main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a
craftsman. Yes: a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a
gang of warriors needed to have by them; and they preferred him lame, so
that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of
Admetus; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon.
Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements; but in
any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punishment.
Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on
agriculture and on justice: they destroy the harvests of those who
offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic
Age itself--if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick's convenient title for the Age
of the Migrations--chieftains and gods probably retained some vestiges
of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times;
and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never
meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these
gods are not real people with a real character. They never existed. They
are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in
the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They
change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it
is pronounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any
one god would be mixed up with traditions and associations drawn from
the surrounding populations and their gods; and by the time they come
down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have passed
through the minds of many different ages and places, especially Ionia
and Athens.
The Olympians as described in our text of Homer, or as described in the
Athenian recitations of the sixth century, are _mutatis mutandis_
related to the Olympians of the Heroic Age much as the Hellenes of the
sixth century are to the Hellenes of the Heroic Age. I say '_mutatis
mutandis_', because the historical development of a group of imaginary
concepts shrined in tradition and romance can never be quite the same as
that of the people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is apt both
to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life.
Romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent perfections.
But the gods of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show traces
of the process through which they have passed: of an origin among the
old conquering Achaioi, a development in the Ionian epic schools, and a
final home in Athens.[49:1]
For example, what gods are chiefly prominent in Homer? In the _Iliad_
certainly three, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, and much the same would hold
for the _Odyssey_. Next to them in importance will be Poseidon, Hera,
and Hermes.
Zeus stands somewhat apart. He is one of the very few gods with
recognizable and undoubted Indo-germanic names, Djëus, the well-attested
sky- and rain-god of the Aryan race. He is Achaian; he is 'Hellanios',
the god worshipped by all Hellenes. He is also, curiously enough,
Pelasgian, and Mr. A. B. Cook[49:2] can explain to us the seeming
contradiction. But the Northern elements in the conception of Zeus have
on the whole triumphed over any Pelasgian or Aegean sky-god with which
they may have mingled, and Zeus, in spite of his dark hair, may be
mainly treated as the patriarchal god of the invading Northmen, passing
from the Upper Danube down by his three great sanctuaries, Dodona,
Olympus, and Olympia. He had an extraordinary power of ousting or
absorbing the various objects of aboriginal worship which he found in
his path. The story of Meilichios above (p. 14) is a common one. Of
course, we must not suppose that the Zeus of the actual Achaioi was a
figure quite like the Zeus of Pheidias or of Homer. There has been a
good deal of expurgation in the Homeric Zeus,[50:1] as Mr. Cook clearly
shows. The Counsellor and Cloud-compeller of classical Athens was the
wizard and rainmaker of earlier times; and the All-Father surprises us
in Thera and Crete by appearing both as a babe and as a Kouros in spring
dances and initiation rituals.[50:2] It is a long way from these
conceptions to the Zeus of Aeschylus, a figure as sublime as the Jehovah
of Job; but the lineage seems clear.
Zeus is the Achaean Sky-god. His son Phoebus Apollo is of more complex
make. On one side he is clearly a Northman. He has connexions with the
Hyperboreans.[50:3] He has a 'sacred road' leading far into the North,
along which offerings are sent back from shrine to shrine beyond the
bounds of Greek knowledge. Such 'sacred roads' are normally the roads by
which the God himself has travelled; the offerings are sent back from
the new sanctuary to the old. On the other side Apollo reaches back to
an Aegean matriarchal Kouros. His home is Delos, where he has a mother,
Leto, but no very visible father. He leads the ships of his islanders,
sometimes in the form of a dolphin. He is no 'Hellene'. In the fighting
at Troy he is against the Achaioi: he destroys the Greek host, he
champions Hector, he even slays Achilles. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo
we read that when the great archer draws near to Olympus all the gods
tremble and start from their seats; Leto alone, and of course Zeus, hold
their ground.[51:1] What this god's original name was at Delos we cannot
be sure: he has very many names and 'epithets'. But he early became
identified with a similar god at Delphi and adopted his name, 'Apollôn',
or, in the Delphic and Dorian form, 'Apellôn'--presumably the Kouros
projected from the Dorian gatherings called '_apellae_'.[51:2] As
Phoibos he is a sun-god, and from classical times onward we often find
him definitely identified with the Sun, a distinction which came easily
to a Kouros.
In any case, and this is the important point, he is at Delos the chief
god of the Ionians. The Ionians are defined by Herodotus as those tribes
and cities who were sprung from Athens and kept the Apaturia. They
recognized Delos as their holy place and worshipped Apollo Patrôos as
their ancestor.[51:3] The Ionian Homer has naturally brought us the
Ionian god; and, significantly enough, though the tradition makes him an
enemy of the Greeks, and the poets have to accept the tradition, there
is no tendency to crab or belittle him. He is the most splendid and
awful of Homer's Olympians.
The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it leads to a
somewhat surprising result. What Apollo is to Ionia that, and more,
Athena is to Athens. There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena,
some Cretan and Ionian, some Northern.[52:1] But her whole appearance in
history and literature tells the same story as her name. Athens is her
city and she is the goddess of Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Korê. In
Athens she can be simply 'Parthenos', the Maiden; elsewhere she is the
'Attic' or 'Athenian Maiden'. As Glaucopis she is identified or
associated with the Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens. As Pallas
she seems to be a Thunder-maiden, a sort of Keraunia or bride of
Keraunos. A Palladion consists of two thunder-shields, set one above the
other like a figure 8, and we can trace in art-types the development of
this 8 into a human figure. It seems clear that the old Achaioi cannot
have called their warrior-maiden, daughter of Zeus, by the name Athena
or Athenaia. The Athenian goddess must have come in from Athenian
influence, and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the
poems that influence must have reached. If we try to conjecture whose
place it is that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her
regular epithet, 'daughter of Zeus', belongs in Sanskrit to the
Dawn-goddess, Eôs.[52:2] The transition might be helped by some touches
of the Dawn-goddess that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The rising
Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from the head of Zeus. Also
she was born amid a snowstorm of gold. And Eôs, on the other hand, is,
like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant Pallas.[53:1]
Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves very easily. A body
of poetry and tradition, in its origin dating from the Achaioi of the
Migrations, growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, and
reaching its culminating form at Athens, has prominent in it the Achaian
Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, the Athenian Korê--the same Korê who descended
in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his throne.[53:2]
We need only throw a glance in passing at a few of the other Olympians.
Why, for instance, should Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a
puzzling figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother of Zeus in
Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian or Aegean god present in him.
He is closely connected with Libya; he brings the horse from
there.[54:1] At times he exists in order to be defeated; defeated in
Athens by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, in Argos by
Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though he continues to hold the Isthmus.
In Trozen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with
Athena.[54:2] Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls
his own hands had built.[54:3] These problems we need not for the
present face. By the time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a
sea-god, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens and Ionia. He
is the father of Neleus, the ancestor of the Ionian kings. His temple at
Cape Mykale is the scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as a
religious centre of the Ionian tribes. He has intimate relations with
Attica too. Besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession
of the land, he appears as the father of Theseus, the chief Athenian
hero. He is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erechtheus. He
is the special patron of the Athenian knights. Thus his prominence in
Homer is very natural.
What of Hermes? His history deserves a long monograph to itself; it is
so exceptionally instructive. Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was
simply an old upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular
Pelasgian sex-symbol of procreation. Set up over a tomb he is the power
that generates new lives, or, in the ancient conception, brings the
souls back to be born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the
Psychopompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. If you have a
message for the dead, you speak it to the Herm at the grave. This notion
of Hermes as herald may have been helped by his use as a
boundary-stone--the Latin _Terminus_. Your boundary-stone is your
representative, the deliverer of your message, to the hostile neighbour
or alien. If you wish to parley with him, you advance up to your
boundary-stone. If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory,
you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone, the
last sign that remains of your own safe country. If you are killed or
wronged, it is he, the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you.
Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to Homer. It was not
decent; it was not quite human; and every personage in Homer has to be
both. In the _Iliad_ Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful creation
or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-goddess, takes his place as the
messenger from heaven to earth. In the _Odyssey_ he is admitted, but so
changed and castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm in the
beautiful and gracious youth who performs the gods' messages. I can only
detect in his language one possible trace of his old Pelasgian
character.[56:1]
Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In speaking of Hermes
among the other 'Workers', who were 'pillars in square form', he says,
'As to Hermes, the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that
he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of the departed to
Hades'.[56:2] In the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old
functions; he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos Daimon.
But thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism.
Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious past behind her.
She has certainly ousted the original wife, Dione, whose worship
continued unchallenged in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended
upon Greek lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems to have left Dione
behind and wedded the Queen of the conquered territory. Hera's permanent
epithet is 'Argeia', 'Argive'. She is the Argive Korê or Year-Maiden, as
Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. But Argos in Homer denotes two
different places, a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain
in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief goddess of Peloponnesian Argos
in historic times, and had brought her consort Herakles[56:3] along with
her, but at one time she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos.
She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship _Argo_, and they
launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the Argonautica she is a
beautiful figure, gracious and strong, the lovely patroness of the young
hero. No element of strife is haunting her. But in the _Iliad_ for some
reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, and a jealous wife.
Why? Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the
time of the invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she the
native queen of the land.[57:1] It may be, too, that the Ionian poets
who respected their own Apollo and Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as
representing some race or tribe that they disliked. A goddess of Dorian
Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It seems to be for some
reason like this that Aphrodite, identified with Cyprus or some centre
among Oriental barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect; that
Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-god and War-god, is treated as a mere
bully and coward and general pest.[57:2]
There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear to us in the
Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and
Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose
from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and
glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They
left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless
common folk.[57:3] And it was not likely that the bards of cultivated
and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system
which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life.
Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and
gods of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of
buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid
adventure. The traits that were at all tolerable were idealized; those
that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was
impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old
Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth
century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform.
II. _The Religious Value of the Olympians_
Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I
believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at
the Panathenaea, produced what I will venture to call exactly a
religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and
falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work.
In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the
tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal
monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matrilinear customs of
the Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their
agricultural rites, their sex-emblems and fertility goddesses. Contrast
for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the _Iliad_
under the name of Athena with the Korê of Ephesus, strangely called
Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered with innumerable
breasts. That suggests the contrast that I mean.
Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic; they are the
literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superstition. True, the
poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so
often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris,
or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something
like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric
gods and the gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr.
Chadwick[59:1] to the difference between the gods of the Edda and the
historical traces of religion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with
Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or _comitatus_, seem to
be the gods of the kings, distinct from the gods of the peasants,
cleaner and more warlike and lordlier, though in actual religious
quality much less vital.
Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for
many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the
'Urdummheit'. For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition,
in having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians are the descendants
of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their homes,
tribes, and tribal traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the
imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic
sepulchres of unknown kings, which the fugitives to Asia had left behind
them and half forgotten.[59:2]
Again, when the Ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no
doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the
barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said,
of something that was Hellenic, as distinct from something else that was
barbaric, and the Hellenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck
them as superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember
that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative
and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in
knowledge and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the
self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its
rise in Ionia.
Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious
reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it? We are again
reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the 'beggarly elements'
towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as
neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the
incursions of _mana_ snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters,
but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers,
wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably
higher.
For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has
perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs
of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods
against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants
and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe
in their houses like storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was
full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of
human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first
the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas
against the brute world.[61:1]
The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man over beast: that was the
aim, but was it ever accomplished? The Olympian gods as we see them in
art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of
acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving, that what I am now
about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless
true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and
admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a
_telos_ or completion but a movement and effort of life.
We may analyse the movement into three main elements: a moral
expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old
chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the
three in order.
In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, or at least
covered with a decent veil, that great mass of rites which was concerned
with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct
stimulation of generative processes.[62:1] It left only a few reverent
and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in
comedy and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a
thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such
worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To
the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often
bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a
time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta.
The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid
centuries, the worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere of
megalomania and blood-lust.[62:2] These things return with the fall of
Hellenism; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers
of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids
him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws
and bound to reckon with the same death.
So much for the moral expurgation: next for the bringing of intellectual
order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, 'In the early religion all
things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them'.
We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as
πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μἴα, 'one form of many names'. Each tribe, each
little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste--the Children
of the Bards, the Children of the Potters--had its own special gods. Now
as soon as there was any general 'Sunoikismos' or 'Settling-together',
any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these
innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different
historical circumstances this process might have been carried resolutely
through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his
proper function and there was no overlapping--one Korê, one Kouros, one
Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had
been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified
and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb
some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythêra
or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Korê or the Delian or the
Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was
greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of
Cyprus, Cythêra, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be
one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis
absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of
various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility
Korê of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much
closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity,
the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the
same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes,
Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like.
As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense
formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Korê or Kouros was a
figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the
Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons; they melted
easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done
its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for
all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as
Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard.
They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary
temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal
about the gods all being one, 'Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios,
Helios the same as Dionysus',[64:1] but the amalgamation only takes
place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious
mysticism.