious terrors and remorse. In fact, it came to serve the purposes
of a private confessional, giving advice on {129} questions of
conscience; and its advice was generally sane and often enlightened
and shows the priests as possessed with the progressive spirit of
Greek ethical philosophy.[129.1]
_Spread of Asklepios-worship_.--Another event of importance is the
diffusion of the cult of Asklepios and the growing influence on the
Hellenic mind of this once obscure hero or earth-daimon of the
Thessalian Trikka. It was thence that sometime probably in the sixth
century he had migrated to Epidauros, where his power expanded through
his union with Apollo. His cult-settlement in Kos was connected with
the Epidaurian; and already in the fifth century the Asclepieion of
this favoured island had reared the great Hippokrates and was thus the
cradle of the later medical science of Europe. Towards the close of
this century Asklepios and his daughters came even from Epidauros to
Athens, and according to a well-founded tradition the poet Sophocles
was his first apostle; in the next generation we find the Athenian
state regulating his worship, which was soon to conquer the whole
Hellenic world. And in the survey of the Hellenistic age it must be
reckoned with as one of the main religious forces of later Hellenism.
We may note in passing a striking divergence between the European
spirit of Hellenic religion and the Oriental spirit of Mesopotamia:
the Babylonian God practises magic, the Hellenic Asklepios, though he
worked miracles enough, came in a later day at least to foster
science, and even his cases at Epidauros were not all merely of the
Lourdes type.
_Growth of the Thiasoi_.--Another interesting phenomenon that begins
to arrest our attention in {130} the latter part of the fifth century
is the growth of private θίασοι or voluntary religious associations
independent of the public religion and devoted to a special divinity
who might be an alien. The most interesting testimony is the title of
a comedy by Eupolis called the ‘Baptai,’ which we may interpret as
‘the Baptisers,’ satirising a society devoted to the Thracian goddess,
Kotytto, whose initiation-rites must have included a ceremony of
baptism, of which this is the earliest example within the Hellenic
area. It will be more convenient to estimate the importance of
religious significance of these θίασοι in the survey of the next
period of our history. Meanwhile, it is well to mark certain evidence
that the most powerful and appealing of these, the Orphic mystery,
having failed in the sixth century to capture the States of Magna
Græcia, was increasing its private influence in Eastern Greece in the
century before the rise of Alexander. Plato’s attack is itself a
witness of this. And when Aristophanes[130.1] and an Attic orator
contemporary with Demosthenes[130.2] openly acknowledge Orpheus as
the apostle to the Hellenes of the most holy mysteries, and the
teacher of a higher way of life, we must conclude that the spirit of
the Orphic brotherhoods had touched the imagination of the general
public outside the circle of the initiated.
_Religion in first half of fourth century B.C._--Yet it is hazardous
and probably false to say that the public religion of Greece was
decaying visibly throughout the first half of the fourth century.
Athens is as usual our chief witness. The restored democracy was all
the more strenuous in matters of religion as scepticism was considered
a mark of the {131} new culture of the oligarchically-minded. The
trial of Socrates is an indication of this temper. We have also
evidence from this period of the occasional severity of the Athenian
people against those who tried to introduce unauthorised and
un-Hellenic cults. The Hellenic tradition is still strong against the
contagion of the orgiastic spirit of the Anatolian religion, and it
was with difficulty that the Athenian public could tolerate the wild
ritual of Sabazios and the Phrygian Mother, nor even in the time of
Demosthenes were the participants in it secure from danger. The early
fourth-century art still exhales the religious spirit and serious
ethos of the Pheidian school; and it created the type, and almost
succeeded in establishing the cult, of the new Goddess of Peace,
Eirene, for whose presence among them the wearied Athenians might well
yearn; it also perfected the ideal of Demeter, the Madre Dolorosa of
Greek myth, whose Eleusinian rites with their benign promise of
salvation added power and significance to the later polytheism. The
literature of this period attests the enduring vitality of the popular
religion. The Attic oratory of the fourth century was more religious
in its appeal than any modern has been, as might be expected of a time
when there was yet no divorce conceivable between Church and State. It
is not a question of the religious faith of the individual orator, but
of the religious temper of the audience which is attested by many
striking passages in the speeches. According to Antiphon, the
punishment of sinners and the avenging of the wronged is specially the
concern of the deities of the nether world[131.1]; Andokides avers
{132} that foul misconduct was a more heinous sin in a man who had
been in the service of the Mother and the Maid of Eleusis[132.1]; the
speech against Aristogeiton is almost as much a religious as a
juridical utterance. Demosthenes may have been a sceptic at heart,
believing in chance--as he once says--as the governing force of our
life; but otherwise he is glowingly orthodox in respect of Attic
religion and mythology, and the greatest of his speeches closes with a
fervent and pious prayer.[132.2] And again it is well to remind
ourselves that the political or forensic orator is a truer witness to
the average popular belief than the poet or the philosopher.
_Plato’s attitude towards the popular religion_.--A consecutive
history of Greek religious thought as embodied in the surviving
writings or records of the philosophic schools of Hellas is far too
large a subject even to be adumbrated here. And a general survey of
the religion can only notice shortly the leading thinkers whose works
there is reason to suppose had popular vogue and lasting influence
upon the religious world.
Among these the primacy belongs to Plato; and the full account of
Greek religion, both in the period that precedes the downfall of Greek
independence and in the periods that follow, must include a critical
estimate of his religious speculation. This is no place for an
elaborate consideration of the metaphysic of his ideal theory, or the
relation of his ideas to a theistic system; but only the most general
observations may be allowed for the purpose of this sketch. To
understand his main attitude towards the popular cults, and his
influence upon the later {133} educated world of Greece, we must
recognise at once that, idealist and reformer as he was, he was no
revolutionary or iconoclast in matters of religion; he would reform
Greek mythology, purging it of stories of divine conflicts, divine
vengeance, divine amours; and, as these fortunately were enshrined in
no sacred books, he feels that this might be done gently and easily
without disturbance to the established forms of worship. He does not
desire to abolish sacrifice or idolatry, but inculcates simplicity in
the offerings.[133.1] In one passage he even maintains that the
legislator will not change a single detail of the ritual, if only for
the reason that he does not know anything of the inner truth that may
lie behind such outward forms.[133.2] Even in his most advanced
physical and metaphysical speculations he finds a place for the
popular pantheon;[133.3] in the hierarchic scale of things the
Olympians are ranged somewhere below the supreme transcendental God of
the Universe. The ‘Timæus’ dialogue presents some interesting
theologic dogma; here[133.4] in the scale of Divine creation the
Olympian Pantheon, which seems to be accepted rather for the sake of
ancient tradition, is given the third place after the planets and the
Sun which are the second works of the Supreme Creator, the first being
the cosmic Heaven. These deities of the polytheism, then, are not
immortal in their own nature, but are held together for all eternity
by the will of the highest God. And it was to them that he committed
the formation of man, and lent for this purpose a portion of his own
immortality; the mortality of man is thus accounted {134} for; which
would have been inexplicable had he sprung directly from the immortal
Supreme Being.
It is interesting for our present purpose to note that this esoteric
and transcendental system, devised by the great master and parent of
Greek theosophy, would leave the established religion more or less
unimpaired; it even accepts its data at certain points, namely, the
nativity of its Gods, and draws the logical conclusion that Gods, who
were born could not be by essence immortal; therefore Zeus could not
be accepted as the Absolute and Supreme Being of the Cosmos. Also it
proclaims the idea of an immortal element in man, which, again, is in
accord not only with Orphic teaching, but also with the contemporary
popular faith in the survival of some part of our being after death.
But the work which reflects most vividly the popular religion and
betrays the strongest sympathy with it is the Laws, a work of his old
age in which the conservative spirit of the religious reformer is no
less striking than the intellectual decay of the philosopher. He
accepts the greater part of the civic political religion, merely
purifying the mythology and some of the ideas concerning divinity; and
it is striking how easily he finds in it materials ready to his hand
on which he can build an exalted ethical-religious system of rights
and duties, especially those which concern the life of the family and
the groups of kinship.[134.1] In fact, the background of the thought
in this lengthy treatise is almost always the Greek Polis, though
glimpses may here and there break through of a wider vista. He
expresses the prejudices of the Greek citizen against new forms of
private or foreign orgiastic cult which {135} were dangerously
enticing to women;[135.1] any doubtful question that might arise
concerning rite or cult he would leave to the decision of the oracles
of Delphi or Dodona or of Zeus Ammon.[135.2] We feel generally that
Plato did not assume the part of an apostle of a new order of
religion, but that both in his philosophy and religious theory he
found a sufficient _point d’appui_ in the old, of which he tried to
strengthen the moral potentialities.
The later sects which attached themselves to his name or to his school
were deeply interested in religious speculation, which degenerates at
last into the mystic superstition of Neoplatonism. Therefore, as the
work of Aristotle belongs to the history of European science, so the
philosophy of Plato concerns the later history, both of pre-Christian
and Christian religious thought. To estimate exactly how his influence
worked on the better popular mind in the centuries before Christ is
impossible. But we may naturally and with probability surmise that he
contributed much to the diffusion of the belief in the spiritual
nature and perfection of God, to the extirpation of the crude notions
of divine vindictiveness and jealousy, to the interpretation of the
external world in terms of mind and spirit as against any
materialistic expression, to the acceptance of the belief in the
divinity of the human soul and its affinity with God and in the
importance of its posthumous life, which was partly conditioned by the
attainment of purity. These latter ideas constitute the faith of the
Orphic sects, from whom Plato may have silently borrowed them. But
whether through Plato or the thiasoi many of them {136} came to appeal
strongly to the popular mind of later Hellas.
_Religious art in the fourth century_.--Our general survey is now
approaching that period of world-change brought about by the rise of
Macedon. But before leaving the scene of the free City-State, we
should remember to estimate the religious work done by the great
fourth-century masters of sculpture before the power of Alexander
reached its zenith. The fiery imagination of Skopas found plastic
types for the forms of Dionysos and his thiasos, and his work rivalled
at least, if it did not surpass, in inspiration of tumultuous life the
masterpieces of the older Attic vase-painters noticed above.
Praxiteles, the master of the gentler moods of the soul, in the
religious sphere consummated the types of Aphrodite and Demeter; the
almost perfect embodiment of the latter goddess, the Cnidian Demeter
of the British Museum, a work of his school, combines something of the
tearful expression of the Madre Dolorosa with the blitheness of the
Corn-Goddess. We are conscious indeed of a change in the
representation of divinity. The works of this later generation have
lost the majesty and awe, the σεμνότης, as the Greeks called it, of
the fifth-century art; nor can the Greek states command any longer the
creation of the chryselephantine colossal statues of temple-worship.
In these later types, though still divine, there is more infusion of
human passion, of the personal experience, the struggles and yearning
of the individual soul. Anthropomorphism is pursuing its path, and
though still fertile in works of high spiritual value, may come to
weary and weaken the religious sense.