birth and infancy of Christianity must always be the most interesting of
all subjects to the student of history, nor are there many more
deserving the attention of the general reader. The opponent, quite as
much as the adherent of Christianity, must admit that the early
struggles of the faith which is professed by nearly a third of the human
race, which for fifteen centuries wielded unchallenged sway over the
whole of Europe, and which has grown with the growth of European
colonization until it now has a firm settlement in every quarter of the
inhabited world, must ever possess surpassing interest for humanity. Yet
the popular ideas on the subject are not only vague but erroneous. A
general notion that, shortly before the coming of Christ, the Pagans had
tired of their old gods, and, lost to all sense of decency, had given
themselves up to an unbridled immorality founded on atheistic ideas, is
probably about as far as the man who has given no special study to the
subject would venture to go. Such a view, founded perhaps on somewhat
misty recollections of the Roman satirists and a little secondhand
knowledge of the denunciations of the early Christian writers, is almost
the reverse of the truth. There has probably been no time in the history
of mankind when all classes were more given up to thoughts of religion,
or when they strained more fervently after high ethical ideals, than in
the six centuries which have been taken for the subject of this book[1].
The cause of this misconception is, however, clear enough. Half a
century ago, the general public was without guide or leader in such
matters, nor had they any materials on which to form opinions of their
own. The classical education which was all that the majority of men then
got, carefully left all such matters as the origins of Christianity on
one side. The treatises of the Fathers of the Church, for the most part
written in late and inelegant Greek, were held to be too corrupting to
the style of scholars reared on the texts of the purest period to be
attempted by any but professional theologians, by whom indeed they were
often very imperfectly understood. Nor was much to be gathered from the
profane historians of the early Christian centuries, who maintained such
an obstinate silence with regard to Christianity as to give rise to the
theory that they must have conspired to ignore the new religion of the
lower classes as something too barbarous for ears polite[2]. Moreover,
the ruling maxim of education, especially of English education until the
end of the XIXth century, was that it was better to know one thing
thoroughly than to acquire a smattering of a great many, and that a
scholar was better served by an intimate knowledge of second aorists
than by any wide extent of reading; while the comparative method of
study was still confined to sciences of analysis like anatomy and
philology[3]. Above all, what has been called the catastrophic view of
the Christian religion was still in fashion. Although our spiritual
pastors and masters were never tired of reminding us that God’s ways
were not as our ways, they invariably talked and wrote on the assumption
that they were, and thought an Omnipotent Creator with eternity before
Him must needs behave like a schoolboy in control of gunpowder for the
first time. Hence “the remarkable victory” which, in the words of
Gibbon, the Christian faith obtained over “the established religions of
the earth” was in the view of the orthodox chiefly due to the miraculous
powers placed at the disposal of the primitive Church, and it was
considered impious to look further for the cause of the despotic rule
which in a comparatively brief space of time it succeeded in
establishing over the minds of men.
From this state of things, the foundation of what is known as the
science of religions did much to deliver us. When non-Christian faiths,
such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Mohammedanism, came to
be systematically studied without preconceived hostility or desire to
jeer at their absurdities, it was seen that the same atmosphere of
miracle and legend had gathered round their infancy as round that of the
Christian Church. Outside the regular or canonical scriptures—if the
phrase may be used—of all of these faiths, there had evidently grown up
a vast literature of uncertain date and authorship in which the same
stories were repeated and the same episodes introduced as in the
Christian Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Lives of the Saints. It began to
dawn upon us that, as the human mind under the same conditions generally
works in the same way, it was possible that all religions, whether true
or false, might have gone through the same or similar stages of
development[4].
That this view of the case was in itself a great step in advance,
everyone will readily admit who can remember the horror with which any
proposal to equate or even compare Christianity with any other religion
was once received. It was much helped, however, by another novel
hypothesis which about that time had got over its period of obloquy and
was rapidly coming to the front, namely, the theory of evolution. When
Darwin in his _Origin of Species_ enunciated the truth that as more
animals and plants than the earth can support come into existence every
year, it is only those varieties which are best fitted to their
environment which survive the consequent struggle for existence, he
practically gave us a new standpoint from which to contemplate Nature.
Herbert Spencer, quickly grasping this principle and carrying its
application much further than Darwin had ventured to do, showed that it
governed the development not only of animal forms but of the
intellectual and moral faculties of man, of political and social
institutions, and even of what he called “ecclesiastical institutions,”
which included religions themselves. With the general acceptance of this
view, it followed that the success in point of popularity of any creed
at any period of the world’s history was not due to any sudden or
capricious exercise of the Divine will, but to the normal working of a
universal and irresistible law.
But, at this point, we must stop a little to define what is meant by the
science of religions. Science, in this sense, has so far departed from
its strict and etymological signification of knowledge, as to connote
exact knowledge based upon ascertained fact, while a science is
generally held to mean an organized system in which the largest possible
number of related facts are gathered together with reference to one
common subject of study. At first sight, it appears that nothing can be
more rigidly excluded by this definition than religion, which has been
defined as “the effective desire to be in right relation to the power
manifesting itself in the universe[5].” This, which in some quarters
would be called the religion “of the heart,” can never form the subject
of study based upon exact knowledge, because the relations between any
human being and the power manifesting itself in the universe can be
known only, so far as we can see, to that being and to that power. But
in the science under consideration, there is no question of religion
generally, but of religions, which is a very different thing. By a
religion, we generally mean the assembly of beliefs, traditions, and
forms of worship which go to make up a faith or cult, and this, as it
must, according to the experience of all history, have come into being
through the agency of some man or men, should go through the same
evolutionary process as all other human institutions. Hence there is at
first sight a considerable probability that all religions whatever will
be found on examination to follow the same law of development by the
survival of those best fitted to their environment that we have seen
operative in the case of animal forms.
Here, however, the Christian—or for that matter, the adherent of any
faith which claims to have been founded by a special revelation—finds
himself in the presence of a dilemma. His own faith, whether it be
Christianity or another, is in his eyes true, as being not the work of
man, but of God, and all others are false. How therefore are they to be
compared? Is the Jew, who believes the Law to have been delivered to his
people “among the thunders of Sinai,” the Parsi who is taught the
special inspiration of Zoroaster by the “Omniscient Lord” Ahura Mazda,
or the Mohammedan who thinks that Mohammed received the Koran from Allah
himself, to be told that his faith has developed according to the same
laws as that of the Christian, who is convinced that his has no other
source than the teaching of the Divine Founder of Christianity?
To this it may be said that the dilemma is more apparent than real, and
is due to a like confusion of thought with that which seized upon many
when the evolutionary theory was first promulgated. No argument was then
more common than that the Divine creation of the animals, including man,
was authoritatively revealed once for all in the first chapter of
Genesis, and that the bare formulation of the idea that man’s bodily
form had developed by a long process of evolution and selection from
those of the lower animals was therefore a blasphemy that could only be
uttered by atheistic men of science[6]. There is no occasion to go here
into the tissue of sophistries and misconceptions with which Mr
Gladstone, when confronted with this argument in controversy with M.
Albert Réville, one of the founders of the science of religions, and
with M. Réville’s champion Prof. Huxley, tried to prove that the
assertion of the doctrine of evolution was to be found in the Book of
Genesis. It is sufficient to say that Darwin never affirmed that natural
selection or the survival of the fittest was the cause of the variation
of animal forms, but simply that it was the mode in which that
variation, however caused, operated[7]. In like manner, it may be said
that the science of religions by no means attempts to discuss the causes
which lead to the institution of any particular religion, but deals
merely with the laws underlying its development when once instituted.
The Christian religion, like those of Moses, Zoroaster, and Mohammed,
however Divine its origin, was, like them, propagated by men who founded
the Church, handed on the traditions, and gave form to the ceremonies.
Is there, therefore, any reason why the same law of development should
not apply to this as well as to its rivals?
That the answer to this must be in the negative is at last beginning to
be generally admitted. Prof. Tiele, writing in 1897, was obliged to
confess that “the new science of religions was in many quarters regarded
with suspicion[8],” but Dr Jevons, when lecturing at Hartford in 1908,
was able to say that “the time has happily gone by when the mere idea of
comparing Christianity with any other religion would have been rejected
with horror as treasonous and treacherous[9].” Yet it may be doubted
whether the clouds have rolled completely away, and it is fairly certain
that the many learned and able Catholic priests who have done so much to
elucidate the origins and tendencies of ancient religions other than
their own have until lately avoided the discussion of their relations
with the earliest forms of Christianity. This is the more to be
regretted, because they are in many cases peculiarly fitted for the
investigation, and their acquaintance with the extra-Canonical Christian
writers before Constantine, hitherto much neglected by Protestant
theologians, would make their conclusions upon it especially valuable.
Yet it is along these lines that future inquiry will probably advance;
and if, as most of us believe, the Christian religion has outdistanced
and survived all its early competitors because it was better fitted than
they to its environment, it is of great importance even from the point
of view of the most rigid orthodoxy, that we should have a clear
conception of what that environment was. Fortunately the gaps in our
knowledge have been in great measure filled by the work of Continental
scholars outside the pale of the Catholic Church, who have been
indefatigable of late years in discovering documents, editing texts, and
publishing monuments which throw great light on the history of the
religions which at the outset competed with Christianity for the favour
of the Graeco-Roman world. A summary of these labours is one of the
objects aimed at in the following pages.
If, now, we attempt to examine what these competitors were, we find at
the outset that a good number of those which we once thought formidable
may be eliminated from the list. Judaism, for instance, although the
matrix in which Christianity was formed, was never at any time in
effective rivalry with it. The words of the Gospel as to the Pharisees
compassing sea and land to make one proselyte have misled the unwary
into supposing that the number of Jewish proselytes was at one time or
another large[10]; but it must be remembered that it was the Sadducees
and not the Pharisees who were the dominant party in the Jewish State,
and that these last formed but a very small part of the total population
of Judaea[11]. The Sadducees from their Hellenizing tendencies were much
more likely to go over to the faith of the Gentiles than to make any
great effort for their conversion, and both they and the Essenes, who
formed in Josephus’ day the third party among the Jews, were too much
set on procuring, by different means, the temporal supremacy of Israel,
to care much about admitting any proselyte to share in it[12]. Although
a few undistinguished persons of Gentile blood may have become converts
to Judaism between the birth of Christ and the fall of the Temple, their
number can never have been at any time important; and after 69 A.D., the
furious hostility that arose between Jew and Gentile made any further
conversions to the Jewish faith practically impossible. Never, so far as
we know, did Judaism aim at becoming, and certainly never had the
slightest chance of appearing as, a world-religion.
Not less hopeless, in this respect, was the case of the Graeco-Roman
pantheon. The late Mr Long’s picture of “Diana or Christ,” representing
a young woman called upon by a sympathetic Roman magistrate to choose
between sacrificing to the statue of the many-breasted Artemis of
Ephesus and condemnation to death as a Christian, attained great
popularity in its day, and shows with fair clearness the view of the
relations between Paganism and early Christianity supposed at the end of
the last century to have been current in the first. Yet hardly anything
could give a falser idea of the religious history of the period. The
officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the
Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the
Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the City of Rome; and at all
times the Christians’ refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as
a political offence[13]. For the rest, the worship of the Olympian gods
had, when Christianity came to the surface, almost entirely died out,
and both Greek and Latin writers bear witness to the contempt with which
it was regarded by both races at the beginning of our era. Cicero, while
admitting that the world is governed by the providence of the gods,
rejects all the myths attached to them as impious, and declares that the
“Deity who is diffused in every part of Nature” appears as the earth
under the name of Ceres, as the sea under that of Neptune, and so
on[14]. Plutarch, too, is plainly a monotheist, who worships “the one
eternal, passionless Spirit far removed from the world of chance and
change and earthly soilure” of Greek philosophy[15]; and, while
lamenting the decay of faith which has led to the cessation of oracles,
thinks that all the manifestations of the Divine providence are the work
of no great deity, but of a crowd of inferior powers or demons who are
hardly in a greater superiority of position to man than the fairies of
our childhood[16]. Whatever rivalry the Christian Church had to face in
its infancy, it had none to fear from the deities of Olympus.
It has been said, however, and to a certain extent accepted, that the
first efforts of Christianity were sorely hindered by the followers of
the great Greek philosophers. In this there is a certain amount of
truth, for the Neo-Platonic school did indeed enter into an alliance
with the few remaining worshippers of the Pagan gods which forced them
into an attitude of opposition to Christianity. But this was at a date
some time after the compact with Constantine, and consequently later
than that within the scope of this book. Nor is it likely that at an
earlier date philosophy and Christianity appealed to the same class of
minds, and that they thus entered into serious competition with each
other. As the late Dr Hatch has said, “the earliest forms of
Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but
they also appealed on the one hand, mainly to the classes which
philosophy did not reach, and on the other hand, to a standard which
philosophy did not recognize[17].” Faith, not reason, was the quality
that the Apostles and their immediate successors sought in their
hearers, and Celsus was probably not far wrong when he said that the
rule of admission into the infant Church was “Let no educated man enter,
no wise man, no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever
is ignorant, whoever is unintelligent, whoever is simple, let him come
and be welcome[18].” To this state of mind the password of the early
Christian communities, _Maran atha_, is a sufficient key. The confident
expectation of the nearness of the Parusia or Second Advent for the
primitive Christian overwhelmed all other considerations. “The Lord is
at hand and His reward” was the one fact that he wished to keep before
him. What need to trouble about the Highest Good or the hundred other
questions that vexed the souls of the philosophers?
The religions competing with Christianity which are left after this
elimination may be classed in three categories. First come the Oriental
religions native to countries lying to the south and east of the
Mediterranean and therefore mainly outside the sphere of Hellenic
culture until after the conquests of Alexander. These religions, born or
nurtured in Asia Minor, Persia, and Egypt, so soon as Alexander had
carried out his project of the marriage of Europe and Asia, poured
westward in a flood which a Roman satirist compared to the Orontes
emptying itself into the Tiber, and gained, according to a well-known
law in the history of religions, a far greater influence over the minds
of men than they had exercised in their native home. The second category
comprises the many strange sects which the first Fathers of the Church
grouped together under the generic name of Gnostics. The faith which
these professed was not, as it is sought to show later, one founded on
religion at all but rather on magic, and had long been present in germ
as a sort of heresy or alternative belief underlying the worship of the
gods of Olympus. Finally, there arose the ambitious religion of Manes,
which aimed at sweeping into one vast synthesis or eclectic church the
three religions of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ, which at the time of
its institution divided between them the allegiance of the civilized
world.
Each of these categories shall be dealt with in turn; but before doing
so, it may be well to say something upon the state of our knowledge
concerning them. Until lately, it was a commonplace of religious history
that the Catholic Church had destroyed as far as possible all traces of
the religions that she had supplanted, which was picturesquely expressed
in the phrase that in her victory she had burned the enemy’s camp. That
this was her conscious policy may be gathered from the advice given by a
Pope of the VIIth century, to “break the idols and consecrate the
temples” of the heathen[19]; but of late many relics of the ancient
faiths which had before escaped us have been disinterred by the care of
scholars. During the last century, the lost heresiology of Hippolytus
and considerable fragments of works by Gnostic authors were brought to
light in circumstances to be described in their place[20], while the
present decade has not only added to our stock of Gnostic fragments, but
has revealed to us on the western frontier of China a hoard of
Manichaean documents rich beyond our hopes[21]. These are not only
valuable by reason of the information they afford, but give us ground
for the belief that, as the interest in such matters becomes more widely
spread, many more documents throwing light upon the subject will appear.
One word may be said in conclusion as to the relations of these rival
religions between themselves. Whoever studies the documents here
described cannot fail to be struck by the fact that certain ideas,
phrases, and even words, seem common to them all. At the time that these
documents were written this similarity excited no remark from the
orthodox, as it was at once disposed of by the theory that these
religions were one and all the invention of the Devil, and therefore
naturally bore traces of their common origin. This explanation, however
convenient, does not satisfy the demands of modern criticism, and it is
therefore necessary to look further. One way of accounting for the
phenomenon is to suppose that many if not all of the analogies noticed
are due to the mistakes of scribes and translators, who, when dealing
with expressions unfamiliar to them, were naturally inclined to repeat
the same phrases over and over again. This, as all know who have had to
do with ancient manuscripts, is accountable for much, and it is
extremely likely that a monk of the Vth or VIth century transcribing an
account of the opinions of, for instance, the Ophites who flourished in
Phrygia before the birth of Christ at the same time with those of the
Manichaeans found in Rome three centuries later, would not hesitate to
express views essentially different by the same phrases and even the
same words. Add to this the jumble that persons untrained in philology
naturally make between names in a foreign language and those of similar
sound in their own tongue, coupled with the fixed idea of finding in the
traditions of the heathen a confirmation of the historical truth of the
Hebrew Scriptures, and you have some explanation of the cause which
makes many proper names recur unexpectedly in otherwise unrelated
documents. Thus the Armenian bishop, Moses of Chorene, in narrating the
story which he says he obtained from Berossus, the Chaldaean historian
who wrote at the beginning of our era, says that “Before the building of
the Tower of Babel and the multiplication of tongues among the human
race, after the navigation of Xisuthros [_i.e._ Hasis-adra, the
Babylonian Noah] in Armenia, Zervan, Titan, and Japhet were princes of
the land. These persons,” he adds, “seem to be Shem, Ham, and
Japhet[22].” Zervan is the name given by a late sect of Zoroastrians to
the “Boundless Time” whom they placed at the origin of all things, while
Titan belongs to the Hellenic mythology, and Japhet may either be
Saturn’s brother Iapetus, or the patriarch of the Book of Genesis. It is
to be conjectured that Berossus did not use these three names in the
apposition quoted or probably at all, and we can only guess vainly at
the real names which are concealed under those which Moses of Chorene
here gives.
But when all allowance is made for mistakes like these, there remains a
fund of ideas common to all or many of the religions hereafter treated
of, which cannot be explained away by any theory of verbal
inaccuracy[23]. As an instance of this, let us take the notion of an
archetypal or heavenly man created ages before the appearance upon earth
of terrestrial man, who was nevertheless made in the image and after the
likeness of his predecessor. This idea, as will be shown later, is met
with among the Phrygian Ophites, where “a Man and a Son of Man” were
said to be the origin of all subsequent things, as in the Avestic
literature of Persia where Gayômort, the son, according to one story, of
the Supreme God Ahura Mazda by his daughter Spenta-armaiti, is made at
once the pattern and the source of the whole human race. The borrowings
of Zoroastrianism from Babylonia were not few, and we might conceive
this to be the survival of some old Babylonian tradition, such as that
which modern critics believe to have been the origin of the Creation and
Flood stories of Genesis; and this theory is strengthened by the
predominant part which this “First Man” plays in Manichaeism, itself a
Babylonian faith, where the Turkestan MSS. show him as a sort of
intermediary between the gods of light and this earth. But how shall we
account for the fact that in one of the earliest documents of the
_Pistis Sophia_, the collection of Gnostic writings hereafter
described[24], a great angel named Jeû, who is spoken of many times as
the “overseer of the light” and the arranger of the Cosmos, is also
alluded to as the “First Man,” in a way which shows that the writer did
not doubt that the allusion would be comprehended by his readers without
further explanation[25]? The _Pistis Sophia_, although doubtless written
in Greek in the first instance, comes to us in a Coptic dress, and the
documents therein contained show more affinities with the Egyptian than
with the Persian religion. How therefore can we account for the same
idea appearing at almost the same time in countries between the peoples
of which there was always bitter hostility, and which were separated
moreover by the Arabian Desert and the whole breadth of Asia Minor?
It seems to the present writer that no solution of this and of the
numerous other difficulties of which this is but one example can be
profitably suggested, until we know more than we do at present about the
origin and dates of Zoroastrianism. Although this religion is still with
us in the beliefs of the modern Parsis, there is none about the origin
of which we know less, or concerning the antiquity of which there is
greater discrepancy between ancient and modern writers. Thus, while
Plutarch, quoting as is generally supposed Theopompos of Chios who
flourished in the IVth century B.C., declares that Zoroaster himself
wrote 5000 years before the Trojan War[26], modern writers of authority,
like Prof. Williams-Jackson and Mdlle Menant, are inclined to bring down
the date of the eponymous prophet or reformer of the Persian religion to
700 B.C.[27] The discrepancy is too great to be bridged over by any
compromise, and the question has been further complicated by the
discovery a few years ago of inscriptions which show that Mithras, the
Persian god whose worship formed the most dangerous rival to that of the
Christian Church immediately before its alliance with Constantine, was
one of the most exalted deities of the presumably Aryan Hittites or
Mitannians at a date not later than 1272 B.C.[28] Signs are not wanting
that discovery in the near future may take this line of advance, and if
it should turn out that the religion which Zoroaster reformed was
established in Northern Mesopotamia before the Homeric age, we may have
to reconstruct all our ideas of the origin of the Greek religion. There
seems no use therefore in dilating upon hypotheses which the course of
research may in a very few years prove to be entirely erroneous[29].
In the meantime, the thing of immediate importance seems to be to get
the documentary evidence already at our disposal as far as possible
before the public, and this is attempted in the pages which follow. The
different religions are there arranged in the chronological order of
their greatest activity in the West with the belief that this course
will prove most convenient to the reader.
Footnote 1:
For the pre-Christian centuries, the rise of ethical religions like
that of the Greek Isis (see Chap. II _infra_) and of Mithras (see
Chap. XII) is perhaps sufficient proof of this. For the
post-Christian, see Tertullian’s remarks as to the interest excited
among the heathens by problems like the origin of evil (_de
Praescript._ c. VII.). As to their striving after morality, see Eugène
de Faye, “Formation d’une Doctrine de Dieu au IIme Siècle,” _Rev.
Hist. Rel._ t. LXIII. (Jan.-Fev. 1911) pp. 1, 2, for authorities. See,
too, Hatch, _Hibbert Lectures_, 1890, pp. 291, 292 and Harnack as
there quoted.
Footnote 2:
W. M. Ramsay, _The Church in the Roman Empire_, 1893, pp. 263, 264.
Footnote 3:
Tiele, in his Gifford Lectures delivered in 1895, remarks on the
ridicule with which the learned Hellenists of his youth received the
efforts of those whom they called the _comparativi_. See _Elements of
the Science of Religion_, 1897, vol. I. p. 7.
Footnote 4:
No better proof can be given of the change in public opinion in such
matters than the comparison of Gibbon’s words with regard to “the
miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church” (_Decline and
Fall_, Bury’s edition, vol. II. p. 2) and the way the subject is
treated in the article “Wonders” in Cheyne’s _Encyclopedia Biblica_,
1903.
Footnote 5:
The definition is that of Ira W. Howerth, _International Journal of
Ethics_, 1903, p. 205.
Footnote 6:
See Tiele, _op. cit._ vol. I. pp. 5 _sqq._ The controversies raging
round Darwin’s theory when first put forward are well summarized by F.
W. Hutton in his _Darwinism and Lamarckism_, 1899, _passim_. Cf.
Delage and Goldsmith, _Les Thèoriesé de l’Évolution_, Paris, 1909, pp.
28, 29.
Footnote 7:
See Hutton, _op. cit._ p. 111.
Footnote 8:
Tiele, _op. cit._ vol. I. p. 11.
Footnote 9:
F. B. Jevons, _Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion_,
1908, p. 18.
Footnote 10:
Like the late Dean Stanley, who in his Lectures on the _History of the
Jewish Church_, talked about the synagogue of the Jewish settlement in
Rome under the first Emperors “fascinating the proud Roman nobles by
the glimpse it gave of a better world” (vol. III. p. 410).
Footnote 11:
According to Josephus (_Antiq._ XVIII. i. 3, 4) they did not amount to
more than 6000 men distributed throughout the whole of Palestine.
Morrison thinks that “the Pharisaic party had no attraction for the
great bulk of the population,” _The Jews under Roman Rule_ 1890, p.
307.
Footnote 12:
See Chap. V _infra_.
Footnote 13:
See Neander, _General Hist. of the Christian Religion and Church_,
Eng. ed. 1853, vol. I. p. 126.
Footnote 14:
_De Natura Deorum_, c. XXVIII. The statement is put into the mouth of
Balbus whose arguments Cicero declares to have in his opinion “the
greater probability.” See also Athenagoras, _Legatio_, c. XXII. and
Minucius Felix, c. XIX. With such interpretations or mythoplasms,
Philo of Alexandria was familiar. Cf. F. C. Conybeare, _Apology of
Apollonius_, 1894, p. 9.
Footnote 15:
Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, 1904, p. 419.
Footnote 16:
_De Iside et Osiride_, c. XXV.
Footnote 17:
Hatch, _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 124.
Footnote 18:
Origen, _contra Celsus_, t. III. c. 44. Cf. Hatch, where last quoted.
Footnote 19:
Cf. Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_,
1899, p. 38, n. 4. See also the edict of Constantine quoted in the
concluding chapter, _infra_. The steps which led up to the policy are
well summarized by Walter Johnson, _Byways of British Archaeology_,
1912, p. 25.
Footnote 20:
See Chap. VII _infra_.
Footnote 21:
See Chap. XIII _infra_.
Footnote 22:
Langlois, _Collection des Historiens de l’Arménie_, Paris, 1868, t. I.
p. 388.
Footnote 23:
The late Dr Salmon’s theory that writers like Hippolytus may have been
taken in by a forger who made one document do duty for many different
sects is given in Chap. VII _infra_, but the arguments in its favour
are not conclusive.
Footnote 24:
See Chap. X _infra_.
Footnote 25:
Sir Gaston Maspero, “Sur l’Ennéade,” _R.H.R._ Jan.-Fev. 1892, p. 8,
says that the Egyptians regarded Osiris as the First Man, and Jéquier
repeats the statement in his _Livre de ce qu’il y a dans l’Hadès_,
Paris, 1894, pp. 9-10. Yet there seems no evidence that the Egyptians
ever knew him under that name.
Footnote 26:
_De Is. et Os._ c. XLVI.
Footnote 27:
See (Mdlle) D. Menant, “Parsis et Parsisme,” _Conférences au Musée
Guimet_, 1904, and Prof. Williams-Jackson as there quoted. The same
date is accepted with some hesitation by Prof. Hope Moulton in his
_Early Zoroastrianism_ (Hibbert Lectures), 1913, pp. 17 _sqq._
Footnote 28:
See H. G. Jacobi, “The Antiquity of Vedic Culture,” _Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society_, 1909, pp. 720 _sqq._, where the texts relied
upon are given and discussed. The correspondence which followed upon
this paper (see _J.R.A.S._ 1909, 1910) is full of interest. Fossey,
“Les Fouilles Allemandes à Boghaz-Keui,” _Journal des Savans_, July,
1909, p. 316, would make the date of the inscription about 1900 B.C.
Footnote 29:
After this was in print, there came to hand Mr Stephen Langdon’s
translation of the Sumerian tablet from Nippur found by him at
Philadelphia, which narrates in a new and modified form the earliest
Babylonian legend of the Creation. From this it appears that the
goddess Nin-harsag, either on her own account or as the agent of the
god En-ki or Ea, “created two creatures with heads, feet, and face as
a model for mankind.” See Mr Langdon’s Preliminary Note in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, 1914, p. 196, n.
23. A full transliteration and translation is promised later in the
_P.S.B.A._ If Mr Langdon’s reading of the tablet is accepted, this may
well prove to be the origin of all the “First Man” legends mentioned
on p. lxi, _supra_.
CHAPTER I
THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER
A glance at the map of Asia at the coming of Alexander will convince us
that all but a corner of the world known to the ancients was then ruled
by a single power. The Persian Empire, sprawling like a huge octopus
over the centre of the continent, dominated it from its four capitals at
the head of the Persian Gulf, and stretched without a break from the
Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. In its eastern provinces were comprised
what is now Russian Turkestan from Krasnovodsk to Kashgar, with the
Khanates and the Pamirs, all Afghanistan, Seistan, Baluchistan, the
North-West Province, and part of the Punjab. On the western side of the
Great Central Desert came the countries which we now call Persia and
Turkey in Asia containing in themselves a territory half the size of the
Continent of Europe, together with the rich province to the south of the
Caucasus which has lately passed into the grip of Russia. From here one
long tentacle had stretched across the Sinaitic Peninsula and had seized
Egypt; and, although another had shrunk back hurt from its attack on
Greece, it yet held positions on the Bosphorus and the Hellespont which
formed a standing menace that the raid might be repeated. Apart from the
Greek States which, as has been well said, the Great King found easier
to control through their own venal orators than to conquer by his
soldiers, there remained outside his sway only the trading republic of
Carthage and the Italian cities just rising into prominence. Travellers’
tales, more than usually improbable and untrustworthy, were, indeed,
told of great countries swarming with men and fabulous monsters lying
beyond the African and Indian deserts on the southern, and the great
ranges of mountains on the eastern, frontier of the Empire[30]; but
these gave as little concern to its rulers as did the fringe of
barbarian tribes, Cimmerians, Hyperboreans, Gauls, and Scyths, who
filled up the space between the civilized world and the imaginary ring
of waters which was called the Outer Ocean.
That this vast dominion should be loosely compacted was of the nature of
things. The twenty or more provinces into which it was divided enjoyed a
large measure of self-government, and had preserved, for the most part,
their native laws and customs unaltered. Each of these divisions was
ruled by a satrap who, like a Chinese viceroy, was allowed to maintain
armies and even fleets of his own. But a check, imperfect no doubt but
still existent, was exercised over his proceedings by the presence of a
Royal Secretary in each satrapy, whose business it was to supervise the
accounts, and to send up regular reports to the capital of the doings,
of his coadjutor[31], while the troops were under the command of a
general appointed directly by the Crown. From time to time, also, a
Royal Commissioner called the King’s Eye visited the province with a
strong guard to hear complaints and to see that all was in order[32].
The satrap, too, only held his post during his master’s pleasure, and
was liable at any moment to be removed to another province, degraded, or
put to death, on the strength of a simple letter bearing the Royal Seal;
and the tribute which each satrapy had to pay to the Great King being
settled at a fixed and known amount, there was less chance than under
some similar systems of devolution that the satrap might squeeze out of
his subjects a sum far greater than that which he transmitted to the
Treasury[33]. Above all, the Persians were of Aryan stock, and early
showed signs of the talent for governing older races which seems to have
stuck to the Aryans throughout their history. They made excellent roads,
and established swift running posts that did much to make communication
easy between the most important parts of their empire; while, as the
satraps’ standing armies were composed either of native Persians or
hired mercenaries, the subject populations had an opportunity, rare
enough in the ancient world, of peacefully developing their internal
resources without constant fear of disturbance by foreign enemies, or
forced participation in wars of aggression[34]. It was only when the
word went forth from Babylon or Susa, Ecbatana or Persepolis, for the
calling-out of the Ban of the whole Empire that the other than Persian
subject of Artaxerxes or Darius had to join the levy of his satrapy,
and, on orders given to him through an interpreter, to assist the Great
King in crushing some rebellious satrap or repelling foreign invasion.
At other times, he must have known him only as a kind of divinity,
having power to throw down and to set up, to whom he might cry, not
always in vain, against the oppression of his own immediate ruler. Those
writers are no doubt justified who say that the government of the
Persian Empire was to the humbler classes of Asiatics a great
improvement upon any that had preceded it[35], and that the rule of the
Great King never awoke the fierce resentment in its subjects aroused by
the tyranny of the Semitic Assyrians, or of the Chaldeans who were, in
great part, of Mongoloid blood [36]. It was doubtless the memory of this
golden age, glorified as remembrances generally are by the lapse of
centuries, that brought about the reaction to the Persian form of
government and culture which we shall have to discuss later in the
countries bled white by the Roman proconsuls.
Throughout this vast realm, Alexander’s coming brought about a change
such as the civilized world has never seen before or since. Among the
world-conquerors who have been hailed as heroes in after times,
Alexander—surely the greatest individual known to history—stands
distinguished by the loftiness of his aims and the swiftness with which
they were attained. It is wonderful that a boy of twenty with an army
that cannot have exceeded 50,000 men all told should succeed in
overcoming practically the whole of Asia in less time than it took the
British Empire with the third of a million to break down the armed
resistance of a few thousand Boers. More wonderful is it that he should
a little later contrive to transport a force of about 100,000,
comprising infantry, cavalry and artillery, over the three thousand
miles that separate Macedonia from Karachi, at the same time preserving
such perfect communication with his base that he seems never to have
remained for long without letters from Europe, while the stream of
recruits that reached him from the same source must have been continuous
and unchecked[37]. Such a feat which, with all the aid which steam and
electricity can give us, would still tax to the utmost the powers of our
greatest modern generals, becomes almost miraculous when we think that
the greater part of his line of communications must have lain through
recently subjugated lands, and that his own advance led him into
countries unmapped and known only to him by the half fabulous tales of
his enemies[38]. But the most astonishing thing about these exploits is
that they were all performed with the conscious aim of making Asia
Greek[39], and in this respect, as in all others, they were both
original and successful. Everywhere that Alexander passed, he left
behind him cities peopled by a mixture of his own veterans, of those
camp followers which, then as now, have always stuck to a European army
on the march, and of natives of the country either found on the spot or
drawn from some other part of Asia; and the permanence of these
foundations still bears witness to the foreseeing eye of their founder.
Alexandria in Egypt, Candahar, Secunderabad, all preserve to this day
the memory of his royal name, and the continued importance of Khojend,
Samarcand, Herat, Merv, and Cabul out of the many other Alexandrias that
he established on his conquering way show that his statesmanlike
perception of the chief markets of the East was as sure as his
strategical insight[40]. Nor did he neglect other means of carrying out
the great design that he had at heart. In the great feast at Susa, which
he celebrated on his return from India, the “marriage of Europe and
Asia,” which had always formed his guiding idea, took visible shape. He
had already wedded—it is said for love—the beautiful Roxana, a princess
from Bactria in the Eastern (or Upper) Provinces of his new Empire[41],
and now he took as a second consort Statira, the daughter of Darius,
who, as the scion of the last native king of Persia, may be taken as the
representative of its western centre. Nearly a hundred of his superior
officers and some ten thousand of his humbler followers hastened to
follow his example and to receive Asiatic brides with the rich dowries
assigned them by the Conqueror[42]. Moreover the thirty thousand
youthful recruits from his new conquests, whom he had ordered five years
before to be trained in the Macedonian discipline and the Greek
language, now arrived[43], and Alexander set to work with his usual
energy to diffuse through his European army strong drafts of his Asiatic
subjects in order to cement still further the alliance between the two
Continents. Had he lived, it would have been a mixed army of Asiatics
and Europeans that he would have led the following year to the conquest
of the western world[44].
Destiny, however, is, as men would have said in those days, stronger
than the immortal gods, and Alexander’s early death put an instant stop
to all ideas of further conquest. It is idle, until we know the causes
of things, to speculate on what might have been; but it seems probable
that if Nearchus’ expedition had sailed, the Conqueror’s warlike plans
would once again have proved to have been perfectly laid, that he would
have crushed Carthage as easily as Thebes and Tyre, and that the Italian
States would have received the same master as the Bactrians and
Indians[45]. Yet so far as our immediate purpose is concerned,
Alexander’s work was done once for all, and the policy typified as the
marriage of Europe and Asia was perhaps as well served by his death as
by his life. During Persian times, the Court of the Great King had
always proved a magnet drawing to itself with irresistible force the
ever-restless Greeks, and the road to Susa was trodden in turn by
politicians like Alcibiades, leaders of mercenaries like Xenophon, and
Greek philosophers, artists, and courtezans innumerable. The traffic in
mercenaries alone must have been enormous when we find Greek troops
forming the stiffening of those huge armies of Darius which Alexander
overthrew at the Granicus, Issus, and Arbela[46]; while as for the other
sex, Themistocles, when turning his back on his own country, could find
no better or safer mode of approaching the Persian Court than in a
closed litter supposed to be conveying a Greek woman to the harem of the
Great King[47]. But when the century-long wars for the succession to
Alexander broke out upon his death, there straightway appeared five
courts where before there had been but one, and these were now ruled
over by Greek and not by Persian kings. Mercenaries of all kinds were in
urgent demand in every one of them, while the setting free of the
millions in bullion and specie found by Alexander in the Persian
capitals caused an outbreak of luxury like that which followed in
Germany the payment of the French milliards. Soon every Greek who had
strength, beauty, or talents to sell was on foot to seek his or her
fortune in Asia, and with them went everywhere the petty Greek trader,
as enterprising and as fearless in pursuit of gain as those countrymen
of his whose booths Lord Kitchener saw set up on the field of Omdurman
before the rout of the Mahdists was complete, and whose _locandas_ still
greet one in the smallest villages on the Nile. The stream of
fortune-hunters, now in full flood, quickly overflowed from the ancient
capitals to the numerous Antigonias, Antiochias, Lysimachias,
Nicomedias, and Seleucias which the new kings everywhere founded in
imitation of their dead master, and even the most distant provinces
began to receive their quota of Greek citizens and Greek culture. As has
happened more than once in history, Asia woke suddenly from her sleep,
and acquired a veneer of foreign manners in hardly longer time than it
has taken Japan in our own days to adopt European armaments, teaching
and dress. When the Parthians overcame Crassus, the Roman captives found
the barbarian victors amusing themselves with the plays of
Euripides[48]; while the Bactrian and Indian provinces, which the rise
of the Parthian power cut off from the western part of Alexander’s
Empire, conceived such a taste for Greek art that the statues of Buddha
with which their capitals were afterwards decorated were carved
according to Greek instead of Hindu canons[49]. The so-called Indo-Greek
kings of these parts, the Euthydemi, Diodoti, and Eucratidae, of whom we
know hardly more than the names, no more thought of using other than
Greek designs and inscriptions for their coins than did the rulers of
Pergamum or Antioch[50]. The generation that had seen Alexander face to
face was hardly in its grave before the marriage of Europe and Asia had
become a very real and pregnant fact.
The importance of this for the history of religions can hardly be
exaggerated. Greek was spoken everywhere throughout Asia, and for the
first time in the world’s history the inhabitants of the civilized part
of the earth had a common tongue in which they could communicate their
ideas to each other. No doubt the language spoken by the offspring of
Greek colonists and their native spouses was not the tongue of Sophocles
or of Demosthenes any more than it was “the strong-winged music of
Homer”; but it was a better medium for the transmission of metaphysical
theories than the founder of any world-religion has ever had at his
disposal before or since. The missionaries whom modern nations send into
the distant parts of the earth for the propagation of the Christian
faith find one of their worst difficulties in the impossibility of
rendering its doctrines into the languages of peoples at another stage
of culture from themselves; but no such barrier between teacher and
taught existed in the empire created by Alexander’s genius. The result
of this possibility of intercommunication of ideas was at once apparent.
Anxious to show that they too had a pedigree, the older nations of the
world seized the opportunity to inform their new masters of their own
history and traditions; and, as all history was in those days sacred
history, they thus introduced to the Greeks their gods and their beliefs
as to the divine governance of the world. The sacred books of the
Chaldeans, of the Egyptians, of the Jews, and no doubt of many other
peoples whose records are now lost to us, were translated into Greek;
and thus the science of the history of religions was born. Writers like
Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch are still our chief guides for the
religions of the earliest populated parts of the ancient world; but how
could these compilers have handed down to us the traditions they have
preserved save for writers like Berossus, Manetho, and Philo of Byblus,
who themselves wrote in Greek? Plutarch tells us that when he spent a
year in Rome during the reign of Trajan, he did not find it necessary to
learn Latin, his native tongue being apparently understood by everybody.
One may wonder how much of the sayings and doings of the Founder of
Christianity would have come down to us, had they not been first
recorded in the κοινή or _lingua franca_ of the whole East[51].
There were, however, other ways in which Alexander’s conquests prepared
the way for a religion which could make appeal to men of every nation
and language. Nothing is more difficult for those brought up in a
monotheistic faith, with its inbred contempt for the worshippers of many
gods, than to realize how the ancients regarded the Divine. The peoples
of classical antiquity seem to have everywhere believed in the gods of
their neighbours as absolutely as they did in their own, for they
imagined that their deities had, like men, only a limited sphere of
action, or, to put it scientifically, were subject to the same
conditions of space as their worshippers. Thus, the Syrians thought that
Yahweh of Israel was a mountain god, who could not help his people when
fighting in the plains[52], and the Philistines believed that the ark in
which he lived would bring prosperity or disaster to the place in which
it happened to be for the time being[53]. This is almost an exact
parallel to the tale of the prince of Bactria, whose daughter was freed
from demoniacal possession by an image of the Egyptian god Khonsu sent
into Asia _ad hoc_, whereupon he decided that it would be wise to keep
so powerful a god in his own country, and did so until frightened by a
dream into sending the statue back[54]. But such ideas, however natural
they may be to isolated or backward peoples, soon lost their hold upon
the acute and logical Greeks, when they came into contact with civilized
nations having pantheons differing widely from their own. The
philosophers, indeed, by dint of hard reasoning on the subject, had
formed before the time of Alexander a conception of the Supreme Being
which does not differ materially from that of the educated Christian of
the present day. “Loyal,” says Pater, “to the ancient beliefs, the
ancient usages, of the religions of many gods which he had found all
around him, Socrates pierces through it to one unmistakable Person, of
perfect intelligence, power, and goodness who takes note of him[55]”;
and the same thing might be said with even greater certainty of the
deductions of Aristotle[56], whose declared monotheism caused him to be
adopted in the Middle Ages as one of the Doctors of the Church. But
there is no reason to believe that such lofty conceptions ever
influenced in the slightest the beliefs of the common people, who alone
count for anything in the evolution of the organized body of beliefs and
practices which we call a religion. Socrates so successfully concealed
his opinions in this respect from everybody but Plato, that the clear
and practical mind of Xenophon seems to have never seen in him anything
but a polytheist[57]: and that Aristotle’s monotheistic teachings were
not intended for the common herd may be judged from the correspondence,
whether actual or imaginary, between him and Alexander himself, in which
the hero reproaches his former tutor for having published doctrines
which should only be taught by word of mouth, and learns in reply that
his metaphysical theories would be unintelligible save to those whom he
had himself instructed in philosophy[58].
It is evident, therefore, that the great mass of Alexander’s subjects,
whether Asiatics, Egyptians or Greeks, would require something more than
the sublime theorizing of the philosophers before their religious ideas
could be turned in the direction of monotheism. Nine hundred years
before, Amenhotep IV of Egypt had indeed been led by his adoration of
the material sun to put forward a religious reform which had as its
principal feature the proclaiming abroad that there was only one God, in
whose sight all mankind was equal; but the sole effect of this premature
attempt to elevate the religion of his people was the loss of the
external possessions of Egypt, and the posthumous branding of his own
memory as that of a criminal. Possibly, too, the Hebrew Psalmists and
Prophets had formed a like conception of the Deity when they asserted
that among the gods there was none like unto Yahweh[59]; but that this
idea seldom penetrated to their hearers is plain from their incessant
denunciation of these last for “whoring after” other gods. The mere
announcement of the unity of God had therefore in itself an insufficient
attraction for the masses, and for the doctrine to be popular they had
to be led to it by other ways than those of argument or authority. Now
Aristotle noted with his usual shrewdness of observation that the form
of religion in a state generally follows with fair closeness that of its
temporal government[60], so that men will be more inclined to believe in
what the Greeks called “monarchy,” or the active rule of One First
Cause, if they live under a despot or absolute king than if they are
members of a democracy. But when did the world either before or after
his time see such a beneficent and godlike despot as Alexander? The
robber-kings of Assyria had been accustomed to sweep across Western Asia
leaving behind them, as they boasted in their inscriptions, a trail of
vassal rulers impaled or flayed alive, of burnt cities, and of plundered
peoples. The Persians, as has been said, had more idea of the rights of
their inferiors, and did not regard their subject territories as mere
fields for exploitation; but the life of sensual luxury into which their
kings sooner or later subsided had its natural outcome in harem
intrigues and assassinations which deprived the central power of a great
part of its otherwise effective control over its satraps. But Alexander
was in this, as in all other respects, the perfect type of the
benevolent master who thinks more of his servants’ welfare than of his
own personal gratification. Neither his mother Olympias, domineering and
masterful as she was, nor his first mistress Barsine the widow of
Memnon, nor his wife Roxana of whom he is said to have been enamoured,
nor the Persian princess Statira to whom he gave his hand out of policy,
could boast that they ever influenced by one hairsbreadth the direction
of his sovereign will. As for his justice, the swift punishment that he
measured out on his return from India to those of his officers whom he
found guilty of oppression and malversation showed that under his
far-seeing eye there would be none of those abuses of delegated power
from which the satrapial system had suffered under his predecessors[61].
Modern historians have sometimes called him cruel; but in political
matters severity is often the truest mercy, and the blood that he shed
at Thebes and in Bactria probably saved a hundred times the number of
lives which unchecked rebellion would have made it necessary to
sacrifice; while the accidental and unpremeditated death of Clitus may
well be pardoned to one who found not only his dignity as man but his
royal authority wantonly outraged by a friend whom he had distinguished
by exceptional marks of kindness. In every other respect his record is
stainless. Although opposed at every step of his short career by orators
and demagogues who saw in him the only obstacle to their unrestrained
plunder of the fatherland, no legend has survived to his dishonour. On
the contrary, all that we hear of him shows us for the first time in the
world’s history a conqueror who was at the same time a just and wise
ruler, merciful to his fallen foe, scorning even in war to take mean
advantage[62], and chivalrous to the weak to a degree that his age could
neither understand nor imitate[63]. And with all this, he united in his
own person those superficial advantages which have always been quick to
win for their possessor the devotion of the mob. To a talent for
generalship which neither Hannibal, Caesar, nor any modern general has
equalled, he joined a personal bravery which often reached the level of
recklessness and was always to be found in the forefront of the hottest
battle. Whether we see him charging at the head of the Companion cavalry
in the three great battles with Darius, pursuing with a handful of his
guard the routed Persian army after Arbela, or first over the wall at
Mooltan, Alexander is always performing these feats of hardihood which
in a leader strike more than anything the imagination of his soldiers.
Add to this a generosity which made him willing to strip himself of his
possessions to enrich his friends, a personal delight in that pomp and
pageantry which forms the most direct road to the hearts of the
proletariat, and a form, face and figure so distinguished that their one
defect was for centuries after imitated by all who wished to be thought
models of manly beauty[64], and we can no longer wonder that his
contemporaries looked upon him as more than human. This wise and
provident ruler of the world that he had conquered was at the same time
a youth beautiful as Apollo, chivalrous as Bayard, clean as Galahad. Is
it surprising that his name alone of all the conquerors of the East has
endured through all changes of creed and culture, that the fierce chiefs
of the Central Asian tableland still boast of him as their progenitor,
and that the whole Mahommedan world still hold him the king of the
believing Genii? No Caesar, Attila, or Genghiz Khan has ever thus
impressed the imagination of future ages[65].
Thus Alexander’s coming gave an enormous impulse to that monarchical
principle of government which from his time onward was to reign supreme
for nearly two thousand years. Philosophers and sophists hastened to
declare that democracy—as was indeed the fact—had proved itself
incapable of governing, and that in the rule of one man was to be found
the natural order of things and the only security for a well-ordered
State[66]. Every one of the Diadochi or Successors of Alexander hurried
in turn to assume the diadem, and Rome had no sooner contrived to crush
her rival republic of Carthage than she too fell under the sway, first
of dictators whose power was admittedly despotic, and then of emperors
whose constitutional limitations were about the same as those of
Alexander. That this was certain in time to react upon the universal
conception of the Divine, followed directly from the law underlying
religious phenomena which had been enunciated by Aristotle: but, before
this could make way among the Greeks, thus suddenly promoted to the
position of the ruling race, it was necessary that their own gods should
be assimilated to those of their eastern fellow-subjects, or in other
words, should be shown to be the same divinities under different names.
Now, a movement with this object, even before Alexander’s coming, had
been set on foot in Greece itself, and was in fact the natural outcome
of the ideas as to the origin and governance of the universe brought
there by the philosophers of Ionia[67]. It was all very well for the
masses—then as now, much given to pragmatism or the reduction of every
abstract idea to its most material and practical expression—to believe
that the power of every god was limited to an area of so many square
feet surrounding his image or sanctuary; but how could such a notion be
held by philosophers who had sought out the causes of things, by
travellers who had visited neighbouring countries in pursuit of
knowledge, or by soldiers who had fought there, and had found it
necessary to pay reverence to gods other than their own? It is said that
in naturalistic religions like those of Greece, there is always a
tendency to consider as identical divinities with the same or like
characteristics—to consider for instance all gods with solar attributes
as but different forms of the sun-god—and the Greeks of the fourth
century B.C. had thus taken many foreign gods into their pantheon. It
was, as Socrates found out to his cost, an offence to bring the worship
of new gods into the city; but the difficulty was got over by the theory
that the foreign divinity was only another form of some god already
worshipped by the citizens[68], and by keeping his cult as private as
possible. Later, when the popularity of the new deity seemed to be
assured, an oracle of Delphi was generally secured authorizing the
adoption of his worship under the name of his nearest Greek analogue,
and in this way many foreign worships were brought into Athens
itself[69]. Bendis, the moon-goddess of Thrace, had there from early
times a temple or Bendideion[70], and the Syrian Adonis was publicly
wailed for in the city when Alcibiades was setting out for Sicily[71].
This, too, was the more natural because the Greeks always acknowledged
that their older divinities originally came to them from foreign parts.
The myths in which the traditions of their origins were preserved gave
Crete or Asia Minor as the birthplace of Zeus, an island in the Aegean
as that of Apollo and Artemis, and the whole scene of the earthly trials
of Demeter and Persephone was laid partly in Eleusis and partly in
Asia[72]. As for Africa, Herodotus boldly asserts that the “names” of
almost all the gods worshipped by the Greeks came from Egypt[73], and,
although this is certainly not literally true, it gave him an excuse for
identifying all the Egyptian deities of whom he had any knowledge with
the Greek divinities whom he thought they resembled. But when
Alexander’s conquests had made the different subject nations really
acquainted with each other’s religion, the process of _theocrasia_ or
the fusion of one god with another received an impulse that carried it
beyond all bounds[74]. The divinities of Asia Minor were naturally the
first to be taken into the Greek pantheon, especially by the Athenians,
always mindful of their Ionian kinship; and the many-breasted goddess of
Ephesus, Cybele of Pessinus with her consort Atys or Attis, and the
Sidonian Astarte, were all worshipped in Greece after identification
with different Greek deities in the manner that had served to naturalize
the “Thracian” or Thessalian Dionysos, and the (probably) Egyptian
Hermes[75]. As we shall see later, the Phrygian Sabazius and the Cretan
Zagreus had already preceded them in secret, and Persian, Jewish, and
perhaps Indian gods were to follow. From Greece, the passion for
_theocrasia_ spread both eastward and westward. The Greek kings of Upper
India found it necessary to identify on their monuments the gods of
their native subjects with the divinities of Homer[76], and those of the
Central Provinces and of Asia Minor did the same with such effect that
it is almost impossible for us to distinguish their many Artemises,
Aphrodites, and different forms of Zeus from the gods worshipped under
similar names in ancient Greece[77]. As for the West, the Romans, even
before they became the masters of the world, took over the Greek
pantheon _en bloc_ by the simple process of calling their own Italian
deities by Greek names; and if we still speak of Zeus as Jupiter, Athena
as Minerva, Ares as Mars, and Hermes as Mercury, it is by reason of the
syncretism brought into fashion by Alexander’s conquests.
Neither must we forget that the deification of Alexander during his
lifetime brought an entirely new conception of the Divine into the
European world. The divinization of the king was indeed no new thing in
Egypt, where the Pharaoh from the earliest times was looked upon after
his enthronement as the living form of the sun-god Horus; but to the
religious ideas of the Greeks it was evidently a surprising shock. The
distinguishing attribute of a Greek god was his deathlessness or
incorruptibility; and although heroes like Theseus and Heracles were
fabled to have become immortal and therefore fit subjects for worship,
this was only because they were in the natural way the progeny of the
gods themselves, and as such were taken into heaven by their fathers
after death and the purging away of their mortal nature[78]. Alexander,
on the other hand, demanded from the Greeks as from his other subjects
divine honours during his life, and these were accorded to him with
servile readiness by the governments of Athens and other Greek
city-states, the Spartans not excepted[79]. What he meant exactly by
this demand it would be hard to say, because his supposed sonship to
Amen on which it was ostensibly based, was, as Sir Gaston Maspero has
shown, merely the form by which, on a change of dynasty, the priests of
Amen were accustomed to legitimize the accession to the throne of a king
who could show no right thereto but force[80]. It is evident, too, that
Alexander did not himself take his deification very seriously, since he
allowed its propriety to be discussed before him at a wine-party[81];
and his apologists, Arrian and Plutarch, are possibly well-founded when
they declare that it was a mere political device to secure the grudging
obedience of his Macedonian countrymen[82]. But his successors in this
matter went far beyond him. Ptolemy and Arsinoe, without any pretence of
divine descent, were proclaimed “Saviour-gods” for their Greek as well
as for their Egyptian subjects quite apart from any identification of
themselves with Horus or any other native deity. Antigonus, when
claiming to be the _strategos_ or generalissimo of the whole Empire, was
hailed as a god, which drew from the rough old king a repartee more
pointed than decent[83]. So, too, was his son, Demetrius the City Taker,
although at the time of his deification he had not even an independent
kingdom of his own, but was merely ruling Greece as the viceroy of his
father. And the barriers between the Divine and the human being thus
broken down, men’s minds soon became so familiar with the idea that they
not only thought men might become gods, but declared that the gods were
only deified men. The Athenians in the hymns that they sang to Demetrius
declared that he was the only true god, and that the others were either
asleep or too far off to be taken into account, or were not really gods
at all[84]. But it is not with impunity that the religious ideas of a
people can be thus suddenly and violently affronted. Within a few years
from Alexander’s death, Cassander’s friend and envoy Euhemerus put
forward, with the aid of a literary fraud something like that of
Psalmanazar, the theory that all the gods worshipped by the Greeks had
once been kings or at least distinguished men and women upon earth[85]—a
doctrine that was received with as much enthusiasm in the Rome of the
Republic as it once evoked in our own days among the followers of
Herbert Spencer[86]. Later, the Epicurean philosophy, with its happy
gods neither interfering with nor caring about the doings of mankind,
came to the assistance of this rather crude atheism. Although the Stoic
philosophers in their turn tried to introduce a more lofty idea of the
Deity, it was probably not until late Roman times that they ever
obtained anything like a grip on the people. Whether for good or ill, it
is certain that the Greeks after Alexander’s death never returned to the
simple faith in their national gods which had sufficed for their
forefathers.
This is a point that it is important to remember, because without it, it
is hard to understand the passion for innovation in religious matters
which seems for the next three centuries to possess unchecked sway over
mankind. It appeared as if Alexander, who indeed had made all things
new, had set free the gods of the ancient world to wander from one end
of his Empire to the other, and the desire to proselytize appears for
the first time in the world’s history. Buddhism must have been prevalent
in India for nearly a century before Alexander; but when it became the
religion of the state in the reign of Asoka, grandson of that
Chandragupta or Sandracottus who had talked with Alexander face to face,
the Indian king boasted that he had sent out missionaries for the
propagation of his new faith to the courts of Antiochus of Syria,
Ptolemy of Egypt, Antigonus of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander
of Epirus[87]. Whether the Indian missionaries ever reached the kings to
whom they were sent may be doubted, and it is certain that these last
did not pay the attention to them that Asoka claims; but it is quite
possible that to the impulse given by such missions may be attributed
some of the practices of the Jewish sect of the Essenes, and perhaps the
monastic seclusion affected by certain worshippers of the Alexandrian
god Serapis[88]. But if Buddhism could thus find its way westward from
so distant a country as India, how much more must this have been the
case with the other Oriental religions with which the Greeks had already
some slight acquaintance, and which, as we shall see in the sequel,
poured into Europe in such a flood that Juvenal compared it to the
Orontes emptying itself into the Tiber. That the Greeks, ever eager for
some new thing, were quick to avail themselves of the new ideas thus
thrust upon them was only to be expected. But this rage for novelty was
too violent to be content to follow the slow process of assimilation or
_theocrasia_ which was prevalent before Alexander. Religious
associations for the worship of foreign gods were formed in which we
may, if we like, see the first germs of the Christian Church[89]. In
these each member had to pay a subscription towards the expenses of the
cult, and the office-bearers instead of being appointed by the State
were either taken from the members in rotation or chosen by lot. That
these confraternities, as we should now call them, were at first
composed of natives of countries other than Greece is shown by their
clustering in the port of the Piraeus as the quarter where foreigners
naturally congregated[90]; and their male members for the most part
consisted of slaves, freedmen, and stranger merchants, who thus found a
meeting-place in what was to them a foreign country. Their worship too
was secret or rather was confined to members of the confraternity only,
while its correctness of form was preserved by means of written books or
rituals, thereby presenting many points of resemblance to that of the
later Gnostics. But the superstitious, and especially the women who were
always in Greece much addicted to _theoxenia_ or the reception of
strange gods, were early attracted by them, and they soon spread to
every great city in the Empire. Thus we see for the first time in
history bodies of men and women banded together, irrespective of
nationality and social rank, for the purpose of religious observances,
and religion becoming recognized as the affair of the individual rather
than of the state, while each member of the association was directly
interested in its extension. In this way, the Greeks became worshippers
not only of their own sufficiently numerous deities but of those of well
nigh the whole East as well. Their inscriptions show that Persian,
Phrygian, and Lydian gods were worshipped by these associations,
together with a whole crowd of Semitic deities among whom, if M. Cumont
is right, there may even have been included the God of Israel[91].
The influence that these confraternities exercised in familiarizing the
minds of the Greek citizens with the religious practices and tenets of
foreign countries must have been very great. Every such association had
a temple of its own, in which it offered sacrifices to its own
particular god. But, after providing for this, the greater part of the
subscriptions went in providing a periodical banquet at which its
members could meet for social intercourse, and to which they were no
doubt sometimes allowed to bring guests. But at these gatherings, as
apparently at all others of the confraternity, all were equal, and there
were no distinctions of rank. Moreover, in addition to the foreign
members for whom the institution was originally designed, they must
early have begun to admit Greeks; and these were generally, though not
always, persons who were in the first instance led to them by a leaning
to foreign superstitions, and particularly to that orgiastic ritual with
which the worship of the Asiatic gods was generally associated in Greek
minds. It is noteworthy that among the Greek names inscribed upon the
stelae containing the lists of members that have come down to us, those
of women are far more numerous than those of men. Yet they seldom seem
to have been of the highest class in their own community, and it is
difficult to conceive of a Greek matron leaving her gynaeceum to take
part with slaves and freedmen in nocturnal feasts or orgies. Among those
whom we know otherwise as belonging to these confraternities are Phryne
the celebrated courtezan, Tryphera and Aristion, who followed the same
manner of life[92], and Glaucothea the mother of Æschines and a
perfume-seller, a trade then considered as disreputable as in the reign
of Louis XIV[93]. On the other hand, it seems to follow from what
Plutarch says, that King Philip of Macedon first saw and loved Olympias,
mother of Alexander, at a meeting of one of these confraternities[94],
and it is possible that outside Greece proper they lost something of
their disreputable associations.
It must not be supposed, however, that these associations concerned
themselves entirely with what we now call religion. The state, in cities
like Athens, regarded them with great jealousy, and did its best to
prevent them from forming a hierarchy by stipulating that their officers
should only hold office for a year. This naturally prevented any
continuity of policy such as a corporation like the priesthood of Amen
could pursue, and set their chiefs upon making hay while the sun shone.
Ignorant and degraded as most of their members were, and generally
engaged in the pursuit of gain, it is not astonishing that they should
thus have lent themselves to the worst and most dangerous because most
profitable superstitions. The priests and especially the priestesses of
the confraternities were always ready to lend themselves to the
practices of divination and magic, to the sale of love-philtres and
poisons[95], the interpretations of dreams and miraculous cures. To
these charlatans came everyone who wanted his or her fortune told, or
who wished to get rid of a rival, or to obtain the favour of a
disdainful lover, or was simply tormented with idle fears or by some
bodily disease incurable by regular means.
“The set of charlatans and market-men who hang about and wait round
the altars of the Great Mother and Serapis; and who manufacture
oracles either out of their own heads or by haphazard out of certain
books for the benefit of house-slaves and silly women”
is the contemptuous way in which Plutarch describes these impostors[96].
Yet even in this way much was doubtless done to spread the knowledge of
foreign religions; for many must have resorted to the foreign temples
for magic or divination who would never have thought of joining the
association by which they were maintained, and in magic it is always the
least known gods and those worshipped by the races of lowest culture who
are thought to be the most powerful. Moreover, many of these
associations in time purified themselves by a sort of process of
elimination from these undesirable accessories, and, so soon as they
succeeded in attracting the adhesion of a sufficient number of
respectable people, managed to get the god they were formed to worship
enrolled among the native deities of the state or city. It was in this
way that foreign gods like Serapis and Mithras, from being the
divinities of a handful of foreign slaves, merchants or hostages, came,
as we shall see, to occupy the highest places in the national worship of
the Roman Empire. Thus Lucian tells us the story of the impostor
Alexander of Abonoteichos, who with the help of a tame serpent with a
cardboard mask gave himself out as the priest of an incarnation of
Asklepios the Greek god of healing, and founded an association for its
worship in Nicomedia in Bithynia. Later, he persuaded one Rutilianus, a
man of consular rank who seems to have had influence at the Court of
Marcus Aurelius, to join him in the propagation of his new cult and even
to marry his daughter[97]. But the worship that he thus set up must have
afterwards been recognized by the city of Nicomedia, for we find the
representation of its god Glycon upon a Nicomedian coin of the time of
the Emperor Gordian, the husband of Tranquillina[98].
It was apparently in these associations that the new spirit now manifest
in the religion of the ancient world began to take organized shape.
Among the Persians and Egyptians the priests were officers of state
living on the property of their several corporations, and therefore with
a natural leaning, except in the rare cases where their privileges or
property were threatened by the Crown, against all innovations and
interference with the established order of things. Among the Greeks,
both in Hellas itself and in her colonies oversea, the priests with a
very few exceptions were chosen from the native-born citizens at large
either for their personal beauty, or for the wealth which enabled them
to give in honour of the gods magnificent pageants and other
festivals[99]. In no case did they regard themselves as having any
teaching or pastoral mission, and were in no way interested in
increasing the number of the worshippers of the god to whose service
they were elected for a short term. Hence, their chief preoccupation was
to keep strictly to precedent in the celebration of the public acts of
worship entrusted to them, and they would have looked with horror on any
alteration of the traditional rites. But in the associations founded for
the worship of foreign gods, affairs were conducted on utterly different
lines. There seems to have been a healthy spirit of emulation among the
successive holders of the priestly office, for the vote of thanks
inscribed on marble and displayed in the temple for the admiration of
the confraternity was the distinction most sought after by them, and the
deprivation of it was the most serious penalty exacted for dereliction
of duty[100]. In order to obtain these rewards, it is plain that the
officers had to carry out to the full the Apostolic injunction to be all
things to all men, and there is actually a case on record where a
priestess is praised because during her term of office she has offended
nobody. This complaisance seems to have extended itself from the
officials to the deities worshipped, who seem often to have been quite
willing to fulfil a double office, and to appear as Aphrodite or Astarte
to the Syrian and as Cybele to the Phrygian members of the
association[101]. By these means, they made it possible for several
nationalities to belong to the same association.
There was probably, however, a more intellectual side to this spirit of
accommodation. All, or nearly all, of these associations celebrated
mysteries or sacred dramas based on the same lines as the Eleusinian and
setting forth, it would seem, the passion, death, and resurrection of
some god. These plays, when we consider the relatively slender number of
the initiates and the limited means at their disposal, must generally
have been acted with maimed and abbreviated rites in which a good deal
was left to the imagination of the beholder. But this very fact must
have set the always curious and inquisitive Greeks upon enquiry into the
nature and origin of the scenes thus indicated rather than acted, and
this in its turn must have led to many discussions and explanations of
the gods there portrayed. For such conversations, too, there must have
been far greater opportunities in the case of those _thiasi_,
_orgeones_, or _erani_ (as these associations were called), where
members were few and in the habit of meeting each other daily than with
the Eleusinian rites which were celebrated only once or twice a year and
then in the presence of a huge crowd dispersed immediately after to the
different parts of the Hellenic world. It is hardly putting it too
strongly to say that anything like propagandism must have been confined
to the smaller societies.
To sum up, then, Alexander united the whole civilized world for the
first time under a single head and gave to it a common language and
culture. By the natural gifts of his extraordinary personality, he at
the same time set before it a perfect model of kingship and thus ensured
the persistence of the monarchical principle for two millenia. This, his
conscious work, had a direct effect on the evolution of monotheism,
while in other respects his conquests proved the turning point in the
history of religions. By breaking down the barriers which racial and
lingual divisions had hitherto set up between different nations of the
earth, these conquests led to a great fusion of the religions hitherto
professed by them, and thus opened the door to the world-religions which
were afterwards to share between them his vast Empire. Before his coming
we see the ancient world divided into separate communities each with its
own pantheon and forms of worship and neither knowing nor caring greatly
about those of its neighbours. But immediately after, all this is
changed. The interchange of ideas between East and West has thrown the
different religions of the world as it were into a melting-pot, in which
the germs of a different grouping of the human race are dimly visible.
The spirit of proselytism is abroad, and man now wants to impress his
own ideas of the Divine upon his fellows. Above all, we see the
beginning of those great associations of mankind for religious purposes
which are henceforth to be the principal factors in the world’s history,
and whose evolution has continued unchecked down to the present day. All
those that followed Alexander were in this respect nothing more than his
conscious or unconscious imitators. The great princes and generals who
after his death parted his Empire among them, and the Romans who
gradually ate up the fragments left to these princes’ effete
descendants, could but carry on the work set on foot by the Great
Conqueror. As Mr Hogarth has said, very little that he did was ever
undone, and for good or ill, he has taken his place among the
immortals[102]. Thus, from the scientific point of view, there is none
among the forerunners of Christianity who did more to prepare and make
ready its way than Alexander.
Footnote 30:
Such as the Arimaspi or one-eyed inhabitants of Russia, about whom
Herodotus (Bk III. c. 116) quotes the legend that they stole gold from
its griffin guardians, and those _myrmeces_ or great ants whom
Megasthenes (Strabo, Bk XV. c. 1, § 44) and other writers describe as
digging for gold on the Thibetan frontier—a story of which more than
one rationalistic explanation has been suggested.
Footnote 31:
Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_ (1862 edition), II. p. 462 for authorities.
Footnote 32:
Maspero, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l’Orient_, Paris, 1904, p.
706. Rawlinson, _op. cit._ p. 463, thinks this practice lapsed early,
but Xenophon seems clear that it was in force in his time
(_Cyropaedia_, Bk VIII. c. 6).
Footnote 33:
He was probably allowed a reasonable sum for the maintenance of his
court and government; but if he exceeded this, was liable to severe
punishment. This appears from the execution by Alexander, on his
return from India, of the satraps who had been guilty of extortion. He
seems to have purposely preserved the Persian laws and customs on this
point unaltered.
Footnote 34:
This is the opinion of Rawlinson, _op. cit._ pp. 460 _sqq._
Footnote 35:
Rawlinson, _op. cit._ p. 464; Winwood Reade, _Martyrdom of Man_, 1910,
p. 56; Sayce, _Ancient Empires of the East_, 1884, pp. 250, 251;
Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 721.
Footnote 36:
Oppert, _Le Peuple et la Langue des Mèdes_, Paris, pp. 17 _sqq._;
Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 559, n. 11.
Footnote 37:
Sir Thomas Holdich, in his excellent book _The Gates of India_ (p.
104), says that when he defeated the Aspasians or Yusufzai in the
Kuner Valley he sent the pick of their cattle back to Macedonia to
improve the native breed. Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk IV. c. 25, however,
in quoting the story from Ptolemy, says only that Alexander “wished to
send them” to till the soil. It seems impossible that they could have
survived the journey before the days of steamships. Still more
incredible is the story in Plutarch, _Life of Alexander_, c. L. that
when Alexander was at Prophthasia (probably Farrah in Seistan), he
received some grapes grown on the coast of Greece. But such stories,
although coloured by age, may serve to show how perfect his
communications were always thought to have been.
Footnote 38:
Holdich, _op. cit._ _passim_, says that he must have had information
from Persian sources, and that his route must have been laid
beforehand. Sir Thomas’ opinion, as that of a soldier as well as a
student, is entitled to much respect. Yet the instances of Genghiz
Khan and other Oriental invaders are perhaps against any such
necessity.
Footnote 39:
Freeman, _Historical Essays_, 1873, second series, pp. 192, 193.
Footnote 40:
Khojend was probably Alexandria _eschata_ or the furthest (East).
Samarcand, of which the ancient name was Maracanda, is said by Baber
to be a foundation of Alexander’s. Herat was Alexandria Ariana, and
Merv probably Alexandria Margiana, while Cabul seems to have been
Ortospana. Among the other Alexandrias which have retained their old
importance are Alexandria Arachosiana or Candahar, Alexandria
Caucasiana or Begram, and Alexandria Sogdiana or Hyderabad. See J. W.
McCrindle, _Invasion of India by Alexander the Great_, 1896, pp. 36
_sqq._, and Droysen, _Histoire de l’Hellénisme_, (French edition),
Paris, 1883, I. pp. 408 _sqq._
Footnote 41:
Droysen, _op. cit._ p. 481.
Footnote 42:
See last note. The second marriage is dramatically described by
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. pp. 638, 639. Cf. Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk VII.
c. 4; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. LXX.
Footnote 43:
Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 6; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. LXXI. Cf.
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 646.
Footnote 44:
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 660. It was probably the fear of this
mixture that caused the quarrel between him and his Macedonians at
Opis. See Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 8; Plutarch, _Alexander_, c.
LXXI.
Footnote 45:
Droysen, _op. cit._ II. p. 34. Mahaffy, _Alexander’s Empire_, 1887, p.
38, thinks that the Romans could never have withstood Alexander’s
cavalry and siege artillery, although he notes that Livy patriotically
decided otherwise.
Footnote 46:
Droysen, _op. cit._ I., pp. 186, 240, 333. There were 30,000 Greek
mercenaries fighting on the side of Darius at Issus, and 4000 of these
remained faithful till his death. _Ibid._ I. p. 368.
Footnote 47:
Plutarch, _Themistocles_, c. XXVI.
Footnote 48:
Plutarch, _Crassus_, c. XXXIII. The play acted was the _Bacchae_, and
a Greek tragic actor, one Jason of Tralles, had been imported for the
principal part. In the essay _De Alex. fortitudine_, I. c. 5, Plutarch
says that no sooner had Alexander subdued Asia than Homer became a
favourite reading-book, and Persian, Susianan, and Gedrosian boys
learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.
Footnote 49:
Droysen, _op. cit._ III. pp. 244, 255.
Footnote 50:
Sylvain Lévi, “Bouddhisme et les Grecs,” _Revue de l’Histoire des
Religions_, 1891, p. 2; Percy Gardner, _Catalogue of Bactrian and
Indian Coins in British Museum_. Arts other than the plastic also
received attention. Amitrochates, son of the famous Chandragupta or
Sandracottus, wrote to Antiochus (Soter?) to buy him some sweet wine,
dried figs, and a sophist. He received the other commodities, but was
told that it was not lawful to sell sophists in Greece. See Athenaeus,
_Deipnosophistae_, Bk XIV. c. 67 quoting Hegesander.
Footnote 51:
Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 66. Cf. the _Omnis Oriens loquitur_ of St
Jerome _Prol. ad Epist. ad Galatas_; and Deissmann, _New Light on the
New Testament_ (English edition), 1907, p. 30.
Footnote 52:
1 Kings xx. 23.
Footnote 53:
1 Sam. iv. 6, 7.
Footnote 54:
Maspero, “La Fille du Prince de Bakhtan” in _Contes Populaires de
l’Ancienne Égypte_, Paris, p. 159.
Footnote 55:
Pater, _Plato and Platonism_, 1901, pp. 85, 86.
Footnote 56:
Aristotle, _Metaphysica_, Bk XI. c. 6.
Footnote 57:
Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, Bk I. c. 1, § 1-5.
Footnote 58:
Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. VII.
Footnote 59:
So F. H. Woods, _The Hope of Israel_, Edinburgh, 1896, p. 205, where
he speaks of the religion of the Prophets and Psalmists, as “giving,
on the whole, by far the most perfect and, as compared with other
ancient literature, practically a unique example of monotheism.” Yet
as Winwood Reade points out, Solomon must have thought there were
other gods than Yahweh, because he worshipped other gods; _op. cit._
_supra_, p. 201.
Footnote 60:
Aristotle, _Politica_, Bk I. c. 2, § 7. Cf. Max Müller, _Religions of
India_ (Hibbert Lectures), 1880, p. 292.
Footnote 61:
Arrian, _op. cit._ Bk VI. c. 27.
Footnote 62:
See his repudiation of the night attack advised at Arbela: οὐ κλέπτω
τὴν νίκην, “I steal no victory!” Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. XXXI.
Footnote 63:
Plutarch, _op. cit._ c. XXI. and c. XXX.
Footnote 64:
The wry neck or, in Mr Hogarth’s words, “the famous inclination of his
beautiful head towards the left shoulder” was imitated by dandies as
late as the time of Severus. For authorities see Hogarth, _Philip and
Alexander of Macedon_, 1897, p. 278, n. 2.
Footnote 65:
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 218 and p. 479, n. 1. Major P. H. Sykes
lately found an inscription in Khorassan to Sulayman Shah who reigned
from 1667-1694 A.D. containing the words “His audience-chamber is the
Sun; his Army the Stars; his authority is like Alexander’s,” _Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society_, 1910, pp. 1152, 1153.
Footnote 66:
Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. des Lagides_, Paris, t. I. p. 130, n. 2,
points out that there was hardly a philosopher during the next three
centuries who did not write a treatise Περὶ τῆς βασιλείας.
Footnote 67:
A parallel movement seems to have taken place in Babylonia, where all
the gods were at one period identified with Marduk or Merodach. See
Pinches, “Religious Ideas of the Babylonians,” _Transactions of the
Victoria Institute_, 1893, p. 10.
Footnote 68:
Maury, _Histoire des Religions de la Grèce Antique_, Paris, 1857, III.
p. 73.
Footnote 69:
Demosthenes, _v. Midias_, p. 53; Herodotus, Bk VII. c. 189. Such gods
were called by the peculiar epithet of πυθόχρηστοι. See inscription
from Smyrna quoted by Rayet, _Revue Archéologique_, 1877, pp. 115-128.
Footnote 70:
Xenophon, _Hellenica_, Bk II. c. 4.
Footnote 71:
Plutarch, _Alcibiades_, c. CXVIII. Cf. Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, ll.
387 _sqq._
Footnote 72:
Homeric _Hymn to Demeter_, _passim_.
Footnote 73:
Herodotus, Bk II. c. 50.
Footnote 74:
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 698.
Footnote 75:
See Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, t. III. cc. 15, 16. Aristophanes,
_Horae_ fragment 1 of Didot, and _Aves_, l. 874, is practically the
earliest witness for their introduction into Athens. Cf. the Scholiast
upon the last passage quoted, for their identification with Greek
deities. M. Paul Foucart, _Les Associations Religieuses chez les
Grecs_, Paris, 1873, pp. 57 and 85, shows the great rush of foreign
gods into Attica after the Persian War and the mode in which their
worship was propagated.
Footnote 76:
Percy Gardner, _Catalogue of Coins_, etc., _passim_. Goblet
d’Alviella, _Ce que l’Inde doit à la Grèce_, Paris, 1897, p. 73, notes
that these coins reproduce “the usual type of the classical divinities
Hercules, Dionysos, Poseidon, Helios, Pallas, Artemis, Niké.”
Footnote 77:
Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 73.
Footnote 78:
Callisthenes appears to have used this argument against the
deification of Alexander during his lifetime, Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk
IV. c. 11. Cf. Budge, _Pseudo Callisthenes’ History of Alexander the
Great_, Cambridge, 1889, Bk III. c. 19, p. 135; Plutarch, _Pelopidas_,
c. XVI.
Footnote 79:
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. 668.
Footnote 80:
Maspero, “Comment Alexandre devenait Dieu.” _Annuaire de l’École des
Hautes Études_, Paris, 1897; _id._ _Ét. Égyptol._ t. VI. pp. 286
_sqq._
Footnote 81:
Mr Hogarth, _Philip and Alexander_, pp. 197 _sqq._, rightly points out
that he never instituted any cult of himself, as did Demetrius
Poliorcetes.
Footnote 82:
Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. XXVIII.; Arrian, _Anabasis_, Bk VII. c. 29.
Footnote 83:
Plutarch, _de Is. et Os._ c. XXIV.; _id. Apophthegmata Antigon_. 7.
Cf. Droysen, _op. cit._ II. p. 295. Mr Tarn in his _Antigonos
Gonatas_, Oxford, 1913, p. 251, would transfer the story to his
grandson, but his reasoning is not convincing.
Footnote 84:
Athenaeus, _Deipnosoph_. Bk VI. c. 62.
Footnote 85:
Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 22 and note 2.
Footnote 86:
Euhemerus’ work was one of the first Greek books to be translated into
Latin. See Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ c. 42.
Footnote 87:
Droysen, _op. cit._ III. p. 341, n. 3. Rhys Davids, _Buddhist India_,
1903, p. 298, thinks it possible that the missions although duly
recorded on stone were never sent.
Footnote 88:
See Chapter II _infra_.
Footnote 89:
Foucart, _Les Associations Religieuses_, etc., pp. 66-84. Cf. Maury,
_Rel. de la Grèce_, II. p. 427. The composition of hymns was
peculiarly the care of these associations; Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 114.
Footnote 90:
Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 85.
Footnote 91:
Franz Cumont, “Hypsistos,” _Revue de l’Instruction publique en
Belgique_, 1897, pp. 5-6; _id._ _Les Religions Orientales dans le
Paganisme Romain_, Paris, 1906, p. 155 and note.
Footnote 92:
Foucart, _Ass. Rel._ pp. 135, 136, 158.
Footnote 93:
See Chapter IV _infra_.
Footnote 94:
Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. II.
Footnote 95:
See Foucart, _op. cit._ p. 158, for the cases of Ninos and Theoris,
priestesses who were condemned for such traffic.
Footnote 96:
Plutarch, _Pythian Responses_, c. XXV.
Footnote 97:
Lucian, _Alexander or Pseudomantis_, _passim_. The story is well
summarized by Sir Samuel Dill, in _Nero to Marcus_, pp. 473 _sqq._
Footnote 98:
Léon Fivel, “Le Dieu Glycon à Nicomédie,” _Gazette Archéol._ 1879, p.
186.
Footnote 99:
Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, II. pp. 418 _sqq._ Cf. Döllinger,
_Judenthum und Heidenthum_ (English edition), I. p. 214.
Footnote 100:
Foucart, _Ass. Rel._ pp. 33-35.
Footnote 101:
_Id._ _op. cit._ pp. 150, 151.
Footnote 102:
Hogarth, _Philip and Alexander_, pp. 277, 282. Cf. Bouché-Leclercq in
Droysen, _op. cit._ I. p. vii.
CHAPTER II
THE ALEXANDRIAN DIVINITIES
When Alexander’s marshals began immediately after his death to divide
his Empire among them, and Ptolemy the son of Lagos claimed and received
for his share the province of Egypt, his more ambitious fellows must
have smiled at his moderation. Egypt was an acquisition that had never
been properly assimilated by the Persians, and although subjugated by
Cambyses very early in their history, had more than once broken out into
successful rebellion. Its inhabitants, then as now, were a race
separated from the rest of the world by peculiarities of climate,
devotedly attached to their own traditional institutions, and bitterly
and obstinately hostile to the foreigner. Moreover, the enormous
resources of the country were undeveloped, the importance of its new
capital of Alexandria as the natural entrepôt of trade between East and
West[103] had not then been made manifest, and the agricultural wealth
which was afterwards to make Egypt the granary of Europe had been ruined
by civil commotions and foreign invasions. Although Alexander was hailed
by the Egyptians as a deliverer, and, like other conquerors before and
after him, found little difficulty in coming to terms with the colleges
of greedy and unpatriotic priests who were ready to welcome any foreign
master so long as their own position was assured[104], he seems to have
felt less interest in the unwarlike and servile _fellahin_ than in the
free warriors of Bactria and India who had fought so gallantly against
him. Hence, he paid little attention to their government, and Cleomenes,
the ruler he had set over Egypt, thus found himself free to practise
extortion on a scale which would certainly have brought down upon him
the condign vengeance of his master had it taken place further
east[105]. Or perhaps the Great Conqueror, among whose gifts the habit
of attending to everything in its turn must certainly be reckoned,
thought it well to let all things grow together till the harvest, in the
consciousness that the campaign in Arabia, on which he was bent when
struck down by the fatal fever, would bring him close to the confines of
Egypt and therefore in a position to investigate on the spot the
complaints against Cleomenes which had already come to his ears. Be this
as it may, one of Ptolemy’s first acts on reaching his satrapy was to
seize Cleomenes and to put him to death, a proceeding which had, we
learn, the full approval of his new subjects. This was but the earliest
of a long list of benefits which his rule was to confer upon them, and
which under his successors were to raise Egypt to a greater height of
prosperity than she had ever enjoyed under her native Pharaohs.
It soon became evident also, that in choosing Egypt for his portion
Ptolemy knew very well what he was about. While its western frontier was
the Libyan desert and its southern was guarded by the cataracts, its
northern coast was so badly off for harbours as to make it difficult to
attack by sea, and it was practically unassailable from the east save at
the Pelusiac or Port Said mouth of the Nile, and then only by an enemy
marching through Syria[106]. Ptolemy, therefore, had ample time to
consolidate his power by annexing Cyrene, making friends in his turn
with the Egyptian priesthoods, and spending the money raised by
Cleomenes’ exactions in the enlistment of an army of mercenaries[107].
He also waylaid the body of Alexander on its way to the tombs of the
Macedonian kings at Aegae, and installed it in a splendid sepulchre
called the Sema at Alexandria, thereby securing to himself, in the
opinion of the time, a talisman of great power[108]. It was not long
before the wisdom of these preparations was put to the proof; for, two
years after Alexander’s death, Perdiccas, the Regent of the Empire, had
the new satrap tried in his absence for treason, and led a great army
out of Asia Minor by way of Damascus to attack him. He found Ptolemy
waiting for him in force at Pelusium, and after some of the royal troops
had gone over to the enemy, and those under Perdiccas in person had
suffered a severe repulse near Bubastis, Perdiccas was deposed and
murdered[109]. The new settlement of the Empire which followed at
Triparadeisos confirmed Ptolemy in the possession of Egypt, and left him
in comparative peace to organize a kingdom which only ended three
centuries later with Cleopatra[110].
Of the able and statesmanlike measures which Ptolemy took towards this
end, only one need concern us here. The plan may have been Alexander’s
own, for no one was more likely to know Alexander’s later mind than
Ptolemy, who had been his master’s companion from his youth, had shared
his exile when banished by Philip, and had distinguished himself in
India as one of his most trusted lieutenants. It is not impossible that
among Alexander’s plans for the government of his Empire, a religion
common to both Greek and barbarian may have been included; for it is
difficult otherwise to explain the active part that he took in the
different religious observances of all his subjects, while the constant
inquisitiveness concerning them which he showed can hardly have been
merely archaeological[111]. At all events, soon after Ptolemy found
himself secure in the possession of Egypt, he set himself to work to
found a religion that should unite both his Greek and his Egyptian
subjects in the bonds of a common faith. At first sight, no two things
can seem more dissimilar than the religions of the two nations; but
there was one point where they drew very near to each other, and it was
to this that Ptolemy addressed himself.
Now religion in Egypt had always been very much in the hands of a
professional priesthood who here, as elsewhere in Africa, formed
organized corporations greedy for political sway, and sometimes proved
more powerful than the king himself[112]. So far as the monuments show,
the first of these corporations in point of time was that of the
worshippers of the sun-god Ra, the chief seat of whose worship was Annu,
On, or Heliopolis in the Delta. Its members were apparently the
religious advisers of the Vth or Pyramid-building Dynasty, and to them
must be attributed the earliest or Heliopolitan recension of the _Book
of the Dead_ engraved on the walls of the chambers in the Saqqarah
Pyramids. This corporation seems to have flourished unchecked until the
Hyksos conquest, but was succeeded, when the invaders were cast out, by
that of the priests of Amen of Thebes who, after crushing the “heresy”
or religious revolt of King Amenhotep IV, gradually became the supreme
power in the state, and established the theocracy or rule of the
priest-kings, under which Egypt went rapidly down the hill. The
decadence was stayed for a time by an uprising of the Libyan
mercenaries, who placed their leader Sheshonq or Shishak, Solomon’s
suzerain, upon the throne, and thus founded the XXIInd Dynasty. The
deposed corporation of Amen thereupon transferred themselves to Ethiopia
or Nubia, where they established a theocracy on the model of that at
Thebes, and whence they returned later with an army of Sudanese to again
enslave their native country. But Piankhi and his Ethiopians found
themselves unable to rule Egypt from Napata, and when they finally
retired behind the Cataracts, there was a brief but brilliant revival of
old Egyptian ideas under the Saite or Philhellene kings of the Delta,
who called in Greek and Carian mercenaries to the support of their
throne. It was in their time that Herodotus visited the country, and
Egypt began again to play its part in the stirring events then fast
coming upon Western Asia. It seems probable also that under them, the
religious corporations, among whom the priests of Ptah of Memphis, one
of the oldest of the gods of Egypt, for the first time take a prominent
place, regained the influence which they had never wholly lost. Then
came the Persian invasion, and although Egypt made more than one
successful attempt to shake off the yoke of the foreigners, it was at
last riveted firmly on her neck. After the flight of Nectanebo, the last
king of the XXXth Dynasty, she was never again ruled by a prince of
Egyptian blood[113].
During this long period—which is often quoted, not without reason, as
the classic instance of the evils attending the Priest in Power—the mass
of the Egyptian people had clung firmly to the worship of one god whose
vogue goes back to very early times. While the rich and powerful were
raising temples to Ra and Amen and showering wealth upon their
priesthoods, the poorer classes remained faithful to Osiris and the gods
of his cycle with such effect that most of the other divinities found it
necessary to include him in their own cults. In the very earliest
recension of the _Book of the Dead_, we find Osiris invoked together
with Ra in a way that gives no hint that one has any superiority over
the other[114]; in the great recension of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Osiris
and Ra, already made into the “king of the gods” by his union with Amen,
are said to have “joined souls” and become one[115]; and in the Saitic
period, Osiris became united with Ptah and a very ancient divinity
called Seker, in a triune deity called Ptah-Seker-Osiris to whom
everyone looked for happiness after death[116]. So, when the bull Apis
came to be adored, he was said to be the “life of Osiris,” meaning
probably his earthly incarnation[117], and there is fairly good evidence
that Osiris had long before absorbed into himself the personality of
several older deities, such as Khent-Amentit “Lord of Amenti,” and Apuat
“the opener of the ways[118].” It is plain, therefore, that the practice
of _theocrasia_ which we have seen rife among the Greeks was known to
the Egyptians from the very earliest times[119]. Yet, all this was
effected without there ever having been a special priesthood or college
of priests of Osiris such as undoubtedly existed in the case of Ra,
Amen, and probably Ptah. It seems really a case of the survival of the
fittest, or, in other words, of the choice by the Egyptian people of the
worship of the god best suited to their wants, in spite of the
well-meant attempts of their rulers to draw their attention to other
deities.
The reason for this obstinacy of choice is perhaps to be found in the
legend or myth of Osiris, which was at once more consistent and more
direct in its appeal to human sympathies than those handed down
concerning the other gods of Egypt. We are told that Osiris was the
first-born of Nut the sky-goddess by Geb the earth-god, that he appeared
upon earth as a man among men, and became king of Egypt, which he ruled
wisely and well, teaching the Egyptians the art of agriculture, giving
them just laws, and instructing them in the proper worship of the gods.
Later, he travelled over the whole earth, civilizing and subduing the
nations not by force of arms but by persuasion and especially by the art
of music which he took with him. On his return, he was entrapped and
murdered by his jealous brother Set or Typhon who, with the aid of
seventy-two conspirators and an Ethiopian queen called Aso, shut him up
in a coffin and threw him into the Nile, by which his body was carried
out to sea. We further learn that his sister-wife Isis, who had reigned
in his stead during his absence, mourned greatly for his loss and
wandered far and wide seeking and lamenting him, until she heard from
some children that the coffin containing his remains had been carried
away by the Tanitic mouth of the Nile. Following this, she found that it
had been washed ashore at Byblus in Phoenicia and had been overgrown by
a magnificent tamarisk, which the king of the country had had cut down
and made into the roof-tree or pillar supporting his house. Then Isis
disguised herself as a servant and became the nurse of the king’s son,
whom she would have made immortal but for the timidity of his mother,
who cried out when she saw the child surrounded by the flames which were
to burn away his mortality. On this, the goddess revealed herself, took
away the pillar containing the coffin, and attempted to revive the
corpse that it contained by her embrace. Afterwards, she gave birth to
her son Horus, whom she destined from his cradle to be the avenger of
his father. Meanwhile, the murderer Set had seized the throne of Egypt,
and while hunting by moonlight came across the corpse of Osiris, which
he tore into fourteen pieces, and scattered them throughout the land.
Consequently Isis, who was at the time visiting Horus at nurse in her
city of Buto, had to begin again her wanderings, sailing over the swamps
in a boat of papyrus, and burying the fragments of the body of Osiris
wherever she found them. One part, however, she could not find, this
having been thrown into the Nile and devoured by fishes; and henceforth
Osiris became king of the Underworld, where he rules for ever over the
dead, welcoming those who successfully win through the ordeal of the
judgment that all must undergo, and providing for them a happy life like
that which the rich live on earth, in which agriculture plays a
prominent part. Then Horus grew up to man’s estate, and having provided
himself with horse, fought three desperate battles with Set, many of
whose followers came over to him. But, although he defeated his foe, he
did not put an end to his existence, and Set still lives, haunting the
deserts and wild places, and even, according to one variant of the
story, ruling for a time over the south of Egypt (or perhaps only a part
of it), while the sway of Horus over the north remained unchallenged. As
for the other gods of the cycle, Nephthys, the twin sister and
reflection of Isis, was the wife of Set, but preferred to throw in her
lot with Osiris, by whom she had a son, Anubis the jackal, the messenger
of Osiris, who possessed many of the attributes of the Greek Hermes. So,
too, Thoth, the ibis, was the judge who pronounced, or perhaps merely
recorded, the final partition or arrangement between Horus and Set, and
most of the other members of the Egyptian Pantheon were brought into the
cycle one way or the other.
This is the legend of Osiris, as we find it in the tract _de Iside et
Osiride_, which is generally attributed to Plutarch and was certainly
written in the first century A.D. It has not been met with earlier in a
connected form; but its main incidents are sufficiently corroborated by
the monuments of the time to convince us that it fairly represents the
popular belief of the Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period[120].
Plutarch, or the writer who assumed his name, gives us more than one
explanation of it coupled with analogies drawn from other mythologies,
which exhibit considerable archaeological knowledge and show us how far
the comparative study of religions had proceeded even in his time. When
he fails, it is generally from lack of acquaintance with the earlier
forms of the religions of Egypt, which had evidently become in those
days as much a mystery to the priests as to their flocks, and which the
labours of modern Egyptologists have but recently begun to recover for
us. Looked at by their light, and stripped of its many transparent
inconsistencies and anachronisms, it seems plain that the story is not
simple but compound, and represents an attempt to fuse together the
religious ideas either of different peoples or of the same people at
different stages of culture[121]. In the first place, we see in it the
animal gods of Egypt—Horus the falcon, Set the unknown animal or _scha_
sacred to him, Anubis the jackal, and Thoth the ibis—whom we now know to
have been the totems or rallying-signs of the different tribes who
invaded Egypt, probably from other parts of Africa, in predynastic
times. The _Sches-Hor_ or Followers of Horus are so often alluded to in
early dynastic texts that there can be no doubt that the tribe who had
the falcon for their banner were originally the royal or leading tribe
of these invaders. The memory of this fact was preserved in the custom,
going back to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, which assigned to the
ruler of Egypt on his coronation a special name differing from that by
which he was usually known, and borne in a rectangle representing the
façade or front of a palace surmounted by a hawk[122]. Recent
excavations at Abydos in Upper Egypt have shown that this custom was
only once broken in the long course of Egyptian history, when a king of
the IInd or IIIrd Dynasty, whose name is read Perabsen, cast out the
falcon from above the _srekh_ or rectangle containing his “hawk” or
Horus name, and crowned it instead with the animal representing Set.
This breach of conventional usage—whether significant of a political or
a religious revolution or of some predominating foreign influence cannot
be exactly determined—was healed by his immediate successor Khasekhmui,
who bore both the falcon and the Set-animal above his _srekh_ with an
inscription proclaiming himself “He who has caused the two gods to be at
peace”; after which the rulers of Egypt returned to the hawk-crowned
_srekh_, which was never again abandoned down to the last-known example
under the Roman emperors. We may assume then that the fundamental
stratum of the Osiris legend was a tradition more or less historical
which preserved the memory of a struggle for supremacy occurring in the
earliest historical times between the tribes represented by Horus and
Set respectively. As the horse was a late comer into Egypt, and seems to
have been introduced there by the Bedouins of the Sinaitic peninsula,
where Perabsen’s predecessors left their inscriptions, we may even read
into it the statement that, while the Horus or falcon tribe were helped
in the war by Bedouin cavalry, the followers of Set sought aid from the
Nubian or “Ethiopian” tribes above the Cataracts[123].
To this foundation, however, there must have been added a myth conceived
by a race in possession of a much higher degree of culture and greater
imaginative powers than any with which the predynastic or protodynastic
Egyptians can be credited. The earliest gods of Egypt of whom we have
any record were, as we have seen, either animals or inanimate objects, a
fact which is sufficiently explained by their totemic origin[124]. But
spread throughout the basin of the Mediterranean, we find from the
earliest times the worship of a god who was from his birth never
anything but a man and a man who suffered a veritable death and passion
before his resurrection and deification. Thus, in Crete we have the
legend of the infant Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, who was
treacherously seized by the earth-born Titans, torn in pieces, and
devoured, but was afterwards reborn as Dionysos to reign over gods and
men[125]. So, too, in Cyprus, Syria, and Phoenicia, we hear of Adonis,
the lover of Aphrodite, done to death by the boar’s tusk, but returning
yearly from the shades to spend part of the year with his mistress. In
Asia Minor, again, was told the story of Atys, lover of Cybele, mother
of the gods, who fatally mutilated himself in a fit of madness, but
after death was resuscitated, and thereafter reigned with Cybele over
all Nature. All these three legends bear too close a resemblance to that
of Osiris for the four to have grown up independently, and although the
point is not free from doubt, it is improbable that Egypt was the source
from which the others were derived[126]. No direct connection in ancient
times can be traced between Egypt and the inland country of Phrygia,
which seems to be the birthplace of the majority of these legends; while
it is of great importance to remember that Isis, Osiris’ queen and
sister, is represented in the early Egyptian myths as merely a magician
or witch cunning in spells[127], whereas in the Phrygian and Syrian
legends the consort of the dying god is the “mother of all living” or in
other words Nature herself. It seems therefore probable that the legend
of Osiris, like so many other things in Egypt, was African as to its
body, but Asiatic or European as to its head.
It was therefore natural that in this legend of Osiris, Ptolemy should
find the desired point of contact between the religions of the Egyptians
and the Greeks. The religious institution which commanded the most
respect among the Greeks of his time was undoubtedly the Mysteries of
Eleusis[128], which were yearly celebrated with a circumstance that drew
upon them the attention of the whole Hellenic world. Messengers went
forth every year from Eleusis to all countries where Athenians could be
found, to proclaim the Sacred Truce that was to ensure peace during the
celebration of the Mysteries. Then on the appointed day in September,
enormous numbers of Greeks from all parts of the world gathered together
in Athens for a festival that lasted for nearly two weeks. First came
the assembly of the worshippers and the proclamation of the hierophant
that none but those unpolluted by crime and of intelligible speech
(_i.e._ not barbarians) might take part in the Mysteries. Then followed
the solemn procession when the sacred objects, upon which none but the
initiated might look, were brought from Eleusis under strong guard and
lodged in the Eleusinion at the foot of the Acropolis, their arrival
being formally notified to the priestess of Athena, the tutelary deity
of the city. Next was made the proclamation of “To the sea, the
initiates!” when all who were to take part in the ceremonies descended
to the harbour of Phalerum[129] to wash themselves and the animals
intended for sacrifice in the salt water, in the belief that, as
Euripides said, “Sea-waves wash away all sin.” After a time spent in
sacrificing and austerities very proper for bringing the worshippers
into a receptive state of mind, there was formed the long procession
which paced the Sacred Way, twelve miles long, from Athens to Eleusis,
beguiling the road with hymns and choruses addressed to Iacchos, the
infant Dionysos[130], who was supposed to lead the procession from his
Athenian temple, the Iaccheion, with a pause at the bridge over the
Cephisus, where the crowd exchanged coarse jokes and sarcasms in a
manner peculiarly Attic. Then came the arrival by night of the
procession at the Telesterion or Hall of Initiations at Eleusis, the sky
above which was made light by the glare of the torches[131]. There,
after more sacrifices, a sacred banquet, in which it is not impossible
that the mystic _cyceon_ or consecrated drink was partaken of, and
sacrifices in the temples of Demeter, of Hades, and of Persephone with
which the Hall was surrounded, the initiates were shown a sacred drama,
like the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages, acted by the priests of the
cult, whose office, contrary to the custom of Greek cults generally, was
confined to two families in which it was hereditary and highly paid.
This drama, the details of which were kept strictly secret and can only
be gathered from hints appearing in writers of a comparatively late
date, seems to have set forth the Rape of Persephone, daughter of
Demeter the earth-goddess, who was known and worshipped throughout
Greece and her colonies as the teacher of agriculture and giver of laws
to mortals. The initiates saw “with their own eyes” the capture of
Persephone, when playing with her companions in the sunny fields of
Eleusis[132], by Hades or Pluto the king of the dead, who takes her to
his own gloomy abode beneath the earth, and the wanderings of Demeter in
search of her lost child. Then they were shown how Demeter came to the
house of Celeus, king of Eleusis, how she became nurse to the king’s
child Demophoon, and was detected by his mother attempting to burn away
his mortal part in the way which the Egyptian legend attributed to
Isis[133]. The next act, probably reserved for epopts or initiates of
the second year only, exhibited the union of Zeus with Demeter[134], and
the birth from the latter of a mysterious child in whom some see the
Iacchos who conducted the procession from Athens to Eleusis, but who was
certainly Dionysos in one or other of his forms[135]. We know also that
the initiates took part in wanderings in dark passages and over
obstacles and difficulties, which were supposed to give them an idea of
the sufferings of the uninitiated dead in the next world, and that they
were then restored to upper air in a blaze of brilliant light, were
shown the mysterious objects brought with such care from Eleusis to
Athens and back again, were given a glimpse of the beatitudes awaiting
the dead who had been initiated in their lifetime, and were at the same
time instructed in certain mysterious phrases or formulas which it seems
fair to conclude they were to treasure as passwords through the realms
of Hades[136]. It seems probable from this that the initiates were
supposed to accompany Hermes the Psychopomp or “leader of souls” as the
messenger of Zeus to the underworld, there to accomplish the deliverance
of Persephone and to witness her restoration to the heavenly regions
where she was again united to her sorrowing mother. Finally, there
appeared Triptolemus, Celeus’ son and Demeter’s pupil, setting out in
his car drawn by serpents to spread the knowledge of agriculture
throughout the world, “an ear of corn reaped in silence” being, as we
learn from a Christian writer, the “mighty and wonderful and most
perfect mystery” exhibited to the highest degree of initiates[137].
It will be noticed that we have spoken hitherto of initiates; for none
might enter the Telesterion unless they had previously been initiated,
and two young Acarnanians who unwittingly did so were formally tried for
sacrilege and put to death[138]. This initiation, or entry into the
ranks of those privileged to behold these wonderful sights, began at the
Little Mysteries, which were celebrated six or seven months before the
Great or Eleusinian Mysteries properly so called, at Agra on the left
bank of the Ilissus. These mysteries of Agra were under the control of
the same sacred families as the Mysteries of Eleusis, for which they
formed a necessary preparation. They were kept, if possible, even more
strictly secret than the Great Mysteries, and the only direct evidence
that has come down to us as to their nature tells us that they also took
the form of a sacred drama, and that the scenes there enacted were taken
from the legend of Dionysos[139]. This Dionysos, however, was not in the
first instance the Theban god of wine born from Semele and celebrated by
the poets, but his Cretan namesake Dionysos Zagreus or “the hunter,” who
was said to have been begotten by Zeus in the form of a serpent upon his
own daughter Persephone, and while still a child was, as has been
mentioned above, torn in pieces by the earth-born Titans from jealousy
at hearing that the child was to be made the ruler of the world. It was
also said that the scattered members of the baby-god were collected by
Demeter, put together and revivified, a myth which late researches seem
to show was alluded to in the Anthesteria, a festival celebrated in the
Dionysion at Athens in the same Anthesterion or “flower month” as the
Little Mysteries. There is much reason to think that the Anthesteria
showed forth in a manner unintelligible to the beholders unless
otherwise acquainted with the details of the legend, the
putting-together of the different members—said to be fourteen in
number—of the infant Dionysos, his subsequent resurrection, and his
marriage with a priestess called “the Queen” who doubtless represented
Demeter or Persephone. The inference seems unavoidable that it was some
part of this legend that was acted in a manner impossible to
misunderstand or mistake before the eyes of those admitted to the Little
Mysteries[140].
We see then that between the legend of Osiris as told by Plutarch and
the legend of Eleusis as set forth in the Mysteries there were
resemblances so close as to make it almost impossible that one should
not be derived from the other, unless we are prepared to consider them
as having a common origin. As Osiris was torn into fourteen pieces, so
was Dionysos, the difference in the agents of this “diaspasm,” as it was
called, being due to the exigencies of Egyptian traditional history. The
wanderings of Isis, again, find an exact parallel in those of Demeter,
the object of the search differing slightly in the two cases, while the
mysterious birth of Horus, the successor of Osiris, corresponds point
for point with that of Dionysos in his second form of Iacchos. That both
stories may have had their source in the folk-lore explaining the
phenomena of the annual decay and rebirth of vegetation, Dr Frazer has
shown with great attention to detail in _The Golden Bough_ and
elsewhere[141] to be possible; but this was too philosophical an idea
for the sixth century B.C., when the Mysteries of Eleusis were founded
or reduced to order[142]. Herodotus, a century later, no doubt expressed
the views of the learned of his day when he asserted that the worship of
Dionysos was brought into Greece from Egypt[143], and among modern
scholars M. Foucart, who has done more than anyone to collate the few
relics that remain to us of the Eleusinian worship, fully supports him
in this. It is therefore plain that the resemblances between the
Dionysiae and the Egyptian worship were many and salient. Hence Ptolemy
found his way clear when he invited Timotheos the Eumolpid, a member of
one of the sacred families in which the Eleusinian priesthood was, as
has been said, hereditary, and associated with him the Egyptian priest
Manetho in the task of founding a religion which should be common to
Egyptians and Greeks alike[144].
In framing this new religion, the first care of the king and his
advisers was evidently to avoid shocking the religious and artistic
feelings of the Greeks. Ptolemy Soter’s position seems to have been much
like that of a modern Governor-General of India; for, while he was not
only tolerant but careful of the religious susceptibilities of the
native Egyptians, his own Court remained in everything predominantly or
exclusively Greek. In Alexandria, the site of which under the native
Pharaohs had been the small fishing village of Rhacotis, he had
practically virgin soil, in which it is doubtful whether any Egyptian
temple existed, and it was consequently, as Alexander intended it should
be, in all respects a Greek city. Greek was the language there spoken,
and it was to the care taken by Alexandrian scholars to preserve the
language and literature of Hellas in its native purity, that we are
indebted for most of what we know of the classic tongue at its best. Its
large garrison consisted almost entirely of Greek soldiers drilled and
armed in the Macedonian fashion, and to the great University or Museum,
which Ptolemy’s munificence founded for the sustentation of scholars,
there flocked learned men from every part of the Hellenic world[145].
Here, indeed, was the first instance of the endowment of research; and
the experiment had important results for most of the modern sciences,
not excluding that transmutation of metals which made such wild work
among some of the best brains of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but
which Sir William Ramsay has lately shown to be more capable of
accomplishment than could have been expected from an alchemist’s dream.
At the Museum, Eratosthenes, “the Inspector of the Earth,” first set on
foot the serious study of geography, Hipparchus laid the sure
foundations of the modern science of astronomy, and Hero invented the
first steam engine. The investigation of those secondary laws by which
their insight perceived nature to be governed was indeed the constant
occupation of King Ptolemy’s “stuffed capons,” as Timon of Phlya
contemptuously called them[146]. But these philosophers would have been
the first to receive with scorn the proposition that anyone should be
asked to worship the “brutish gods” of Egypt under those animal forms in
which they had long been known to the more simple minded Egyptians.
Osiris, the “bull of Amenti,” as he is called in the early texts, was
worshipped under the actual form of the bull Apis at Memphis and as a
ram or goat at Mendes. Isis was often portrayed with the cow’s head
which commemorated one of the incidents of her myth as set forth by
Plutarch. Horus, who was in fact an older god than either of them, was,
as the totem of the royal tribe of the first invaders, worshipped at
Edfu and elsewhere as a hawk, and although the Egyptian priests kept up
as long as possible the distinction between this “Horus the elder” and
Horus the son of Isis, it is certain that their Greek worshippers saw no
difference between the two. While Timotheos was doubtless willing to
recognize the Eleusinian deities, of whose worship his family were the
traditional guardians, in the Egyptian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus,
he must have been sure that he could not ask his art-loving countrymen
to do them homage in the guise of beasts or birds.
The difficulty was got over in a way that was characteristic enough.
The _theocrasia_ or fusion of one god with another which we have
seen playing such a prominent part in the religion of both Egyptians
and Greeks, was of the very essence of the religion of Eleusis. At
no time from the earliest mention of the Eleusinian worship onwards,
is it possible to draw any sharp dividing line between Demeter and
her daughter Persephone, or as Mr Louis Dyer rather flamboyantly
puts it, Demeter and Persephone were at Eleusis “regarded as one,
being so filled with mutual love that all barriers between them
melted away[147].” “Excepting,” he says again, “in her days of
thoughtless youth, Demeter’s Persephone is Demeter’s self twice
told,” and the same dogma seems to have been prematurely revealed by
Xenophanes of Colophon, who was exiled for his declaration that all
the gods of his fellow-countrymen were but varying forms of the one
deity. This identity of the goddesses of Eleusis must have been
constantly present to the mind of the Greeks, who hardly ever spoke
of Demeter and Persephone save as “the Goddesses Twain” or as the
Mother-and-Daughter. But this was only the first step in what was
called without circumlocution the “mystic _theocrasia_[148],” which
went so far as to include in the persons of the Eleusinian deities
nearly all the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. In the original Cretan
legend, the infant Dionysos is the son of Zeus, whom he is destined
to succeed upon his throne, as Zeus had succeeded in the Homeric
myths his father Kronos, and this last, _his_ father Ouranos. But
the Zeus of Eleusis was by no means the Zeus of Olympos whom Homer
hails as “father of gods and men,” but who had to yield the empire
of the seas to his brother Poseidon and that of the netherworld to
his brother Hades. Originally known at Eleusis as “the God” only, as
Demeter with or without her daughter was called “the Goddess,” the
Eleusinian god was also invoked as Zeus Chthonios or the infernal
Zeus, called by euphemism Zeus Eubuleus (Zeus of Good Counsel),
Pluto (Bringer of Riches) and other similar names[149]. But by
whatever name he was called, he was always the king of the dead, and
was thus again brought near to Dionysos, whom Heraclitus of Ephesus,
two centuries before Alexander, had declared to be the same god as
Hades, lord of the netherworld[150]. In this double capacity,
Dionysos was therefore the brother, father, and spouse of his
consort Demeter, of whom he was also the child. He might therefore
be considered one of the first instances known in the history of
religions as a god who was, according to the way in which he was
regarded, either father or son[151]. Nor did the _theocrasia_ stop
here. The Asiatic forms of Dionysos, whether we call them Atys,
Adonis or by any other name, were often represented as of both
sexes, a doctrine which is also denoted by Dionysos’ Orphic epithet
of Mise, and led to his being portrayed in effeminate shape[152].
Hence, Dionysos and Demeter or Persephone might be regarded as the
God under both the male and female aspect. Moreover, Zeus was said
to have ordered the corpse of Dionysos to be buried at Delphi, where
secret ceremonies were celebrated in connection with it by five
priests called Hosioi; and this seems to have led to the idea common
to the classic poets Pindar, Aeschylus, and Euripides, that Dionysos
and Apollo were different forms of the same god, a theory which is
expressly confirmed by Plutarch[153]. But Apollo “the Far-Darter”
was always to the Greeks a sun-god, and Horus from the first had the
same character among the Egyptians, the emblem of the sun-disk being
often added to the Horus-hawk of their protocol by the Pharaohs of
the New Empire. Thus the identification of the gods of the Osiris
cycle with their Greek analogues was complete. It was agreed that
Osiris was to be represented as the Greek Hades, Isis as Demeter,
and the child Horus as Apollo. Herodotus and probably other Greek
writers had long before made the same identifications[154].
This settled, the question of the material forms under which the triad
was to be worshipped by Ptolemy’s new subjects became easy. A convenient
dream, so runs the story told in Roman times, revealed to the king the
existence of a statue of Hades or Pluto at Sinope in Pontus that was
exactly fitted to his purpose[155]. It is said to have been of colossal
size, the work of Bryaxis, the fellow-worker of Scopas, and to have been
composed of a mixture of the most precious metals with fragments of
gems, the whole being coloured with a dark varnish. This statue was
given up by—or according to another version was stolen from—the city of
Sinope, and was installed with great pomp in the magnificent temple or
Serapeum built for it at Alexandria, which for centuries formed one of
the wonders of the Hellenistic world. It doubtless formed the model for
all the later representations of the new god called henceforth Serapis
(in Egyptian, Asar-hapi or Osiris in his manifestation as Apis), which
resemble each other in all important particulars. They show a bearded
man of mature age, whose features have much of the majesty and dignity
of the Phidian Zeus. On his head he wears the _modius_, a crown of
basket-work on which are sometimes represented olive trees and which is
said to be a reproduction of the _calathos_ or consecrated basket
carried in the sacred procession to Eleusis, and doubtless possessed for
the initiated some mystical or symbolical meaning[156]. He is generally
represented with an eagle at his feet, and by the side of him appears a
triple monster which may perhaps represent the classical Cerberus with a
serpent twisted round its body and equipped with the heads of a lion, a
dog, and a wolf. It seems, therefore, that in choosing this statue the
founders of the Alexandrian religion had quite turned their backs on the
lighter and more joyous aspects of the mystic Dionysos, and intended to
regard him as the god of the dead merely[157]. The same was not the case
with his consort Isis, who is generally represented as a young matron of
stately appearance having sometimes the crescent moon on her head, and
sometimes a crown of lotus flowers interspersed with ears of corn. She
is dressed in a fringed tunic reaching to her feet, having over her
shoulders a mantle tied by its ends between the breasts in a peculiar
knot. In one hand she bears the _sistrum_ or rattle used in her worship,
and in the other a horn of abundance or other emblem, while the head is
frequently covered by a long veil. Both the attitude and the dress are
always of the strictest modesty, and the features wear an expression of
gentle benevolence, in which it is possible to see a trace of
melancholy. The Alexandrian Horus is seldom represented otherwise than
in child form, the type being taken from the Egyptian Horus known as
Har-pa-khrat (Horus the Child) of which the Alexandrians made
Harpocrates. In this form he was represented with his finger in his
mouth in accordance with the usual Egyptian ideogram for childhood, and
this gave rise to the story among the Greeks that he was the god of
silence. Sometimes he is shown with wings like the classical Eros,
frequently seated on the lotus or with the lotus flower on his head, and
very often with the hawk which formed his proper emblem[158]. He was
seldom represented in a group containing Serapis, although bas-reliefs
and statues showing Serapis and Isis together are common; but groups
representing Isis suckling Horus have been found in some numbers.
Generally it may be said that the _modius_ on the head is the
distinguishing mark of the figure of Serapis, the peculiar breast-knot
that of Isis, while Horus can seldom be recognized with certainty save
by the gesture of the forefinger in the mouth or, as the Greek artists
preferred to represent it, on the lips. From this time forward, the
Alexandrian Greeks could worship the chief deities of their native
fellow-citizens under forms which they felt to be worthy of the Divine.
Thus, the worship of the great Egyptian triad under their Greek forms
was inaugurated, as was our own English Reformation in the sixteenth
century, as a measure of statecraft, by a king who hardly cared to
conceal that in doing so he had only his own interest to serve. Yet it
may be said at once, that so far as its political purpose was concerned,
the Alexandrian religion was from the outset foredoomed to failure. The
Egyptians of Philhellenic times were of all the nations of the earth at
once the most superstitious and the most fanatically attached to their
traditional modes of worship. Although until the rise of the theocracy,
the importation of foreign gods was not unknown, under the Ethiopians,
the Persians, and Alexander, the Egyptians had not scrupled to sacrifice
their nationality to their religion, and to accept a foreign governor so
long as the worship of their native gods under types that had been
observed by them for more than four millennia remained untouched. How
then could they be expected to recognize their native deities in forms
beautified and dignified by Greek art indeed, but so foreign to all
their traditional ideas that nothing distinctly Egyptian about them
remained?
To this question there could be but one answer, and it is not
extraordinary that the native Egyptians proved as recalcitrant to their
new king’s endeavour to unite them in a common worship with their Greek
masters as the Jews did under the somewhat similar attempt of Antiochus
Epiphanes. The Egyptian priests allowed Ptolemy to set up at Memphis,
which had become since the ruin of Thebes the religious capital of the
country, a Serapeum, doubtless modelled on that of Alexandria, by the
side of the native temple established for the delectation of the living
Apis and for the solemn burial of his predecessors: but they took care
that it should be separated from the Egyptian Serapeum by a long avenue
of sphinxes, and that no Greek prayers should ever be allowed to defile
the purity of the native Egyptian sanctuary[159]. Moreover, Egypt,
resembling in this perhaps all countries with strongly marked
geographical characteristics, has exhibited through all ages a wonderful
power of conquering her conquerors, or, in other words, of forcing her
foreign rulers to accept the ideas that they found there, instead of
adopting at their instance innovations on customs consecrated by
centuries of usage. Hence the Ptolemies, as time went on, found it
necessary to pay ever more and more attention to the native Egyptian
religion, and Ptolemy V Epiphanes was crowned at Memphis, as is recorded
on the Rosetta Stone, with all the religious ceremonies that made him in
the eyes of the Egyptians the living Horus, son of the sun-god, the
beloved of Ptah and the rest, as fully as any of the ancient
Pharaohs[160]. All the Ptolemies, too, seem to have spent very
considerable sums on the restoration and keeping-up of the temples in
Egypt dedicated to such thoroughly native gods as Amon of Thebes and
Horus of Edfu, besides those at Philae and elsewhere raised not to the
Alexandrian but to the Egyptian Osiris and his cycle. What truth there
is in the statement of Macrobius that Ptolemy Soter compelled by
“tyranny” the Egyptians to take Serapis into their temples, it is
impossible to say; but as his image in Greek form has never been found
in any of them, it is plain that the priests must have found some way of
evading the royal order, if it were really given[161].
Ptolemy, however, was building better than he knew, and the hybrid cult
which the provident old soldier had fashioned as an instrument of
government turned out to be the first, and not the least successful, of
the world-religions for which Alexander’s conquests left clear the way.
During the wars of the Diadochi, all the powers who at any time found
themselves Ptolemy’s pawns in the mighty war game then played on a board
stretching from India to Thrace, thought to curry favour with their rich
ally by giving countenance to his new religion. An association of
Sarapiasts or worshippers of Serapis held their meetings in the Piraeus
not long after the institution of the Alexandrian cult[162]; and before
the death of Ptolemy Soter, a Serapeum was built in Athens over against
the Acropolis itself[163]. Cyprus, Rhodes, Antioch, Smyrna, and
Halicarnassus were not long in following suit, and before the end of the
century several of the islands of the Ægean together with Boeotia, which
was said by some to be the native country of Dionysos, had adopted the
new worship. In the second century B.C., the temples of the Alexandrian
gods were to be found in Delos, Tenedos, Thessaly, Macedonia and the
Thracian Bosphorus in Europe, and in Ephesus, Cyzicus and Termessus
among other places in Asia Minor[164]. But their greatest triumph was
awaiting them further west. Invited by Hiero II into Sicily, they were
not long in working their way up the coast, and a hundred years before
our era a temple to Serapis was in existence at Puteoli[165]. It was
evidently no new foundation and had probably been built some fifty years
earlier, at which date perhaps the first Isium at Pompeii was also in
existence[166]. Somewhere about 80 B.C., the Alexandrian worship was
introduced into Rome itself, and thereafter no action of the authorities
was able to expel it[167]. Its temples were more than once thrown down
by order of the consuls; but they were always rebuilt, and in 43 B.C.,
the aedile Marcus Volusius, who had been proscribed by the triumvirs,
found the linen robe and the dog’s head mask of a priest of Isis the
most efficient disguise in which to escape Sulla’s bravos[168]. Under
the Empire, the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius became one of the
fashionable resorts of the Roman youth; and, although Tiberius seized
the occasion of a real or pretended scandal in connection with it to
exile a large number of the faithful to Sardinia, his successors were
themselves initiated into the faith; while under Nero the worship of the
Alexandrian gods was formally recognized by the state[169]. From that
time, it followed the Roman arms into every quarter of the ancient
world, and its monuments have been found in Morocco, Spain, France,
Great Britain, Germany, and the Danube provinces. Ridicule was as
powerless to stop its march as persecution, and the satire of Juvenal
and Martial had no more effect on it than the banter of the New Comedy,
which was quick to observe that even in Menander’s day the gilded youth
of Athens swore “by Isis” or “by Horus[170].” Under the Antonines, it
probably reached its apogee, when the Emperor Commodus appeared in the
processions of the cult among the bearers of the sacred images, and few
Romans seem to have been aware that the Alexandrian gods were not Roman
from the beginning. Like Ptolemy’s master, Ptolemy’s gods might have
boasted that they commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized
world[171].