Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. There are three poems, all devoted to
this object, composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and
certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a quasi-Homeric dialect and
under a quasi-Olympian system to bring together vast masses of ancient
theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The _Theogony_ attempts
to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods; _The Catalogue of Women_
and the _Eoiai_, preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in
canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and
hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their
descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. The _Works
and Days_ form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus
relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the
most valiant failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity of it
are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty and its extraordinary
historical interest. The Hesiodic system when compared with that of
Homer is much more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less
accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay the lordly
warrior-gods of the Heroic Age, at the back of Hesiod the crude and
tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the mainland. Also the
Hesiodic poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened
atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light of Athens.
The third element in this Homeric reformation is an attempt to make
religion satisfy the needs of a new social order. The earliest Greek
religion was clearly based on the tribe, a band of people, all in some
sense kindred and normally living together, people with the same
customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds and fields. This
tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself
unchanged at the great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.[65:1]
It certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the
heroic age. It bowed its head beneath the sceptre of its own divine
kings and the armed heel of its northern invaders, only to appear again
almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the
invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain.
But it no longer suited its environment. In the age of the migrations
the tribes had been broken, scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased
to exist as important social entities. The social unit which had taken
their place was the political community of men, of whatever tribe or
tribes, who were held together in times of danger and constant war by
means of a common circuit-wall, a Polis.[66:1] The idea of the tribe
remained. In the earliest classical period we find every Greek city
still nominally composed of tribes, but the tribes are fictitious. The
early city-makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal
basis. Every local or accidental congregation of people who wish to act
together have to invent an imaginary common ancestor. The clash between
the old tribal traditions that have lost their meaning, though not their
sanctity, and the new duties imposed by the actual needs of the Polis,
leads to many strange and interesting compromises. The famous
constitution of Cleisthenes shows several. An old proverb expresses well
the ordinary feeling on the subject:
ὥς κε πόλις ῥέξειε, νόμος δ' ἀρχαῖος ἅριστος.
'Whatever the City may do; but the old custom is the best.'
Now in the contest between city and tribe, the Olympian gods had one
great negative advantage. They were not tribal or local, and all other
gods were. They were by this time international, with no strong roots
anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some native
god; they were full of fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to
be made 'Poliouchoi', 'City-holders', of any particular city, still more
ready to be 'Hellânioi', patrons of all Hellas.
* * * * *
In the working out of these three aims the Olympian religion achieved
much: in all three it failed. The moral expurgation failed owing to the
mere force of inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local
cults. We must remember how weak any central government was in ancient
civilization. The power and influence of a highly civilized society were
apt to end a few miles outside its city wall. All through the backward
parts of Greece obscene and cruel rites lingered on, the darker and
worse the further they were removed from the full light of Hellenism.
But in this respect the Olympian Religion did not merely fail: it did
worse. To make the elements of a nature-religion human is inevitably to
make them vicious. There is no great moral harm in worshipping a
thunder-storm, even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite
recklessly. There is no need to pretend that the Lightning is exercising
a wise and righteous choice. But when once you worship an imaginary
quasi-human being who throws the lightning, you are in a dilemma. Either
you have to admit that you are worshipping and flattering a being with
no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to
invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck.
And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal,
becomes capricious and cruel.
When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines, the
cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nachon, and the holy object was
in danger of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang forward to
save it and was struck dead for his pains. Now, if he was struck dead by
the sheer holiness of the tabu object, the holiness stored inside it
like so much electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting
accident, and no more.[68:1] But when it is made into the deliberate act
of an anthropomorphic god, who strikes a well-intentioned man dead in
explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element has
been introduced into the ethics of that religion. A being who is the
moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite.
Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, as was done in
agricultural rites all through the Aegean area, is in itself an
intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those
emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropomorphic god
of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so
modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften
its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. This result was
intensified by another well-meant effort at elevation. The leading
tribes of central Greece were, as we have mentioned, apt to count their
descent from some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes unknown
and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. Sometimes he was a local god
or river. When the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity
among these innumerable local gods, the original tribal ancestor tended,
naturally enough, to be identified with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The
unfortunate Olympians, whose system really aimed at purer morals and
condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with a crowd of consorts that
would put Solomon to shame.
Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the
attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods.
The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If
Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the
father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point
and meaning. It is curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism of
a very profound and impersonal type, the real religion of Greece came in
the sixth and fifth centuries. Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes,
Parmenides, and others, asserted it clearly or assumed it without
hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper moments point
the same road. Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is
far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to
make any particular difference between οἱ θεοί and ὁ θεός or τὸ θεῖον.
They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between
'he' and 'it', or between 'one' and 'many', apply to the divine.
Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried the day, would have
been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal
monotheism of the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard-caked
superstitions, too many tender and sensitive associations, were linked
with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rites which had
brought the worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew
prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and bloody-minded, to
agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out
in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was
seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great
period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and did not try
to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular
or philosophical, seldom denied any god, seldom forbade any worship.
What it tried to do was to identify every new god with some aspect of
one of the old ones, and the result was naturally confusion. Apart from
the Epicurean school, which though powerful was always unpopular, the
religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a
sort of apotheosis of good taste, in which the great care was not to
hurt other people's feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless
mysticism.
The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the Polis failed also.
The Olympians did not belong to any particular city: they were too
universal; and no particular city had a very positive faith in them. The
actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric gods a little alien and
literary. The City herself was a most real power; and the true gods of
the City, who had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply the
City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as mother and guide and
lawgiver, the worshipped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend
even to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from the social
group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the band of suppliants, in like
fashion ἡ Πολιάς or ὁ Πολιεύς emerged as a personification or projection
of the city. ἡ Πολιάς in Athens was of course Athena; ὁ Πολιεύς might as
well be called Zeus as anything else. In reality such beings fall into
the same class as the hero Argos or 'Korinthos son of Zeus'. The City
worship was narrow; yet to broaden it was, except in some rare minds, to
sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible to love his next-door
neighbours except by siding with them against the next-door-but-one.
It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have gods that would
appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On the Acropolis at Athens there
seem originally to have been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with
her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was
united and brought under the lead of its central city, the gods of the
outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the
thunder-maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint personality
with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north-east, on the way from Delos to
Delphi, had for its special god a 'Pythian Apollo'; when Oinoe became
Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis.
Dionysus came from Eleutherae, Demeter and Korê from Eleusis, Theseus
himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozên. They were all given
official residences on Athena's rock, and Athens in return sent out
Athena to new temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and various
colonies.[72:1] This development came step by step and grew out of real
worships. It was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body
of non-national, poetical gods: yet even this development was too
artificial, too much stamped with the marks of expediency and courtesy
and compromise. It could not live. The personalities of such gods vanish
away; their prayers become prayers to 'all gods and goddesses of the
City'--θεοῖς καὶ θεῇσι πᾶσι καὶ πάσῃςι; those who remain, chiefly Athena and
Theseus, only mean Athens.
What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian religion really
achieve? First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of
Greece--not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading
knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the
'Urdummheit', for the most part, to a romantic memory, and made religion
no longer a mortal danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it
generally permitted progress; it encouraged not only the obedient
virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that
saves from disaster, that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before
it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosynê.
Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek
communities. It is, after all, a good deal to say, that in Greek history
we find almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even
blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many weaknesses, it built up
something like a united Hellenic religion to stand against the 'beastly
devices of the heathen'. And after all, if we are inclined on the purely
religious side to judge the Olympian system harshly, we must not forget
its sheer beauty. Truth, no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many
matters beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know is that
when the best minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful. It
was a great thing that men should envisage the world as governed, not by
Giants and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by some human and
more than human Understanding (Ξύνεσις),[73:1] by beings of quiet
splendour like many a classical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If
Olympianism was not a religious faith, it was at least a vital force in
the shaping of cities and societies which remain after two thousand
years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high endeavour. Even
the stirring of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power to
produce something of the same result; for the classicism of the Italian
Renaissance is a child, however fallen, of the Olympian spirit.
Of course, I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith. There is,
in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which
sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of
Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is
religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the
ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen
through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but
transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too
hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in
such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and
of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus; the
old liturgy of the dying and re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If
Religion is that which brings us into relation with the great
world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this home-coming Bride
of the underworld, life with its broken hopes, its disaster, its
new-found spiritual joy: life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing
continuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death, life
as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed.
'But stay,' a reader may object: 'is not this the Persephone, the
Athena, of modern sentiment? Are these figures really the goddesses of
the _Iliad_ and of Sophocles?' The truth is, I think, that they are
neither the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of ancient
reflection and allegory; the goddesses, that is, of the best and most
characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened. What we
have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact
that they have no roots in any particular soil, little hold on any
definite primeval cult, has turned out to be their peculiar strength. We
must not think of allegory as a late post-classical phenomenon in
Greece. It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Heraclitus,
perhaps as early as Hesiod; for Hesiod seems sometimes to be turning
allegory back into myth. The Olympians, cut loose from the soil,
enthroned only in men's free imagination, have two special regions which
they have made their own: mythology and allegory. The mythology drops
for the most part very early out of practical religion. Even in Homer we
find it expurgated; in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Xenophanes it is
expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths survive chiefly as
material for literature, the shapes of the gods themselves chiefly as
material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of
imagination. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it
twines itself still around these gracious and ever-moving shapes; the
Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of
Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long spiritual
history. They are but little impeded by the echoes of the old frivolous
mythology; still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or
compulsory details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind of Greece
emerged from a particular, local, tribal, conception of religion, the
old denationalized Olympians were ready to receive her.
The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion
to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles,
again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and
Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear
the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is
expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single
god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most
modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more
fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the
danger-point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a
thing they had faced last week and might face again to-morrow. It was
more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is
clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the
mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no
words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its
mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have
recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a
religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a
particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be
'one great City of gods and men', the only Gods with which Greece could
satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old
Olympians.
They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of
something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition,
of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom
doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as
to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in
whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it
just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion
and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its
worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on
which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any
respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only
an accident--though perhaps an invariable accident--that all the
supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider
the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and
possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your
creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human
language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are,
by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond
you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this,
I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher
minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and
strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to
be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the
god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god;[77:1] so
the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol
to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before
them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no
commands that made man sin against his own inner light.
FOOTNOTES:
[39:1] Hdt. i. 60 ἐπεί γε ἀπεκρίθη ἐκ παλαιτέρου τοῦ βαρβάρου ἔθνεος τὸ
Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν καὶ δεξιώτερον καὶ εὐηθίης ἠλιθίου ἀπηλλαγμένον μᾶλλον. As
to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of Hellenism Mr. Edwyn
Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about
that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer
Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in
India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' Εὐηθίη ἠλίθιος
is almost '_Urdummheit_'.
[40:1] See in general Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i; Leaf,
_Companion to Homer_, Introduction: _R. G. E._, chap. ii; Chadwick, _The
Heroic Age_ (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_,
chaps. viii and ix.
[40:2] Since writing the above I find in Vandal, _L'Avènement de
Bonaparte_, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary
soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates .
. . et ils créaient un type de haute vertu guerrière, quand ils
croyaient seulement le reproduire.'
[41:1] Hdt. i. 56 f.; Th. i. 3 (Hellen son of Deucalion, in both).
[42:1] Hdt. i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed.
[42:2] The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. The word
βάρβαροι is absent from both poems, an absence which must be intentional
on the part of the later reciters, but may well come from the original
sources. The compound βαρβαρόφωνοι occurs in B 867, but who knows the
date of that particular line in that particular wording?
[42:3] Paper read to the Classical Association at Birmingham in 1908.
[43:1] For Korinna see Wilamowitz in _Berliner Klassikertexte_, V. xiv,
especially p. 55. The Homeric epos drove out poetry like Corinna's. She
had actually written: 'I sing the great deeds of heroes and heroines'
(ἰώνει δ' εἱρώων ἀρετὰς χεὶρωιάδων ἀίδω, fr. 10, Bergk), so that presumably her
style was sufficiently 'heroic' for an un-Homeric generation. For the
change of dialect in elegy, &c., see Thumb, _Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_,
pp. 327-30, 368 ff., and the literature there cited. Fick and Hoffmann
overstated the change, but Hoffmann's new statement in _Die griechische
Sprache_, 1911, sections on _Die Elegie_, seems just. The question of
Tyrtaeus is complicated by other problems.
[45:1] The facts are well known: see Paus. i. 18. 7. The inference was
pointed out to me by Miss Harrison.
[45:2] I do not here raise the question how far the Achaioi have special
affinities with the north-west group of tribes or dialects. See Thumb,
_Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_ (1909), p. 166 f. The Achaioi must have
passed through South Thessaly in any case.
[45:3] That Kronos was in possession of the Kronion and Olympia
generally before Zeus came was recognized in antiquity; Paus. v. 7. 4
and 10. Also Mayer in Roscher's Lexicon, ii, p. 1508, 50 ff.; _Rise of
Greek Epic_{3}, pp. 40-8; J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey
(1914), chap. vii, viii; Chadwick, _Heroic Age_ (1911), pp. 282, 289.