GREECE
The history of Europe begins in Greece. It is there that the Aryans
in Europe first feel the touch of the arts and civilisation of the
East, and are stirred up to new activities; and the life thus
quickened in Greece transmitted its spark to Italy, and so to the
whole of Europe.
People and Land.--There is no direct evidence that the Greeks came to
their country from elsewhere; and the theory of a Graeco-Italic
period, in which the future inhabitants of Greece and Italy lived
together somewhere to the north of both these countries and made
common advances in civilisation, is now abandoned. There are,
however, faint indications that the Greeks spread over their country
from the north southwards. What people dwelt in it before them it is
impossible to say; the Pelasgi and Leleges, whom they themselves
conceived to have preceded them, left behind them no other trace than
that belief. When first we descry this land in the faint dawn of
history, it is tenanted by the people whose name it bears, touched
only by the Thracians to the north, and the Illyrians to the west,
these also being Aryan races. Though the Greeks are on both sides of
the Egean, which seems from the earliest times to have connected
rather than divided them, their centre of gravity is in the mainland
of Hellas, including the Peloponnesus. In this country many a
migration no doubt took place before the people was finally arranged
in it; and some of these migrations are faintly known to history.
When once the settlement had been accomplished, the nature of the
country did much to fix the institutions of the people and the mutual
relations of their various communities. Large tribes coming into the
narrow valleys and sequestered coasts of Greece necessarily broke up
into small cantons, each of which, though not cut off from
intercourse with its neighbours, was free to develop by itself. The
country is said by travellers to be the most beautiful in the world.
The branch of the Aryans which settled in it may have brought scanty
acquirements with them, but they brought great capacities. The Greeks
had an unrivalled talent for doing what they saw others do, in a much
better way, and so making it their own. They had an inborn
disposition to what is reasonable. That they had a deep-seated
inclination to what is harmonious and beautiful is proved by their
first great work of art, their language. Of that language there were
several dialects in the earliest times; the principal ones being the
broad Doric of the peninsula and the colonies, and the softer Ionic
of which the classical language is a branch. But the Greeks of all
dialects could understand each other, and regarded as barbarians
those without who spoke other tongues. Thus from the first this
people was much divided, but was also held together by strong bonds.
Earliest Religion--Functional Deities.--The religion the Greeks
brought with them to their country was undoubtedly that which we have
discussed in our chapter on the Aryans. The primitive elements of
Aryan religion all reappear in Greece; the combination of many small
household worships with the supra-family worship of a great god or
gods, the few great gods who are surrounded by a multitude of
spirits, some of these also growing into gods, the recognition of
spiritual presences in many a natural object, living or dead. All
this we find in early Greece. The whole nation believes in Zeus; to
all he is the Lord of heaven, the giver of rain, the fertiliser of
mother earth, the supreme ruler in earth as well as in heaven, the
father of the gods as well as of men. This is the first bond of unity
in Greek religion. But every family, every village, every town has
its own peculiar worship which is to be found nowhere else. That
worship may be addressed to Zeus with a local title; each circle of
men has its own particular Zeus, who is their protector and ruler;
and thus Zeus has many forms and names. In each community there is
also the worship of the goddess of the hearth (Hestia); each
household has its own Hestia, and carries on the worship which in
other Aryan peoples is connected with the memory of departed
ancestors. But the family or the township has also other objects of
worship. There are other gods besides Zeus who are connected with
heaven, such as Apollo and Heracles. There are gods connected with
each activity of the people. Artemis is goddess of hunting, Aphrodite
of the peaceful life of nature and of gardens, and also of love.
Poseidon, the sea-god, was also worshipped inland, and was perhaps
originally a god of horses and oxen; Hephaestus was the god of workers
in metal, Ares the god of battle. These are in their origin what are
called functional deities, that is to say, gods who are present in
the function with which they are associated, and of which they
constitute the ideal or sacred side, and who have no existence apart
from it.
The gods of Greece in fact had their origin in that view of nature as
animated in every part, which the Greeks shared with other branches
of the Aryans, and with early man generally. Like the Latins, the
Greeks at first saw a mystery, a spirit, in every part of life; each
fountain had its nymph, each forest glade its dryad; and they felt
the gods to be returning to fresh life when spring came with its
flowers. Each of their own activities also had its unseen genius.
Each enclosure for flocks had its Apollo, "him of the sheepfold," who
protected the flock and the shepherd; and each boundary stone its
Hermes, "him of the boundary," who also watched over flocks and took
charge of marches and of paths.
Growth of Greek Gods.--Such beings, however, are something less than
gods; and the Greeks, long before we know them, had made the step
which the Romans scarcely made at all, from the spirit to the god,
from the vague unseen power behind an object or an act, to the free
being conceived with human attributes and feelings, who can be the
patron of a community, and afford help in all its concerns. Not all
the spirits rise into gods; it depends on circumstances which of them
are selected for that advance; but the choice once made, their rise
was rapid. As the gods grew into personality and definite character,
though the function out of which they first sprang was not forgotten,
other functions were added to them; and as a god grew in power and
consideration, his worship was set up in new places, where other
titles and attributes awaited him. The local god might be identified
with the great god from a distance. The god of a powerful community,
as Athene ("she of Athens"), might be adopted wherever the influence
of that community extended; thus new gods arose and old ones took
local form. When a change took place in the habits of the people, it
was followed by a corresponding change in the character of their
gods. When agriculture comes in, the gods have to take notice of it,
the pastoral god turns agricultural, and even the huntress Artemis
becomes an encourager of fertility. When navigation rises in
importance, a number of the gods, Poseidon at their head, become
sea-gods.
Stones, Animals, Trees.--In Greece the worship of the gods soon
superseded that of objects not possessing any human character. Traces
of such lower worships survive, it is true, in the later religion in
great abundance, but they have no influence in its development; they
only tell their story of the otherwise forgotten past. Stones were
worshipped in early Greece. Not to speak of the cromlechs and
dolmens, which are found there as in all parts of Asia and Europe,
and the meaning of which is so little understood, stones were
preserved as sacred objects in various places, even to late times,
and had no doubt originally been worshipped. The god Hermes was
represented in every period by a slab of stone set upright, a human
head and other human features being indicated on it. Even in later
Greece, boards or blocks of wood were in some places exhibited on
rare occasions, which were the oldest images of the Artemis or the
Aphrodite there adored. Though for the public eye splendid statues
had taken the place of the goddess, the original image was still
thought to have a sanctity all its own. We also notice that the gods
of Greece are associated with animals. Zeus is a bull in Crete; he
has also other transformations: Pan is a goat; Artemis is a bear in
some provinces, elsewhere a doe. The Athene of the Acropolis is a
serpent. Apollo is sometimes connected with the mouse. Along with
these identifications of the gods with animals we may mention the
animal emblems with which they are generally represented. The eagle
is the bird of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the peacock of Hera, the dove
of Aphrodite. In this connection we cannot help thinking of the
sacred animals of the Egyptian nomes; and the question may be asked
whether such animals must be taken to be in Greece also the signs of
a primitive totemism?
Of the tree-worship of Greece much has been written of late. The oak
was the sacred tree of Zeus; he must have been conceived as living in
it; he gave oracles at Dodona by the rustling of the branches of the
tree. Athene has the olive, Apollo the palm, and also the laurel.
After the introduction of agriculture rustic cults arose, in which
the inhabitants of a village followed in sympathetic rites the
fortunes of the gods who live in the life of the plants in summer and
die with them in autumn. The god of the Semites is generally a
changeless being, who himself conducts and orders the changes of the
seasons, but in Greece we find gods whom man can accompany in the
tragedy of their fall and the triumph of their rise. We shall see
afterwards that the rustic worships of Demeter and Proserpine were
brought forward at a critical period in Greek religion, to supply an
element which was much required in it. These worships, similar, as
Mr. Frazer suggests,[1] to those still kept up by our own peasantry,
were doubtless of immemorial antiquity in Greece, though in the
earlier period they are little heard of.
[Footnote 1: _Golden Bough_, vol. i. p. 356.]
Thus the Greek gods grew up in the period before Greece was awakened
to new thoughts by contact with foreign peoples. Many harsh and cruel
rites were no doubt practised; human sacrifice, heard of even in
later times in remote parts of the country, was not unknown, and
practices were connected with the service of stern gods and goddesses
which, though literature is silent about them, left their mark on
custom. Zeus and one or two other gods are essentially moral, and
some duties were strongly encouraged by religion, such as those of
hospitality and strict regard for boundaries, of faithfulness to
pledge, of respect for strangers. But many of the gods are too
closely interwoven with external nature to be very decidedly moral
powers; they are like the plants and animals, neither good nor bad
but natural.
Greek Religion is Local.--What strikes us most strongly about this
early Greek religion is its entire want of system and its local and
disintegrated character. Every town, every family, has its own
religion. There is no central authority. New gods are constantly
springing up; the old ones are constantly receiving new titles and
forming new unions with each other or with newer gods. The god of one
place is in another only a hero; the same god is represented in
different places in entirely different ways, and entirely different
legends are attached to his name. Thus the Greeks have from the first
a mythology singularly extensive and inconsistent, and their worship
also varies in each place. There is no general religion, but only a
multitude of local ones. In story and in rite old and new are mixed
up together,--what is local and what is imported, what is savage in
its nature and origin, and what is on the side of progress. This is a
state of matters which lies in every land before the beginning of
organised religion. Rites and legends are everywhere of local growth,
and the attempt to frame the various rites and legends into a
consistent ritual and a systematic account of the gods, comes later.
In Greece, as Mr. Robertson Smith observes, the earlier state of
matters continued longer and influenced the national faith more
deeply than elsewhere. As the Greeks never succeeded in forming a
central political system, so they never attained to unity in worship.
No national temple arose, the priesthood of which had power to frame
the national religion, to lay down rules for sacrifice, or to edit
sacred texts. The Greeks were less than any other people under the
sway of religious authority. While local practice was fixed, and
custom and tradition declared plainly enough what was to be regarded
as religious duty, belief was quite free to grow as circumstances or
the growth of culture dictated. A religion in such a position, and
among a people of lively imagination and specially gifted in the
direction of art, must necessarily receive its forms rather from the
artist than the priest.
Artistic Tendency.--Thus we can discern from the first the direction
which Greek religion must take. The Greeks shaped their gods earlier
and more freely than other peoples, and went on shaping them till no
further advance could be made in that way. Long before Homer they had
been making their gods such as free men, and men endowed with a sense
of beauty, could worship. They were not content to worship lifeless
objects, but must have living beings. They were not content to
worship beings without reason, they must worship reasonable beings.
They were not inclined to regard the natural objects they worshipped
with terror or self-prostration, but rather in a spirit of genial
friendliness and sympathy as being something like themselves. And so
they turned their gods into men. The anthropomorphising tendency,
present as we have seen in other lands and at much earlier periods,
present indeed wherever religion is a growing power, had freer play
with them than with any other people. Thus the spirits of the
fountain and the tree, and of every part of nature that was
worshipped, took human form. At first, no doubt, the nymph was in the
fountain, the dryad in the oak, but as time went on the human maiden
cast off her mosses and her bark and leaves, and stood forth to
imagination a being wholly human, dwelling beside the fountain or the
tree. In the same way heaven becomes a great human father, the sea an
earth-shaking potentate drawn by dolphins over the waves, the sun a
mighty archer, fire a lame craftsman (from the flickering of flame?)
whose smithy is underground where the volcanoes are. And the figures
once arrived at, it was no hard task to spin out their stories and
their relations with each other, and to connect with them older
tales, as taste or fancy suggested.
The thorough humanisation of the gods, the clothing of the gods in
the highest types connected with free human society, is the first
great contribution made by this gifted race to the progress of
religion. Receiving from the earlier world the same kind of gods as
other nations did, Greece proceeded to treat them in a way of her
own, idealised and refined the parts of nature held divine, and
ascribed to them not only, as all early races do, human motives and
human passions, but also human beauty and wisdom and goodness.
Whatever rude materials she received to work on, either from the
earlier dwellers on Greek soil or from foreign lands, she made them
her own by transfiguring them into ideal men and women. Thus the
Greeks reached the position, which they taught the world first in
immortal poetry and then in immortal plastic art, that man should not
bow down to anything that is beneath him, and that nature can only
become fit to be worshipped by being idealised and made human. An end
was made to the dark imagination which was so apt to creep over all
early religion, that deity and humanity may be different and
opposite; that an object devoid of reason, an object or an animal
admired not for its goodness but for something about it which man
cannot understand, may be his god and have a claim to his allegiance.
God and man are of the same nature, the Greeks found; to arrive at a
true idea of a god we have to form, on the basis of the natural
object where he is supposed to dwell, the image of an ideal man or
woman. This was a great step, but in this conception of deity the
Greeks also laid up for themselves, as we shall see, many
difficulties.
Early Eastern Influences.--Our positive knowledge of Greek history
begins about the middle of the second millennium B.C.; we have
information of this period in the ruins of Mycenae and Tiryns and
other places. These remains attest a political condition widely
different from that of the patriarchal settlements of the period when
the Greeks were emerging from Aryan barbarism; very different also
from the free city life which came afterwards. The recent excavations
have brought to light the palaces of kings, built, it is evident,
according to an Eastern type, and with arrangements for the burial
and worship of dead potentates, not unlike those of the pyramids. The
art is rude, but shows large forces to have been at the command of
those who directed it. We have here, therefore, a state of matters
such as that described in the Homeric poems, in which petty kings
rule in many of the Greek towns, some of them being personages of
great rank and power. The movement in civilisation attested by these
remains is admitted to be due to an impulse from the East; but
whether this impulse was imparted by the voyages of Phenician
discoverers and merchants, or whether it came by land along the trade
routes of Asia Minor and across the Egean, is uncertain. It is in any
case traceable to North Syria, where in the early part of the second
millennium B.C. Babylonian and Egyptian influences met and gave rise
to some rude civilisation. Greece was not conquered from the East,
but stirred to new life by the communication of Eastern ideas.
Greek religion was not much assisted, or indeed much modified in any
way, by this movement. The worship of ancestors which went on in the
palaces was not contrary to Greek sentiment, perhaps not even much
more elaborate than that sentiment required. But this part of
religion was not a growing thing in Greece; and the royal practices
did not prevent it from dying gradually away in later times. That any
god was imported into Greece at this time, is not proved. Where
Greeks and Phenicians met, as in some of the islands, a Greek and an
Eastern god might be identified; the worship of Aphrodite and that of
Astarte were fused in this way in Cyprus, and Aphrodite may thus have
acquired some new characteristics even in Greece. This is not
certain. Perhaps the most important thing to notice in this
connection is that the new type of society at the royal courts may
have furnished a model for the arrangement of the heavenly family
when that arrangement came to be made. The Eastern influence came to
an end in time, and the pressure being removed, the monarchies
crumbled away, the court worships were discontinued, and Greece was
left free, after this awaking to fuller life, to pursue her own
thoughts in her own fashion.
Homer was regarded by the Greeks who lived after him as the founder
of their religion. Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod
lived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they who
framed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned to
them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. These
writers accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we know
that their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, and
they thus provided an early bond of national unity.
The Homeric poems are the outcome, whether we regard them as the work
of one singer or of two, or of a whole school, of long processes of
growth. The poetic art which makes them the delight of all mankind is
not a first experiment, but the ripe result of an elaborate method.
The stories and the wisdom they contain are brought together from
many quarters by long accumulation. And in the same way the accounts
they give of the gods individually and of their relations to each
other are not thrown together at haphazard, but are the result of a
work of unconscious art which must have been carried on for centuries
before it issued in this form. Homer does not by any means repeat all
the stories he knows about the gods. He passes over many local myths,
especially those of the more repulsive order, which were known for
centuries after, and undoubtedly existed in his day; only what is
"worthy of a pious bard" does he reproduce. A pious bard, however,
had considerable latitude; and the phrase does not represent all that
Homer was. He was an entertainer of the public at royal courts, where
a feast was incomplete without him (_Odyssey_ viii.); he had to
produce his songs at banquets or in the open air at festivals; what
he gave had to be entertaining. This could not but influence his
choice of materials even when the gods were his theme. He could not
deal in what was most terrible about the gods, nor could he enter
into speculations or mysteries, nor could he make use of a legend
which, though it had point for the locality it belonged to, was not
generally interesting. What was powerful and dramatic, what all men
could understand, what was curious and piquant, what met the general
sentiment, that he would be led to adopt and to work up into a
telling form; he naturally sought after broad pictures, amusing
conversations, simple and true emotions, curious incidents connected
with well-known characters. Religion, it is plain, could not gain in
depth and intensity from the treatment of such poets; many of the
thoughts men had about the gods could not find expression in their
lines. But, on the other hand, we have the fact that the Greeks
accepted the Homeric representation of their religion as the standard
one; not till it had existed for centuries were voices raised against
it. And this is not strange. Homer took away nothing from the
religion of any Greek; no local worship was in any way infringed upon
by him; and on the other side he gave to the Greek world, whose
belief consisted formerly in a multitude of disconnected or even
inconsistent legends, a united system of gods, in which there was at
that stage rest for the mind, and for the imagination an
inexhaustible spring of ideal beauty.
The Homeric Gods.--What, then, is the religion of Homer? The gods are
a set of beings not very unlike men; they present a curious
combination of human frailty with superhuman powers and virtues. To
speak first of the physical side of their nature, the gods are far
stronger than men, their frame is huger, their eye keener, their
voice louder; like the sorcerer of savage times, they can assume
other shapes to gain their ends, they can become invisible, or they
can travel very swiftly through the air. Yet, on the other hand, they
can be wounded when they strive even with men; accidents happen to
them, they require to eat and drink. They eat, it is true, ambrosia,
and drink nectar, which give immortality; and they have in their
veins not human blood but divine ichor. It is the fact of their
immortality that makes them different from men; it has happened that
a man obtained immortality and became thereby a god. The line between
gods and men may be crossed; in former times it was crossed more
frequently. The gods entered into relations with mortals; many of the
heroes are of divine extraction, and the gods are still interested in
the royal houses they thus founded. But such unions do not take place
in the poet's time. The world is growing less divine.
Homer, however, looks further back than this, and we find in him the
belief, found also in India and in Iceland, that an older and more
savage race of gods once ruled, whom the present dynasty conquered
and dethroned. Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, and
the Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost region
of all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning of
the present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upper
world, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus in
Thessaly; Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under-world, above
Tartarus, to which men go after death.
Zeus rules in Olympus. He presides there over those gods who are at
present in power. He summons them to council, he sits at meals with
them. They are a very human set of beings. They are moved by ordinary
human motives; love and revenge, jealousy and anger, rule in their
breasts. They do not act from eternal principles, but as men do, from
sudden impulses or from the desire of temporary advantages for
themselves or for their favourites. They even indulge in loose
amours, and are brought into ridiculous situations. They laugh at
each other; the stronger god hurls the weaker out of Olympus to the
earth. Taking them together, we do not find the Olympians an
impressive set of beings. Taking them, however, one by one, we judge
of them quite differently. The individual gods represent lofty ideals
and are not unworthy of worship. Whatever they were once, powers of
nature, fetishes or men, whatever village legends they have brought
with them from their native place, or whatever traits of savage life
still cleave to them, to the poet they are the embodiments of various
moral excellences. Zeus, father of gods and men, combines in his
character the attributes of righteousness and of kindness; he is the
founder of social order and the defender of suppliants, he possesses
all wisdom. Hera is the matron of fully unfolded beauty and matchless
dignity; Apollo is the faithful son who carries out his father's
counsel; Athene is the warrior-maiden skilled in battle but equipped
with every kind of skill, best counsellor and guide for the mortal
whom she favours; Aphrodite is the goddess of love, in whose girdle
are contained all charms; Ares is the impetuous warrior, Hermes the
trusty messenger, of the heavenly circle; Hephaestus, the lame and
awkward smith, is the artificer for the gods of all manner of cunning
work in metal. Around and under the Olympians are many other deities;
such as Hebe, the budding girl, and Ganymede, the youth born of human
race but taken up to heaven for his beauty to minister to the gods at
their banquets. Aphrodite is attended by the graces, Apollo by the
Muses, and the world is not stripped by Homer of its local deities,
although the chief deities now dwell aloft; mountains, rivers, caves
and isles of ocean, all have their immortal occupants.
Worship in Homer.--The gods being of such a nature, what relations
does man keep up with them, and how do they affect his life? Worship
follows the simple practice of the early world. It is not priestly.
There are priests, and they offer sacrifices regularly at the shrines
of which they have charge, but the king can sacrifice, or the head of
the house; and while one or two temples are mentioned in the _Iliad_,
sacrifice may be offered anywhere. Temples first appear in Greece
merely as shelters for images, but in the _Iliad_ the god is
generally worshipped not by means of an image but as himself directly
present; the need of temples has not yet arisen. In the _Odyssey_
temples of the gods are spoken of as buildings no town could be
without, but this is less primitive. Sacrifice is a feast in which
the god's portion of the viands is first offered to him, and the
worshippers then eat and drink to their hearts' content. There is a
detailed description of the proceedings in _Iliad_ i. 456 _sqq._ Here
after the feast there is music; "All day long worshipped they the god
with music, singing the beautiful paean to the Fardarter (Apollo); and
his heart was glad to hear." "The gods appear manifest amongst us,"
we read in the seventh book of the _Odyssey_, "whensoever we offer
glorious hecatombs, and they feast by our side, sitting at the same
board." There is nothing of the nature of an expiation about such a
sacrifice; it is simply the renewal of the bond between the god and
those who look for his aid, when a new enterprise is about to be
undertaken or a solemn engagement is entered on. Prayers are very
simple. Thus prays the wounded Diomede to Athene (_Iliad_ v. 115):
"Hear me, daughter of aegis-bearing Zeus, unwearied maiden! If ever in
kindly mood thou stoodest by my father in the heat of battle, even so
be thou kind to me, Athene! Grant me to slay this man, and bring
within my spear-cast him that took advantage to shoot me, and
boasteth over me!"
As there are no bad gods, good and evil are considered to be sent by
the same beings. Thus there is a great deal of uncertainty in men's
relations to the gods. "All men need the gods," we read; the Homeric
hero regards the companionship of a god as proper and necessary for
his enterprises. But some trouble must be taken in order to secure
their favour. They must not be neglected; their signs must be
attended to; above all, a man must be reverent and must studiously
practise moderation in his conduct and in his ways of thinking; else
the gods may easily be offended or made jealous, and withdraw their
countenance. And if they are to a certain extent capricious, there is
another consideration which impairs confidence in them. They are not
all-powerful. There is a point beyond which they cannot give a man
any help. Each man has a fate or destiny, which the gods did not fix
and with which they cannot interfere. When his hour comes, they must
leave him to his doom; indeed they may even deceive him, and lead him
into folly so that his fate shall overtake him. The punishment of
crime, both in this world and afterwards, is committed to a special
set of beings, the Erinnyes. The gods who are most worshipped do not
exercise that function; they are not immovably identified with the
moral order of the world, but frequently deviate from it themselves.
In the _Odyssey_, it is true, we meet with a deeper feeling. Here
Zeus is a kind of providence, in whom a man may trust when he does
right, and to all whose dispensations it behoves him humbly to
submit. A root of monotheism is present here, as in all the Aryan
religions from the first, and in Greece it is destined to have a
stately growth. The Homeric pantheon, however, as a whole, shows
religion at a stage in which it is rather an external ornament to
life than an inner inspiration. Perhaps there was never a set of real
men who thought of the gods and addressed them according to the
fashion of Homer. If such a religion ever actually existed, it was
not a strong one. These gods, with their caprices and infirmities and
their limited power, could never exercise any strong moral influence
or rouse any passion in their worshippers. They are fair-weather
gods; the religion is one of children, in whom conscience is not yet
awake and the deeper spiritual needs have not yet appeared. What the
mind of the Greek has done up to this stage is to discover that
nature is not above him; the powers of nature are human to him; they
are divine not because they are essentially different from himself,
but because they are matchless ideals of his own qualities. It is a
religion of free men. But the Greek has not yet discovered how
different he himself is from all that is around him; that element of
himself which is above nature will when he discovers it make such a
religion as the Homeric for ever impossible to him.
Omens.--As the godhead is never far away from the Homeric Greek, and
is an active being who takes an interest in human affairs, signs of
his presence are not infrequent. The air is the scene of them; in the
flight of birds, in sudden noises, the gods send messages; lightning
is a sign from Zeus of approaching rain or hail, it may be of
approaching war. There are rules for the interpretation of signs,
which, however, are in many cases of doubtful significance. Dreams
also are a favourite channel for divine communications, but they also
may be interpreted wrongly. There are persons who have a special gift
for knowing the divine will; the seer ([Greek: mantis]) is
enlightened by the deity not by an outward sign but inwardly; he
hears the god's voice, and can declare the divine will directly. This
gift may reside in a certain family, and may be attached to a certain
spot, where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona we
read that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests of
ascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, and
Agamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before the
Trojan war.
The State after Death.--With regard to the state after death, belief
is not uniform in Homer. There are elaborate funeral rites which
point to the assumption that the spirit of the hero is living
somewhere and needs various things. But the life of the departed was
not mapped out in Greece as it was in Egypt. The ritual of Mycenae had
little influence, for the funeral celebrations in Homer are very
similar to those of other early Aryan peoples, and undoubtedly were
not imported. What then is thought of the present existence of the
hero? He has ceased to exist. The body is the man, the spirit when it
has left the body has but a shadow-life, without any strength or
hope; at the most it may revive a little at the taste of blood. But
while the worship of the departed is seen from Homer to be decaying
among the Greeks, imagination is seen to be occupied in more than one
direction with the regions where they are, and to be asserting for
them a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed.
The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiring
clearer shape. The punishments are described which certain great
transgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; and
other details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conception
of the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken by
the gods when he dies, and where there is no snow nor storm nor rain.
Homer was not the only poet who furnished the Greeks with a system of
their gods; nor was his system everywhere accepted without demur.
Hesiod, writing in the latter half of the eighth century B.C., gives
a "theogony" or birth of the gods, which is also a genesis or origin
of the world, for to the Greek mind the gods and the world came into
existence together. He complains of those who on this subject have
taught fictions which resemble truths, referring perhaps to Homer.
His own system of the world is not a light and airy fabric but a
laborious work, due no doubt to professional or priestly industry, in
which the attempt is made to treat all the divine figures or
half-figured spirits the Greeks knew, genealogically, and to give a
complete enumeration of them. Myths are given, some of them of a
horrible character, which do not occur in Homer. The battle of the
gods with the Titans occupies a large part of the poem, and it
concludes with a collection of stories showing the descent of heroes
from alliances between gods and mortals. This work, as we saw, was
considered, along with the Homeric poems, as a standard authority on
the subject of the gods, and was appealed to even in the early
Christian centuries as showing what the Greeks believed.
The Poets and the Working Religion.--The work of these poets proves
that the Greeks in their days were anxious to arrive at clear and
harmonious conceptions about the gods. The movement on which Homer
and Hesiod set their seal, of fixing the characters and attributes of
the various deities, must have been long going on; and it led, as we
see, to different results in different places. That labour when
accomplished endowed Greece with a new religion. The local rite still
went on, which acknowledged no central authority and presented the
spectacle of an infinite diversity. Each city carried on in grave and
solemn fashion the traditional worship of its own gods, on whose
favour its prosperity depended. The other gods of the Pantheon the
city did not need to worship; and moreover local worship was
addressed to a large extent to the Chthonian or earth-gods, as
Demeter and Dionysus, of whom the epic poems know but little. The
poets were of little assistance therefore to the working religion;
but on the other hand the happy and beautiful deities of Homer found
entrance wherever poetry was loved. This was a religion for all
Greece; these gods were national; though some of them belonged
originally to Aeolia, they had become national by being enshrined in
poetry which the whole nation regarded as its own. The Homeric
conception of deity acted therefore on the whole Greek mind; all gods
rose in rank by the example, a subject was set before the mind of the
people, which the closely succeeding development of religious art
shows to have been studied in the noblest way.
Rise of Religious Art.--The seventh century B.C. was a period of
rapid development and of great prosperity in Greece. It was the age
of colonisation; manufacture and trade were active, and though the
Phenicians were not now in the Egean, Greeks sailed to the East and
brought home with them many ideas. It was a time like the sixteenth
century in Europe, when the world of geography was quickly opening
out, and views and sentiments were also widening. Worship could not
fail to share in the upward movement of such a period, and it is here
that we find the appearance of the ideas in religious art which have
made Greece the envy of the world. Architecture received a new
impulse from Egypt and Babylon; dwellings were built, not for human
rulers, as in the Mycenaean period, but for the gods. In country
districts or small towns the wooden shed might still suffice to
shelter the rude image, but in large towns, where the higher
conception of the gods and the artistic impulse were both present in
many minds, temples of more durable material were built. This came to
be a universal practice; among the first tasks of a new colony was
always that of erecting on a commanding site in the rising town,
splendid temples to the gods of the mother city. The Greek temple is
not a place to accommodate a large body of worshippers, but a
dwelling for the god. It is of oblong shape, and is placed on a
raised platform which is ascended by steps. It is generally
surrounded by pillars, is roofed, and has a low gable at each end.
The most important chamber in it is that containing the image of the
god. From his dim chamber the god looks out to the east through the
doorway facing him, which opens on the pillared portico in front.
Here the worshipper stands when praying, his face turned westward to
the god. As it was essential that the smoke of the sacrifice should
ascend freely to heaven, the god's real dwelling, the altar stood
outside. In some cases the roof was partly open, and the altar could
stand under the sky in the _cella_ of the god.
In the building and adornment of the temples Greek art found its
highest exercise. The architecture of those specimens which can still
be seen or described is of a dignity and beauty never before
attained; the beings must have been lofty and reverend indeed for
whom such dwellings were formed. The gable spaces and the flat
surfaces between the tops of the pillars and the roof gave
opportunity for sculpture; and the archaeologist traces on these
metopes (spaces between the beam-ends under the roof) and friezes,
the progress of Greek sculpture from a rude stage to that in which
the sculptor has gained complete mastery over his material, and can
give an imposing representation of a myth, or place on the marble a
complete religious procession of brave men and fair women. The images
of the gods to be placed in the temples called forth the artist's
highest skill; even when the rude old god was retained, a fine work
of art could also find place. It is the ideal gods of poetry that are
coming to be worshipped; the conception of the poet is expressed in
marble. Sculpture, however, came to its highest point in Greece
somewhat later than architecture. And offerings were made to the
temples of just such rare and costly things as men loved then and
love still to store up in their houses,--bowls and cups wrought
curiously in precious metals, statues and tapestries and all kinds of
treasure.
Festivals and Games.--The temple for which so much was done, formed
the centre of the city where it stood. In it the town deposited its
treasure and its documents; there oaths and agreements were ratified.
There also at certain times, such as the annual festival of the god
or the anniversary of some happy event in the history of the
town,--and as time went on such occasions tended to multiply,--the
town kept holiday. Women escaped from their monotonous confinement
and joined the procession to the holy place, perhaps carrying a new
dress for the deity. A sacrifice was offered, the god received his
share of the victim or victims, and the worshippers feasted on what
remained. But before this part of the proceedings arrived there was a
pause, which was filled up with various exercises all connected with
the act of worship, but tending also in a high degree to the delight
of those taking part in it. Dancing formed a part of every rite,
accompanied of course with music, and consisting not of a careless
exercise of the limbs, but of a measured and carefully trained set of
movements expressive of the emotions connected with the occasion.
This part of the religious act is obviously capable of great
expansion. We find the art of poetry also making its contributions to
religious art; poems are recited bearing on the history of the god.
The sacrifice is followed by contests of various kinds; the singers
compete for a prize, and athletic sports also take place, the
competitors for which have long been in training for them. The
winners are crowned with a wreath or branch of the plant sacred to
the god. The games of Greece, which thus arose out of acts of
worship, and some of which became so famous and attracted competitors
from every Greek-speaking land, are a notable sign of the spirit of
Greek piety. There is no asceticism in Greek religion; the god is
represented as a beautiful human person, and his worshippers appear
before him naked, in the fulness of their youthful beauty and of
their well-trained vigour, and offer him their strength and skill in
highest exercise;--the whole city, or a crowd much larger than the
city, rejoicing in the spectacle.
Thus does Greek religion enlist in its service all the arts, and
increase as they increase. At this period irrational manifestations
of piety tend to disappear, human sacrifice and the worship of
animals are heard of afterwards only in remote quarters. The religion
which now prevails is a bright and happy self-identification with a
being conceived as a type of human beauty and excellence, by being as
far as possible beautiful oneself, creating beautiful objects,
composing beautiful verse, training the body to its highest pitch of
strength and agility, and displaying its powers in manly contests.
This conception of religion, for a short time realised in Greece,
still haunts the mind as a vision which once seen can never be
forgotten. No one whose eyes have opened to that vision can regard
any religious acts in which the effort after harmony and beauty forms
no part, as other than degraded and unworthy.
Zeus and Apollo.--It is impossible here to enter specially on the
worship of the individual gods. Two of the gods, however, the same
who even in Homer stand above the level of the rest, still maintain
that superiority. Zeus draws to himself more and more all the
attributes of pure deity; his name comes more and more to stand
simply for "God," as if there were no other. He is the father of gods
and men; goodness and love are natural to him. He is the supreme
Ruler and Disposer, whose word is fate and whose ways pious thought
feels called to justify; but he is also the Saviour, to whom every
one may appeal. He is the source of all wisdom; all revelations come
from him. The other god who occupies a marked position is Apollo, the
god of light and the prophet of his father Zeus. His oracle at Delphi
was the most important in Greece; it was held to be the centre of the
earth, and was a meeting-place for Greeks from every quarter. His
priests exercised through the oracle a great influence on Greek life,
and as their god required strict purity and truthfulness and was the
inspirer of every kind of art and of none but noble purposes, the
worship of Apollo is one of the highest forms of Greek religion.
Change of the Greek Spirit in the Sixth Century B.C.--But the time
was at hand when the worship of the gods of the poets was to prove,
in spite of all that art had done for it, inadequate to meet the
spiritual needs of Greece. Civilisation advances in the sixth century
B.C. with immense rapidity; the Greeks, no longer prompted by any
foreign influence, quickly learn to exercise their own powers, and to
apply them in new directions. Life grows richer and deeper, new modes
of sentiment appear, the nation grows more conscious of its unity,
and at the same time the individual learns to value himself more
highly and to assert himself more strongly. On one side thought
awakes to an independent career and traditional beliefs are subjected
to criticism; on the other spiritual needs are felt which the old
worship does not satisfy, and for which religion has to find new
outlets.
It is far beyond our scope to deal with the religious movements of a
people thus passing into the self-conscious stage, and unfolding with
unparalleled freshness and power all the various activities of the
human mind. We can only point out a few of the lines of development
which become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise
of _rationalism_, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to
ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting
mind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter
suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their
attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment.
This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not gods but
only God, the gods can only hold their place on condition that they
are what God must be, and so they all tend to become alike in their
character; attention is turned most of all to Zeus, the highest god,
and when others are worshipped, it is as his prophets or delegates.
The poets of the fifth century reflect the conviction which all the
higher minds of their country were now coming to hold, that the world
is under the rule of one god. From this they are led to take up the
questions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government.
Aeschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as the
author of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Why
is Prometheus, though the noblest benefactor of the human race,
doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to a
certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation?
What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the
hearts of all men, and human laws which sometimes contradict these
older ones? Thus to the educated Greeks of the fifth century the old
religion had in its essence passed away. With unexampled rapidity had
the journey here been traced which India made more slowly, which
Egypt made at a very early period, but was not able to maintain, and
which every people starting from polytheism must make if their
religion is to prosper.
New Religious Feeling; the Mysteries.--But the conscience as well as
the mind of Greece awakes at this period, and Greek religion becomes
inspired with a deeper feeling. The simple objectivity of the Homeric
spirit is gone in which man could frankly worship beings like himself
and not very far above himself. God at this time is growing greater
and more awful, and man, less certain of himself, is beginning to
feel a new sense of mystery and of shortcoming. Whether it was due to
the anxiety and depression felt in Greece during the century before
the Persian wars, or to foreign influences, or mainly to the natural
growth of the Greek mind itself, religious phenomena of a new kind
now appear. Sacrifices are heard of, which are not merely social
reunions with the deity, but are intended to expiate some guilt or to
remove some pollution. The sense of sin has arisen, which the Homeric
world knows not, and gives a new colour to man's converse with the
deity. Another new feature is the rise into prominence of cults in
which man feels himself taken possession of and inspired by his god.
Some of these belonged to Asia Minor, the great centre of worships
accompanied with ecstasy and frenzy, but some were of native growth.
In these the common man found a satisfaction which the stately
ceremonial of the temples did not afford. The official religion had
grown cold and distant; but in the worship of Demeter or Dionysus, as
afterwards of the Phrygian Cybele, the "Great Mother" whom the Romans
imported, the least educated could feel the joy of enthusiasm and of
self-forgetting under the influence of the god, and could be closely
identified with the object of worship by performing acts in which the
experience of the god was symbolically repeated.
The rapid rise of the worships of Demeter and Dionysus thus furnishes
an instance of the law that a religion of intellect and of art is apt
to be confronted, even when it appears to have overcome all
obstacles, by a religion of feeling, in which all the fair progress
that was made appears to be entirely set at naught. When the worship
of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene was coming to its highest splendour,
these cults began to spread rapidly. They were originally peasant
rites of unknown antiquity in Attica and Boeotia, in which, after the
manner of rustic festivals, the coming of spring or the dying of the
year were celebrated amid jest and song, and with certain prescribed
actions in which the fortune of the god, corresponding to the season,
was dramatically set forth. In spring Demeter, the mother goddess,
received her daughter Persephone, who had left her for the winter; or
in autumn Dionysus, the god of vegetation, was defeated by his
enemies and driven away or torn in pieces. These worships, when
developed and forming a prominent part of Greek religion, were called
"mysteries," not because the knowledge of them was confined to few,
but because some parts of them were transacted in deep silence, and
were the objects of such awe and reverence that they were not spoken
of. No one, moreover, could assist at these rites without being
solemnly initiated after a period of probation and purification. Of
the Eleusinian mysteries at least, which were the most widely
diffused and which formed part of the state religion of Athens,
ancient writers agree in their report that the course of training
before admission was powerfully elevating and solemnising, so that
the period of initiation was the highest point of the religious life.
It was a condition that the candidate should be pure in heart and not
conscious of any crime. There was apparently no doctrinal
instruction; everything was to be inferred from the spectacle. The
mind was kept in a state of intense and devout expectation, knowledge
and insight growing, it was held, as the time of admission came near.
Before the final act there came a period of fasting, then a march
from Athens to Eleusis along the sacred way, which was studded with
shrines; then a search for the lost goddess in the dark of a moonless
night on the plains of Eleusis, and then at last admission to the
brightly-lighted building. Here all the arts were enlisted to furnish
a spectacle of unparalleled magnificence, during which the candidate
was allowed to touch and kiss certain sacred objects of a simple
nature, and repeated a solemn formula at his admission.
By partaking in these rites a man was believed to part with his
former sins, to form a special union with the deity, in whose nature
he was made to partake, and to be started on a career in which he
could not fail to grow morally better. It is easy to see the immense
superiority of this worship to the official rites of the temples. The
great point is that a new principle of religious association is here
introduced. The tie which binds the worshipper to his god and to his
fellow-worshippers is no longer that of blood or of common political
interests, but the higher one of a common spiritual experience. All
Greeks were eligible for initiation at Eleusis. A man was not born
into this circle, but entered it of his own free will and by means of
voluntary effort and self-denial. A community of a higher order thus
makes its appearance in Greek history, in which the limits of race
and of locality are overstepped, and each is connected with the rest,
because all have turned of their own voluntary motion to the same
ideal centre. The analogies between the community formed on the
mysteries and the Christian Church are too obvious to need to be
insisted on. The adversaries of Christianity asserted that in the
mysteries all the truths and the whole morality of that religion were
to be found.
Religion and Philosophy.--But while the mysteries met to some extent
the craving for a closer union with deity, another need which had
long been growing in the Greek mind was to be satisfied in a very
different manner. The Greek religion we have described had very
little to offer in the way of doctrine. There are no sacred books in
it, there is no theology, there is no religious instruction. When the
mind of Greece awoke to intellectual life, and the demand was made
for an explanation of the world, and for a view of the origin of
things which should explain man to himself, the Greek religion was
manifestly little fitted to meet such a demand. But man has
everywhere looked to religion to do him this service, and a religion
which is incapable of rendering it, or which like Buddhism explicitly
refuses to take up the task, stands in a perilous position. If the
shrine has no doctrine enabling man to understand the origin and the
connection of things, he will seek such a doctrine elsewhere, and
religion will have no control over it. Another alternative is that of
Buddhism where in default of such a doctrine man is condemned to
subside into intellectual apathy.
This, however, could never be the case with the Greeks, and their
fate in this respect proved different from that of any other people.
After their intellectual awakening took place, and when they had
begun to seek in every direction for a first principle of all things,
never doubting that the world was a system of reason, but trying one
key after another to unlock its secret, we find that religion itself
became aware of the need of the times, and that the attempt was made,
late in the day but with deep earnestness and great ability, to
construct out of the myths a reasoned account of the origin of
things. This was the aim of the Orphic poets. Orpheus, the mythical
singer of Thrace, who charmed men and beasts with his songs on earth,
had descended into Hades to fetch back his wife, who had been taken
from him, and had beheld the secrets of the under-world. The school
which was named after him dealt with the deepest problems, and sought
to explain both the nature of the gods and the destiny of the human
soul. It insisted strongly on the power and sole headship of Zeus, in
whom Greek religion had possessed from Homer downwards a figure
fitted for a monotheistic position. "Zeus is the head, Zeus the
middle, from Zeus are all things made. He is male and female, he is
the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven, the breath in
all, the strength of fire, the root of the sea, sun, and moon. Zeus
is the king, the progenitor of all things." The god Dionysus also is
placed by the Orphic writers at the head of the whole process of
creation. The myth of his dismemberment and of the scattering of his
ashes over the whole world is made to symbolise the great thought of
the connection of all things with the same source of life.
Descriptions were also given, answering to the growing sense of
personal responsibility, of the abodes of Hades and of the fate of
souls there, and of the metempsychoses through which the soul must
pass. This teaching had an influence which it is difficult to
measure; it acted on the tragedians in their magnificent attempts to
reform the beliefs of their country by making them moral; it is to be
traced in Plato, it also found expression in the mysteries. In its
own development it gave rise to a new phenomenon in Greek religion,
that of itinerant preachers who went about appealing to individuals
to take thought for the salvation of their souls, and also, strange
to say, offering private charms and spells to put them on the right
way of salvation.
But Greek religion was not thus to be reformed. It was not from the
priests that the growth of the higher faith of Greece was to proceed,
but from the philosophers. While much of the teaching of the
philosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith,--for
Greece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridicule
on existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothing
certain could be affirmed about the gods, and even her secularists
who held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers for
their own purposes,--the course of Greek philosophy was, on the
whole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured to
provide religion with a stable foundation in thought. In this great
movement of the human mind the thinkers of Greece--Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, to name no more--were working at the same problem which
occupied the prophets of Israel, and building up the rule of one God,
a Being supremely wise and good, source of all beauty, and the worker
of all that is wrought in the universe, in place of the many fickle
and weak deities who formerly bore sway. In many ways the schools of
Greece were the forerunners of Christianity. As the Jews, carried far
from their temple, form a new principle of religious association and
learn to meet for the service of God, without any sacrifice, in pious
mental exercises, so the Greeks, for whom their temples could do so
little, form little communities of earnest seekers after truth under
some teacher. The philosopher's discourse is held by students of the
early Christianity of the West to be the model on which the Christian
sermon was formed. Some of the schools even developed a true pastoral
activity, exercising an oversight of their members, and seeking to
mould their moral life and habits according to the dictates of true
wisdom.
Thus there arose on Greek soil, after the temples had grown cold,
what may truly be called a second Greek religion. It took possession
of the Roman world, and was, when Christianity appeared, the
prevailing form of religion among the more educated. Both in its
outward forms of association, in its doctrine of God, which went
through later developments very similar to those of Judaism, and in
its concentration of thought on ethical problems and on the moral
life of the individual, it powerfully prepared for Christianity. It
was not a religion, for it had neither any historical root nor any
belief and practice definite enough for the guidance of the common
people. Yet Christianity could not have conquered the world without
it.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. ii., contains the first
attempt to deal with Greek religion in the manner now required.
The Histories of Greece of Grote, Curtius, Abbott, and Holm.
Roscher, _Lexikon der griechischen, a Romischen Mythologie_.
Dyer, _The Gods of Greece_.
Gardner and Jevons, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, 1895.
L. R. Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_, 1896-1907.
Naegelsbach, _die Homerische Theologie_.
Williamowitz, _Homerische Untersuchungen_.
G. Anrich, _das Antike Mysterienwesen_.
Rohde, _Psyche_, 1891.
L. Campbell's Gifford Lectures on _Religion in Greek Literature_,
1898.
E. Caird, _The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_,
1904.
Holwerda, in De la Saussaye, Third Edition.
Ramsay on "Religion of Greece and Asia Minor" in Hastings' _Bible
Dictionary_.
S. Reinach, in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. ii. p. 117, _sqq._