GREEK HERO CULTS AND IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY \ G REEK HERO C U L T S AND IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY C{)e (^iffoi'ti lectures DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS IN THE YEAR 1920 BY LEWIS RICHARD ^ARNELL RECTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD AND VICE-CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITV OF OXFORD OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1921 I'^A Oxford University Press London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen New Tork Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University PREFACE This work, of which the main contents were dehvered last year as Gifford Lectures in the University of St. Andrews, was planned many years ago as a continuation and supple- ment of my Cults of the Greek States, but the difference of the subject has necessitated a somewhat different method in the presentation of the facts. I had collected ahd arranged geographically a complete table and ' Schriftquellen ' of all the hero-cults in the Greek world recorded by literature, inscriptions, and art-monuments. That I have not published this in extenso here is no loss to scholars, nor to the public, nor to myself. For I did not wish to write a mere Encyclo- paedia, and scholars can always avail themselves of Roscher's Lexikon, which is nearing completion and is fairly exhaustive ; also a large part of this material turns out to be merely barren, mere names about which nothing positive, nothing that concerns religion or history, can be said. Here, as so often, the half may be better than the whole. One of my objects has been to reduce the chaotic mass of facts to some order, by defining the categories under which the different hero-personahties may be classified, and to discuss under each the salient examples and those of whom some- thing of interest for religion, history, or psychology may be proved or surmised ; I have dealt at length, therefore, with the greater personages of saga, for they are part of the fabric of the literature of Europe. I am not dealing with the whole heroic mythology of Greece, but only with that part of it — a very large part — that concerns a certain religious phenomenon, the worship of the human personage after death ; and for this purpose I have had to face the much-debated and sorely mishandled problem whether the heroes and heroines worshipped were mainly human personages. And the question of hero-worship is part of 4G8638 vi PREFACE the larger question, considered at the close of the volume, concerning Greek opinion about existence after death and the possibility of a blessed immortality. The work has been long delayed by other literary tasks and the cares of official life. And delay, whether chosen or enforced, gives a writer the advantage of living through many temporary phases of theorizing and of chewing the cud of long reflection before making up his mind. I was glad to find that the settled conviction that at last I had reached concerning Greek heroic saga and saga-personages was the same as that which inspires Mr. Chadwick in his admirable treatise The Heroic Age. For a general exposition of my views on the right and wrong methods of mythologic inter- pretation I may be permitted to refer to my paper published by the British Academy on ' The Value and the Methods of Mythologic Study ' in 1919. If this treatise is censured as a revival of ' Euhemerism ', it will only be censured on this ground by those who have not followed recent researches in anthropology and the comparative study of saga. And if, though that is not its main intention, it helps to corroborate Mr. Chadwick's contention that saga is imperfect history, I shall be content ; for I have long felt the unreality of the distinction between the ' prehistoric ' and the ' historic ' periods. But my main task has been to track and collect the evidence of the worship of the dead, the apotheosis of the human being, from the earliest days of Greece to the latest, and my interest in this religious phenomenon has been sustained by the light that it throws upon much of the religion, the history, and the mentality of the Hellenic race. A serious and systematic treatment of this theme has long been a desideratum in our literature ; it is for criticism to pronounce whether this treatise supplies it. Exeter College, Oxford, September, 1921. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGES General Survey of the Prehistoric Period . . i-iS Importance of the subject, especially for Hellenism. 1-3 ; was worship of the dead aboriginal among the Hellenes or the pre- Hellenic populations ? evidence from Cretan and Mycenaean graves, distinction between tendance and worship, 3-5 ; evidence from Homer as to worship and beliefs concerning the dead, 5-12 ; from Hesiod in his account of the four ages of man, 12-14 ; meaning of the word ijfm, 15-16 ; a priori probability of some worship of the dead in proto-Hellenic period, 16-18. CHAPTER n Heroes and Heroines of Divine or Daimoniac Origin (Ref. 1-29) 19-52 Seven distinguishable types of heroes, 19 ; criteria for judging the question of divine origin of hero, 20 ; Trophonios and other examples, 21-23 ; Linos, 23-30, a vegetation-daimon who developed into culture-hero, Argive-ritual of the dpi'is and the slaughter of dogs, 21-28, primitive traits in legend . transformed by Hellenic genius, 30 ; legends arising from ritual of hanging puppets on trees, 30-32 ; CAan/a-ritual and legend at Delphoi, 32-35 ; Ino-Leukothea, 35-47, in Homer a human goddess, apparently maritime : but in cult a chthonian rather than a sea- goddess : the name Ino cannot be dissociated from Leukothea, which probably arose from a rite of immersion, 35-39 : Melikertes- Palaimon of no independent origin but always her young son, com- pare Opheltes and Sosipolis, 39-42 : legend of the cauldron examined, suggests a cathartic-baptismal ritual rather than human sacrifice, late survival in Syria, 42-43 : ethnic question, Ino and Melikertes inherited by the Minyans from Minoan Crete, 45-47 ; Europa, Cretan mother-goddess, festival of Hellotia, 47-48 ; Ariadne, Hellenic transformation of Cretan goddess, the chthonian Aphrodite, little or no cult on Greek mainland, 48-49 ; Aristaios, earth-spirit, imagined as male, of divine origin, ' son of the Best (ApioTt]) ', but developed into a culture-hero rather than a god. Myths about vegetation-daimones often independent of their origin or of ritual, 49-5.:. viii CONTENTS CHAPTER III PAGES Sacral Heroes and Heroines (Ref. 30-54) . . 53-70 Heroic honours paid to priest or priestess or missionary, some of the names in the hst may be historic, none are of ' faded Gods ', 53-55 ; Aineias, a sacral eponym of the Aineiadai, 55 ; V Iphigeneia, ? a double of Artemis or heroized priestess, ritual at AuUs and Brauron, 55-58 ; Amphiaraos, the human heroized prophet, no reason to regard him as a mere fiction or as a faded god, ritual at Oropos, 58-62 ; Melampous, a similar figure of Minyan origin, connected with a Bacchic Katharsis, 63-64 ; Hippolutos, his humanity earlier than his divinity, meaning of the name, M. Salomon Reinach's theory, weakness of the hieratic explanation of his myth, 64-70. CHAPTER IV Functional Heroes and ' Sonder-Gotter ' (Ref. 207- 238) 71-94 List of these, including individuals and groups, 71-76 ; are these pre-theistic products of ' polydaimonism '? meaning of ha'inav and ^paj, 76-77 ; Usener's theory stated and examined, meaning of ' Sonder-Gott ' ; evidence from Roman and Lithuanian religion ; no proof that the functional heroes and daimones of Greece belonged to a system of thought earlier than the polytheism and the parent of it, some of them are obviously late and arise from the polytheism, some may be adjectival or functional cult- names of historic personages; adjectival cult-titles not neces- sarily earlier than proper personal names ; human dramatic stories attaching to some of them, such as Eimostos, 77-94. CHAPTER V Origin and Diffusion of the Cult of Herakles . 95-145 Herakles the ripas 0(6s, distinction between heroic and theistic ritual, 95-96 ; in many places, as at Sikuon, both awarded him, 96-97 ; yet the human aspect of him primary and the earliest, the evidence of the name points to this, so also the legend, his divine or daimonistic functions later accretions, 97-102 ; the ethnic question, the old ' Dorian ' theory baseless, no single tribe or stock can claim him, 102-105 ; ethnic survey, Thessaly, Druopis, Phokis, Boeotia, 105-107; Attica, cult perhaps associated with Ionian immigration, 107-110 ; in the Isthmus, Megara, Corinth, Sikuon, neither cult nor legend points to Dorian influence, 110-113; in Argolis and Messenia, cult pre-Dorian and not prominent, 113-115 ; in La9onia the cult-title reva/jx^s Dorian, but CONTENTS ix PAGES otherwise the imprint of I'orian influence slight, 115-119; in Dorian Hexapolis, Kos Rhodes, Ovrc., his cult not prominent, but his name linked with the Dorian settlement of Rhodes, 1 19-124 ; in Crete scarcely any trace of his cult, 114-115 ; the fiction of ' Herakles the Daktyl ' or ' the Idaean Hcrakles ' examined, 1 25-131 ; in Dorian colonies in Magna Graecia and Sicily Herakles nowhere prominent except at Akragas, 131-135 ; Herakles a Pan-Hellenic hero, his cult no proof of Dorian settle- ment, 134-135 ; Herakles in Arcadia, links with Delphoi, 135- 137 ; in Ionia, Miletos, Eruthrai, 137-138 ; prominent in Magna Graecia and Liguria, associated with lolaos in Sicily and Sardinia, 138-139 ; alien associations of Herakles in non-Hellenic lands, in Lydia with Sandan and Omphalc, 139-141 ; at Tj're with Melqart, at Tarsos with Sandan, reasons discussed, 142-145. CHAPTER VI The Functions of Herakles .... 146-154 Heroic and warlike cult-titles, 146-148 ; his functions as con- troller of ghosts, healer of disease, protector of flocks a later development, 148-153 ; his chief social activity the protection of the Epheboi, 154. CHAPTER VII The Ritual of Herakles i55-i74 Blood-sacrifice and the male victim usual in his worship, 155 ; ritual at Lindos accompanied with curses, not explicable by other examples of cursing in ritual, modern theories concerning it examined, 156-160 ; peculiar ceremonies in his worship in Kos, ( men in women's garments, ' the Thracian woman ' at Kos and Eruthrai, theories of explana.tion, 160-165 ; a /fpos yafx-i in his ritual, 165-166 ; ritual at Gades, death of the deity on the pyre and resurrection in records of Melqart and Sandan transferred by legend to Herakles, source of the legend of Mount Oita in oriental ritual, unknown to Hesiod, spiritual value of the legend. CHAPTER VIII The Dioskouroi ....... 175-22^ Perplexity of the problems about them, older view of Myrian- theus that they were a deposit of Indo-Germanic period, Lettish ' Sons of God ', ? Celtic, ? Teutonic, 175-176 ; Dioskouroi identified with Vedic Aivins, criteria for judging this equation, reasons for rejecting it, 176-179 ; contradictory explanations of the Dioskouroi as Nature-powers, 179 ; examination of Dr. Rendel Harris's theory, the awfulness of twins in savage superstition. CONTENTS PAGES 179-180; necessity for re-examination of the evidence in chronologic sequence ; wholly human in the Iliad, they begin to show divine character in the Nekuia of the Odyssey, 180-182 ; evidence from Hesiodi9 poems, Homeric Hymns (where the phrase Aioj Kovpoi first occurs) and the Kupria, diffusion of cult in seventh century, Dioskouroi always regarded as twins and as Laconian heroes of Therapnai, 180-184 '• the Twin-Brethren in Euripides, their stellar character beginning to emerge, this emphasized only in later period, 185-186 ; later assimilation to Kabeiroi and Korubantes, casual and valueless for any theory of origin, i86-i8g ; value of evidence from art, the ^'ncavn in the aniconic period, snakes on amphora of the fifth century, stars not found as their art-emblem until the fourth century, 1 89-1 9 1 ; Laconia the aboriginal home of their legend and cult, their Laconian cult suggests divinity, but Laconian legend their mortal-heroic status, and the popular imagination pre- ferred this aspect of them, 191-196; their oldest appellative Tvvoapibat , value of this fact as evidence of their human origin, Tundareos no divine name but belonging to purely human genealogies, 196-198 ; general conclusion concerning Laconian cult and myth, the Twins arise as Kastor and Poludeukes with family name Iw&apiSai, human figures of prehistoric Achaean genealogy, 198-199 ; fallacy of interpreting legendary figures by their associates, son or husband of god or goddess need not be a god, no proof of divinity of Leda nor of Helen, the brides called Leukippides do not explain the Twins, 199-201 ; Dios- kouroi-cults in other localities, local ' Sons of God ' or ' Heavenly Twins ' other than Kastor and Poludeukes not discoverable, the Anaktes in Argolis and Attica jind the Dioskouroi of Messenia and Elis always Kastor and Poludeukes, Idas and Lunkeus and the Molionides never called Dioskouroi and never worshipped, 201-208 ; cults in Arcadia, Achaia, Phlious, 209-210 ; Attic cults and religious feeling, 210-212 ; question of Theban cult examined, claim of Amphion and Zethos to be independent local Dioskouroi examined and rejected, Euripides has falsified the facts and misled modern theorists into totemistic theories, true explanation of the -nwKoi tuv Ai6s, 212-216 ; the Spartan twins found elsewhere in Boeotia, in Lokris, Phokis, at an early period in Kephallenia, in Thessaly and Macedonia, 217-220 ; Milesian colonization probably brought them to the Black Sea and into the Argonautic myth, 220-221 ; evidence from western Mediterra- nean, as far as Massilia, points the same way, everywhere Dios- kouroi = Kastor and Polydeukes, no evidence in Greece of pre-ethnic daimones of ' Indo-European ' period called ' Sons of God ', Kastor and Polydeukes not faded gods nor originally astral, but human heroic personalities, 223-224 ; superstition about twins, suggesting the name AwsKovpoi, grows stronger in later period, evidence for this, 224-227 ; value of cult for Greek rehgion and ethics, 227-228. CONTi'INTS xi CHAPTER IX PAGES The Leukippides ....... 229-233 Uncertainty as to their original character ; names Phoibc and Hilaeira usually regarded as proving astral character, but the Laconian cult of Phoibe suggests a chthonian power, 229-233. CHAPTER X The Cult of Asklepios 234-279 Importance of the study, Asklepios the typical man-god, the earliest tradition in Homer and Hesiod presents his human side only, 234-235 ; only two possible views to consider {a) that Asklepios was originally an earth-daimon of Trikka gradually humanized, (b) that he was a real physician of prehistoric age, worshipped with heroic honours after death and gradually apotheosized : prima facie reasonableness of latter view, Homer and local cults preserve many real names of physicians, 235-238 ; the name, the forms of cult, the legend may help to decide ; the name points more naturally to a man than to a god ; the cult is doubtful, being chthonian, and chthonian ritual being much the same for buried man as for earth-spirit, also his emblem or incarnation the snake equally appropriate to either, but the dog, his other familiar, more to the man, 238-241 ; sacrificial animals, goat generally excluded, a taboo more frequent in cults of heroes than of deities, 241-242 ; his legend strengthens belief in his human character as primary, the stories of his miraculous birth and death by lightning no proof of divinity, the only other stories attaching to him show the culture-hero, 242-244 ; he has no vegetative functions, therefore probably no original earth-deity, no real connexion with Trophonios, oracular power by incubation only for healing, 244-246 ; diffusion of the cult, earliest home Trikka, earUest worshippers the Phleguai who may have brought it to Boeotia and Phokis, Asklepios dpx,rjyirTis in Phokis, hostility of Delphoi, 247-249 ; migration of cult to the Peloponnese, Corinth, Titane in Sikuon, Epidauros ; Thessa- lian origin partly obliterated in Laconia, Arcadia, Messene, 249- 251 ; Epidaurian legend and cult, close connexion with Trikka and the Phleguai, with Apollo Maleatas, influence of Apollo on develop- ment of Asklepios, 251-256 ; shrine at Kos, founded direct from Trikka though Coan worship influenced by Epidaurian, 256- 258 ; introduction of Asklepios into Athens as full-blown god from Epidauros, sacred dogs, 258-263 ; in the fifth and still more in the fourth century cult penetrates the islands, Crete, Kos, and later Paros, &c., its greatest centres Pergamon and Rome and at last ubiquitous in Roman empire, but its aboriginal con- nexion with Trikka not forgotten, 263-265 ; question of contribu- tion of Asklepios-cult to the science of medicine, relation of CONTENTS PAGES science to religion in the Greek world, question whether the Asklepieia directly aided development of therapeutics, divergent views, Greek physicians generally attributed their inspiration to Asklepios, 265-270 ; the shrines at Epidauros, Kos, Per- gamon, Rome, mainly thaumaturgic, but admitted some science especially in later period, contrast between Christian and Hellenic view, 270-275 : deep devotion of Graeco-Roman world to Asklepios, reasons for this, illustrations from hterature and art, attempt to develop Asklepios into the highest god, 275-279. CHAPTER XI The Cults of Epic Heroes (Ref. 55-109) . . 280-342 Weakness and failure of the theory that would explain the leading heroes of saga as ' faded gods ', hieratic element in mythology much exaggerated : cults of epic heroes in Greece intended to be cults of real men, not always ancestors, most of them post-Homeric, due to great and wide influence of epos, 280-285 ;'' Achilles-cult examined, no plausible evidence of aboriginal divinity, diffusion of his hero-worship, prominent only in Black Sea, scarce^ traceable in Thessaly, never worshipped as ancestor except possibly in Epeiros ; ritual at Kroton and Elis showing epic influences, 285-289. Dioinedes, diffusion of his cult in the Adriatic, theory asserting his original divinity criticized, Diomedes of Thrace, 289-293 ; Aias Oiliades, probably a real personage remembered, discreditable stories attaching to him, hero-worship among the Eastern and Western Lokroi, 293-294 ; ritual-of the Locrian maidens to expiate his sin against Kassandra, facts concerning this ritual, inscription found in West Lokris,it was established at least as early as eighth century b. c, no parallel to it in Greek annals, failure of comparable method and of all ' hieratic ' explanations of the Aias-Kassandra episode, 296-300 ; the only possible explanation is that something like that episode had occurred which demanded atonement, 300-301 ; special reasons compelling Locrians to atone, connexion between names Oileus and Ilion, interest of Locrians in later city VII -, Athena Ihas in Troad and Lokris, importance of these facts for the ' Homeric Question ', 301-305 ; Aias Telanionios, generally regarded as a ' double ' of the former, erroneousness of this view, both distinct in legend, genealogj', and cult, Aias Telamonios real figure of popular saga, no faded god, 305-307 ; hero-cult in Salamis, thence brought into Attica, possibly into the Megarid, cult in Troad due to epic influences, doubtful if Aias was of the Aiakidai, connexion of the Aiakida; with Zeus Hellanios, 307-310 ; Peleiis, shght traces of cult at Pella and in island off Euboia, to be classed as figure of the historic-epic than of the daimonistic type, 210-211 ; Neoptolemos, his reality a tenable hypothesis, problems arise about the double name Pyrrhos- CONTENTS xiii PACKS Neoptolemos, both names of transparent meaning but not therefore fictitious, his descendants tlie Epeirote kings preserved both, 311-313; belongs to the tradition received by Homer, 313-314 ; heroic honours at Delphoi, connected with a tradition of his murder there, religious ' pomp ' of the Ainianes at Delphoi, doubtful evidence of his cult in Epeiros, authority of Delphic tradition a bar to his cult elsewhere, 314-317 ; ' hieratic ' explanations of his murder, futility of them, no ground for sup- posing Neoptolemos to have been a priest-king put to death ritualistically, human-historic reasons might explain his death and burial within the temple, 317-320 ; no ground for dissociating the Pyrrhos of Delphoi from Neoptolemos, 320-321 ; "'Agamemnon- and M enelaos-cnlt?, no proof of aboriginal divinities, their names and legends compel us to class them among the human figures of epic saga, their cult later and greatly due to epic influences, 321-323 ; Helene, generally regarded as faded goddess, cult in Laconia, Athens. Rhodes (Helene ' Dendritis '), but this theory explains nothing and is unnatural, love-motives in ' heroic ' saga may be based on real events, the Trojan war no i(po% \6yos, cosmic or celestial explanation of human stories a vartpov nporepov, 323-325 ; later cult of Helene owed much to cult of Dioskouroi : other examples of epic evoking cult, Alkinoos, Idomeneus, Meriones, Odysseus, Talthiibios at Sparta, Homeric heroes worshipped en bloc at Tarentum and many leading heroes in the Troad, 325-328 ; cult of Hcktor in Thebes, fallacious theory of Bethe, Theban cult late and suggested by their Medizing policy, 328-329 ; , Kassandra, apparent cult in Laconia, important for construction of epic plot and cult influence of the epic, but cult of Kassandra really a cult of Achaean goddess Alexandra confused with Kassandra because of Paris- Alexandros, confusion helped by independent tradition of the bringing of Kassandra to Laconia, 329-332 ; Oidipoiis, cult shows influence of Theban cycle of epic (cf. Amphiaraos, Amphion, Adrastos, ? Tiideus), hero-worship of him in Laconia and Attica, evidence of Sophokles authoritative yet perplexing, Oidipous no hieratic figure but belongs to real Theban tradition, 332-334 : ^^^ras^os-cult at Sikuon of same type, 334-336 : cult-influence of Cychc epic, 336 ; Perseus at Argos, cult ancestral-heroic, merely heroic at Athens and Seriphos, later raised to a city-god at Tarsos, 337 ; Theseus, question of his divinity, in spite of his parentage no indication of a god ' Theseus , the name human rather than divine, his cult in Attica and Delos not earlier than the period of Kimon, Theseus essentially an Ionian hero, close association with Poseidon and Aphrodite, incarnation of Attic virtue, ethical value of the heroic ideal, 337-340 ; genera! considerations on the cult-influence of the epic, 340-342. xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER XII PAGES The Cults of Ancestors (Ref. 110-206) , . 343-360 The distinction and the relation between hero-cult and ancestor- cult, 343-344 ; ancestral ' tendance ' in Attica, the ytviaia, veKvcta, vffjiiffia, the ' Feast of Pots ' probably pre-Dionysiac, souls under the charge of the earth-divinities, motives of affection and fear combined in the ritual, 344-347 ; the ' miasma ' of the dead, scarcely recognized by Homer but felt by Hesiod, more strongly in later times leading to veto on burying within the city wall, 347-349 ; various funeral laws and ritual evoked by this ' miasma ', results of it on religious dogma concerning the soul and on views about the ghost, 349-352 ; family meals to the dead, ? sacramental, 352-353 ; but usually food offered to the dead forbidden to the living, ivayinimro., the early funeral- ritual of Greece shows affection and fear coexistent, 353-355 ; evidence vague but sufficient that the direct worship of certain an- cestors or groups of ancestors was very ancient, the Tritopatores, perpetual fire in the City Hall, 355-356 ; aspect of the spirit-world different from the Homeric, the kindly ghost the source of life, doctrine of ' palingenesis ' in early Greece, evidence and signi- ficance of the phalloi on tombs, 356-357 ; ancestor-worship probably developed with agriculture and was based on patrilinear systems, the cults give evidence against the hypothesis of a prehistoric matriarchy, cults of heroines and ancestresses verj- few, but Otoi MT^TpSioi recognized, 358 ; restrictions on ancestor- worship in historic period, many ancestors fictitious and merely eponymous, yet these fictions often became realities in popular legend and cult, e. g. Messene, Lakedaimon, no doubt some true and real names preserved by cult, 359—360. CHAPTER XIII Cults of Real Persons in the Historic Period (Ref. 239-325) • 361-372 Cults of great legislators, Lukourgos the earliest recorded, noground for doubting his reaUty, public worship of recently deceased very rare in seventh and sixth centuries : in lifth- century worship sometimes the reward of a brave death on the battle-field, e. g. at Plataea, Thermopulai, Marathon, cult of Bvasidas, social value of these honours, heroizing of poets and philosophers beginning in fifth century, 361-365 • the heroi/.ing of athletes, a rehgious degradation, 365-366 ; evidence from the Spartan reUefs of the heroizing of real individuals, 366-367 ; later instances of poets and philosophers canonized, 367 ; Greek religious and ethical sense not perturbed by hero-cult, but the Greek higher conscience revolted against apotheosis of the living rife in Hellenistic period, hero-worship on the whole not the cause of demonology nor CONTENTS XV PACKS injurious to the polytheism, 368-36Q ; relation of heroes to gods, influence of Delphoi, popular conception of the heroes as corporeal, 370-37^- CHAPTER XIV Individual Belief in Immortality : the Mysteries and Orphism 373-402 Posthumous hopes gratified by the Mysteries, the Eleusinian opened as early as seventh century, sacramental communion discernible at Eleusis and Samothrace but not the secret of the Eleusinian appeal, 373-374 ; Orphic-Bacchic sects aiming at mystic union with deity and promising happy immortality, 374- 375 ; Orphic sources, (a) gold tablets from South Italy and Crete, analysis of contents, doctrine of purgation, the cycle of existences, the Orphic Paradise, 375-378, (b) Greek literature, Pindar's second Olympian ode, passages in Plato's Dialogues, 378-381 ; summary of results, Orphism marks new epoch in Greek religion, its eschatology, stress on purity, ritual magical- religious with ethical possibilities, doctrine of purgatory and eternal damnation, identity of mortal and divinity, the death of the god, 381-383 ; ? higher morality taught by Orphism, doubtful evidence, higher ethic of Greece not Salvationist, 383-386 ; the prevalence and influence of Orphism, evidence from Pindar, Plato, Aristophanes, from the vases, from orators of the fourth century. Pausanias, Plutarch, 386-389 ; later popular views concerning life after death, ol fiaKapiot, Plato's Apology, the pseudo-Platonic ^.r/oc/zos first speech against Aristogeiton, funeral oration by Hupereides, Lucian, Plutarch, 389-393 ; grave-ritual, grave-monuments and • epitaphs, evidence conflicting but suggesting stronger hopes and convictions in later Paganism, 300-40T ; summary conclusion, 402. References for Hero-cults : Alphabetical lists . 403-426 ERRATA Page 1 8, for ' Ikaros ' read ' Ikarios '. , 21, for ' Demiphon ' read ' Demophon '. , 23, for ' Kion ' read ' Kios '. , 23, for ' Prusiai ' read ' Prousias '. , 62, Add to foot-note b : It would be equally in accordance with analogy to interpret the name as ' living round the temple ' : cf. 008109. „ 63, for ' Pylos ' read * Pulos '. CHAPTER I GENERi^T. SURVEY OF THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD The quebtion concerning a people's belief in a posthumous life, in the continued existence of the soul after death in a spirit-world, will appear to many as one of the most interesting that the comparative study of religion has to propound and consider. Some theologians are apt to regard it as a fundamental tenet of all higher religions, and are at times inclined to claim for it the value of an a priori axiom of natural religion : even those who have discarded the belief have sometimes held the view that all higher religion is really a derivative from it, in accordance with Herbert Spencer's theory that the worship of the ancestral spirit is the source of the worship of gods. In fact, in this as in most other fields of scientific inquiry, the zealous devotion of the first who worked in it led to certain exaggerations and some illusory theories. Scarcely any one still maintains Herbert Spencer's dogma : a wider and more accurate com- parison of the phenomena prevents us regarding these beliefs as universal or as an axiom of ' natural ' religion ; nor, when we look at the history of Judaism, dare we affirm that they inevitably accompany the higher development of the religious spirit. We must indeed admit that their prevalence has been and is extraordinarily wide and belongs to a very ancient stage of the social history of man. But those who are familiar with the religions of the ancient civilizations are aware that only a few of them gave any prominence to eschatological doctrine, or allowed the ideas concerning the future life to be constructive of their rehgious system. Most of the ritual and worship were mainly efficacious of man's welfare, material and spiritual, in this world, and other- worldliness, as it has been called, had little or nothing to do with it. And it was particularly their preoccupation with 2460 B 2 GENERAL SURVEY OF THE the present life that distinguished early Judaism, the Babylonian-Assyrian, the older Indo-Iranian, and the older Hellenic religions, from Buddhism, Islamism, and Christianity. Even the Egyptian religion, in which the eschatological idea appears so prominent, was probably in its earlier stages by no means preoccupied with it. Yet in all these systems we find the doctrine, more or less articulate, of the soul's continuance, and in some of them this evoked in certain cases an actual cult of the dead. Now we know that such doctrine can coexist with, and yet not essentially affect, the higher religion ; but also that at certain times and under certain conditions it may become quickened with dogmas and beliefs that vitally transform men's conceptions concerning the High Gods and the hopes that he entertains about them. It is only then that views concerning the dead and men's relations with the spirits of the departed become a matter of primary religious importance. But in any case they are always of intrinsic interest for the study both of religion and of social institutions, for they are often discovered to be the foundation on which much of the social fabric has been constructed. Now the study of this phenomenon in Hellenism is im- portant from every point of view. It was associated, and in the later periods became ever more intimately associated, with the higher religion ; it was a social and constructive force, shaping morality and law ; and it was one of the sources to which we can trace certain currents of Greek philosophy, notably the Academic. Its influence on Greek social institutions I have partly con- sidered elsewhere ^ ; my primary concern here is the religious evolution of the phenomenon and its religious character. It is intricate and many-sided. For the sake of clearness of arrangement we should distinguish, and mark the dis- tinction with precision, between ancestor-cult, hero-cult, and, thirdly, the general religious ' tendance ' or depaTreCa of the dead ; but we must be aware that all these are liable to blend, the one with the other. » Vide Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, pp. 58-68. PREHISTORIC PERIOD 3 We may also consider, on the one hand, the significance of certain funeral rites, and the ritual whereby man ful- filled his religious duty to the departed and also that whereby he expressed and ensured his own posthumous hopes. We must review the literary and archaeological evidence of the doctrines current among the people from time to time concerning the life after death. And if we find many in- consistencies of doctrine even in the religions that rest on the dogmas of sacred books, we shall expect to find still more in Hellenic belief, uncontrolled as it was by sacred books or orthodox dogma. And it has been remarked that there is no sphere of religious doctrine where more contradiction pre- vails, either veiled or apparent, in the opinions of the same period, even of the same individual. The first question we may ask is whether belief in the soul's survival of the body was an ancient heritage of the Hellenic people. Though presuppositions are always a danger in Comparative Religion, we may presuppose with a fair degree of certainty that it was. The Homeric poems, which give sufficient proof of the prevalence of the belief, reflect Hellenic society of the pipvpnfh ^n d tenth ce nturies, and as such behefs do not grow up in a day, we may regard it as indefinitely older than the first emergence of those poems. Also, the Hellenic tribes when they won their way into Hellas had already reached a stage of comparative culture. If they possessed no such beliefs then, they were singular among all the nations of this area, and singular among all Aryan nations of which we have record ; among their nearest kinsmen, the Thraco-Phrygians, the belief has been traced back with some probability to the second millennium. The next question, whether the aboriginal Hellene wor- shipped his dead or some of them, is not so easy to answer. It is true that this worship has prevailed at some time or other and with lesser or greater power among the main branches of the Aryan stock. But we are not warranted in drawing the conclusion that it was an Indo-Germanic tradi- tion, which the Hellenes must have inherited and main- tained Hke their other kinsmen . Nevertheless, a review of the B 2 4 GENERAL SURVEY OF THE evidence, when we get to it, suggests the opinion that some worship of the dead belongs to an early period of the religious history of the race. In our attempt to penetrate the pre-Homeric society, we naturally look to the evidence of the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments. . And they contribute certain facts that may help our present inquiry. In the first place Mycenaean burials in Greece might take place near or within the inhabited precincts, and funeral- jars or TTidoi have actually been found in the niches of the walls of a pre-Mycenaean house in Aigina ^. One important reflection is at once suggested : the earlier people, whoever they were, did not fear the contagion of the dead ^ ; believing in the continuance of the soul as we know that they did, they must have regarded the ghost with affection rather than with terror and desired to keep it in or near the family. Some other peoples have done the same, but not many. Also, the Mycenaean shaft-graves reveal elaborate provision for the tendance of the departed : ornaments and weapons were buried with him ; there is reason to think that slaves were sometimes killed in order that their spirits might wait upon him "" ; and the grave-mound was constructed with contri- vances for conve5dng sustenance, especially liquids, down to the dead. All this, however, may be mere ' tendance ' prompted by family affection, and does not in itself prove actual cult of the spirit regarded as a divine power. But » Eph. Arch. 1895, P- 251. '' The evidence from Crete, as Sir Arthur Evans has kindly given it me, is conflicting. At Knossos the tombs appear outside the settlement ; there is a cemetery a mile from the Palace : at Phaistos it is well away from the Akropolis : at Hagia Triada tombs have been found quite near the Palace : but in one or two cases he has found tholos-tombs in the outer walls of buildings, e.g. at ara 'EWrjviKa, a group of castles (late Minoan), one with a series of small 66\oi built in its outside wall with openings outside : so also at Arne in South Crete an akropolis with SoAos in its outside wall partly rock-cut. The prehistoric tombs at Phylakopi in Melos show the practice of burying the corpses of grown-up people outside the city, but those of infants in pitchers within the walls of the houses, possibly that the soul of the prematurely deceased might be reincarnated in a new member of the family {Arch. Anz. 1912, p. 259 ; vide Ann. Brit. Sch. xvii, pp. 6-9). <^ Eph. Arch. 1888, p. 130; Bull. Corr. Hell. 1904, p. 370 (tombs at Mukenai and Argos). PREHISTORIC PERIOD 5 some of these graves, such as the Mycenaean tomb at Menidi in Attica were thus tended for many generations '', perhaps centuries ; and where tendance is maintained for so long a time the imagination of the people who cherished the tradi- tion must have come to invest that ghost with supernormal powers. We may say, in fact, that tendance long maintained is likely to engender actual worship. But one monument at_ least has been handed down to us from the Minoan civiliza- tion, that many archaeologists regard as a direct proof of actual cult of the dead : the famous Hagia Triada sarco- phagus discovered near Phaistos by the Italians, on which we see a procession of worshippers, some on the right bringing offerings to a tomb, before which we see a mummified figure that we may interpret as that of the dead man who has come forth to receive worship ^ ; others on the left approaching with gifts the sacred altar and axe of the High God. It seems as if the dead hero were being here invited to a communion with the deity. We cannot of course tell whether the departed spirit was being here revered as hero or ancestor ; and the cult of the dead in Minoan Crete may have been quite excep- tional, confined perhaps to the kings who may have been regarded as semi-divine even in their lifetime'. But unless the peoples of this Mycenaean-Minoan culture had in them a Hellenic strain (and about this ethnologists are still dis- puting), we cannot use their religion as evidence of the early Hellenic ; it is nevertheless important for our purpose, for doubtless the later Hellenic practices and cults derived from it abundant inspiration and suggestion. Our first literary evidence concerning Hellas is of course the Homeric poems ; but Homer's testimony on this matter is found to be somewhat inconclusive. It is sometimes * Jahrb. d. d. Inst. 1899, P- ^^7- '• Vide a recent paper by E. Meurer in Jahrb. d. d. Inst. 1912, p. 212, who tinds evidence in the painting that the mummy-fignre of the deceased is represented as standing in a pit. "" In Sir Arthur Evans's recent article in Archaeologia, 6$, 'The Tomb of the Double Axes', 1914, p. 55, new evidence is given of the Minoan association of the dead with the Great Goddess : the contour of the cistgrave itself reproduces the shape of the double axe : cf . also Karo in Arch. f. Rellgionswiss. 191 3, p. 258. 6 GENERAL SURVEY OF THE interpreted in different ways, and we are not always sure how far we can trust it. Taking the poems as they stand, we should be inclined, on a superficial view of them, to conclude that the Homeric world, if Homer is its spokesman, did not generally offer worship to the departed spirit. The soul of the recently dead is there regarded as a frail, unsubstantial thing that flits away as soon as the funeral rites are performed to a remote, colourless, and joyless world whence it can never return to visit the living : the Homeric ghost is piteous, pathetic, excites and feels yearning and the remembrance of past love, but is too weak to evoke fear or worship. But Rohde, in his well-known and valuable treatise Psyche, while emphasizing this aspect of the Homeric soul-theory, finds on the other hand distinct traces in the poems of real ghost-worship, which clashes with that theory and of which the true significance seems no longer appreciated by the poet. He finds these especially in the funeral of Patroklos, in the elaborate ritual, the slaughter of captives, horses, and dogs, the dedication of Achilles' hair, and finally in the funeral games that follow : he is aware that Homer does not interpret these various acts as divine honours, but he argues that such elaborate and expensive ceremonies could not have become traditional except at a time when the ghost of a great chief- tain was regarded as a supernormal power, to be feared and propitiated. But such indirect evidence may be illusory : and it is the chief defect in Rohde's treatise that he does not clearly distinguish between ' tendance ' and cultus. There is nothing that Achilles does for the dead Patroklos that might not be prompted by his strong affection and by the feeling that the departed chief needs in the other world much of the pomp and appurtenance that surrounded him in this. We may indeed say that those offerings are inconsistent with the usual Homeric conception of the disembodied soul as a feeble wraith ; but who is always consistent in this dim region of thought ? Certainly the dedication of Achilles' hair is no act of worship, rather a loving act of communion ; it would have been an act of communion, a bond or tie of friendship and sympathetic relation, had he given his locks PREHISTORIC PERIOD 7 to the river-god, as the Greek youths of ater times were wont to dedicate theirs. The elaborateness and magnificence of funeral rites in early societies prompt us naturally to interpret them as actual worship of the dead. But we must not take this as sufficient e\iJence. The funeral of the pagan Norse chieftain may often have been as splendid as that of Patroklos : ornaments and armour were piled up around him, hell- shoes for his distant journey were provided, his wife and some of his slaves were induced to accompany him, and finally he might be burned on his war-ship and sent off to sea in the blaze of it. All this need only mean that the departing soul is sent away with eclat to the unknown region where once arrived he will trouble the living no more. As regards funeral games, the view taken by Rohde and others that these are a clear proof of cult is in my opinion erroneous. It is suggested by the fact that all the later athletic contests of Greece had a religious character, and while the greater festivals were under the patronage of the High Gods most of them were consecrated to the ghosts of heroes. But we must not draw the conclusion that this religious aspect of the games is primary and aboriginal : the Phaeacian games in the ' Odyssey have no religious character, and it would be an absurdity to suppose that the primitive Hellenes could not arrange a race or a wrestling- ma^tch as a secular frolic. We must imagine that in ancient Hellas, as in Iceland, there would be manly games at" every social gathering of the people, who loved open air and athletic prowess : the chief occasions for such gatherings wt^re weddings, funerals, and temple-worship, and at all these evidently games were in vogue. The funeral and the temple- service of the tribe will bring together the largest concourse, a/id the prestige of the accompanying games will be all the gi:eater. Also, the idea may easily arise that the spirit of the chieftain, who in life was a great athlete, is pleased to see these sports around his tomb ; but no such idea need have dictated them originally. Again, it was an obvious advantage that the greater games, which brought together strangers irom many tribes, should be associated with temple-service, 8 GENERAL SURVEY OF THE for the deity of the temple would command a ' holy peace ' among them and prevent the brawls of rivals and tribesmen at feud. We se-e here what we often can discern in the history of Greek custom ; an institution arising from a secular impulse is taken up, assisted, and regularized by religion. We cannot prove that Greek games originated directly from the worship of the dead merely on the ground of Varro's assertion that the bloody gladiatorial shows of Rome arose from human sacrifices at tombs. The de- scription, then, of Patroklos' funeral does not throw light on the question that we are seeking. But the Nekuia in the Odyssey furnishes some direct evidence. We have there ^ a minute account of the sacrifices to the ghosts that Odysseus is to perform when he visits Hades to consult Teiresias : and the poet leaves us in no doubt that these offerings signify worship : " YloXka Se yovvovadai v€KV ^h ^^ elemental names which designate the earth-maiden and the dew-maiden ; though in genealogy they belong to the mortal sphere, their cult was theistic, not heroic ; their legend is wholly hieratic ; Aglauros and Herse come to an evil end through opening the mystic chest entrusted by Athena to Pandrosos, wherein they saw the infant Erich- thonios encircled by a snake ; the story reflects a mystery, " Vide p. 88. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 23 in which certain sacred things were revealed only to the initiated, and we hear of mysteries and initiation in the cult of Aglauros ; another legend, that Aglauros sacrificed herself for her country in time of war by throwing herself down from the Akropohs, shows the same blend of hieratic and epic elements as the story of the Huakinthides. Such also was probably the character of the Bithynian Hulas 2', who in the myth disappears into a stream — the ritual-fate of many a vegetation-puppet— and who was worshipped at that spot with an annual sacrifice wherein ' the priest thrice called him by name and thrice the echo answered him '. The Bithynians of Kion and Prousias instituted a periodic search for Hidas, going out to the mountains and woods in troops in quest of him. He may well have been a woodland-daimon ; but the quantity of the first syllable of his name, being short, forbids us to connect it with the Greek vkri ; it may have arisen from the actual sound of the dirge-invocation. In the learned poem of ApoUonius Rhodius, Hulas, perhaps for the first time, is engrafted on the Argonaut-story, and becomes the beloved youth whom Herakles loses and bewails ; and here as so often we find the Hellenic genius relieving the monotonous fictions of peasant-ritual with the transfiguring light of romance and art ; while our John Barleycorn remains plain John Barleycorn, and the Bithynian Bormos, the twin- brother of Hulas, kept to the humble estate of the rustic vegetation-daimon, who was periodically and monotonously bewailed, Bithynia, Mysia, and Phrygia were evidently haunted by such figures, who indeed have left traces of themselves in most parts of the world, to furnish good hunt- ing to the folklorist "". The Hellenic soil presents them in the forms of Huakinthos, Hulas, and perhaps of Linos. Linos Of all this group it is Linos ^^ who most perplexes the inquirer into the origins of ' heroic ' personalities. Was * Daphnis of Sicily, R. lo, who visits Lituerses and comes near to being sacrificed in his harvest-ritual, or who flings himself from a rock into the water, seems to belong to the same class. 24 HEROES AND HEROINES OF he the personal ' projection ' of a wailful song, as was lalemos, and according to one authority the Bithynian Bormos ? Or was he, like the others, the youthful vegeta- tion-hero who dies and is mourned ? Or was he of a different type altogether, from his earhest origin a culture-hero specialized to the art of song ? Each of these views may be supported by some of the recorded facts, but perhaps none of them easily explains them all. We may admit that the original significance of the word Alvos is not yet discovered, and that we cannot decide whether it designated a particular kind of song or a per- sonage who was the theme of that song. We are not quite sure whether Homer, our earliest authority for the word, intends it in one sense or the other, when in the description of the Shield he depicts the boy as ' singing the fair Linos- song ' or * singing of fair Linos ', while the youths and maidens are returning from the vintage. The two meanings again appear blent in the compound Olroktvoi, ' Dirge- Linos ', which Sappho is said to have borrowed from Pamphos, but which she used as a personal heroic name, associating it with Adonis. But the original meaning of the name is of little importance. The wailful cry of AlKlvo^ or AtKivov may have arisen from some non-Hellenic funeral howl, let us say the Semitic ' Ailenu '. But we cannot imagine even the aboriginal and most primitive Hellene sobbing and mourning for no one in particular. There was some one in that song, whatever his proper name was, whose sorrowful fate was being lamented. The question of interest is, what manner of person was he or was he imagined to be ? Of this at least we may be certain : he was more than the mere ' projection ' of that song. Examples of such fictions are lalemos, ' projected ' from the dirge called IdXeixos, and 'A^^tS/jo/xos from the 'A/x(^t8poVia ; but to these shadow-creations no real myth or no state-ritual attaches. On the other hand, there is a strong and abiding legend with var3dng details about Linos, and we have record of a curious Argive ritual in his honour. According to the tradition accepted by the later literature he was one of the chief of the culture-heroes, who fj DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 25 in the classification of heroic types constitute an inde- \ pendent class ; as the inventor of the art of song, he was I slain by the jealous Phoebus and was bewailed by the ! Muses. And it appears as if this version of his career was both popular and ancient. It seems reflected in the ritual, on Mount Helikon, where a yearly ' heroic ' sacrifice — kvayicTixaTa — was offered to him just before the great sacrifice to the Muses. It is reflected in the Hesiodic verses — ' The Muse Ourania bore him a lovely son : and all mortal singers and masters of the harp mourn for Linos in festivals and choral-dance, ever beginning and ending with the call on Linos' name '. It reappears in the elegiac epitaph on his tomb, quoted by the scholiast on the Iliad, who also quotes the Hesiodic passage. But its most graceful expression is the anonymous fragment of a lyric song, quoted by Athenaeus : 'Ah, Linos, whom all the gods did honour, for to thee first of mankind they gave the gift of singing shrill- voiced music to mortal men : but in his wrath Phoebus lays thee low : and the Muses mourn for thee '. If this could be beUeved to be a snatch of primitive Hellenic folk-song, we should treasure the fragment, and use it as our primary document, and on the strength of it interpret the personality as belonging whoUy to the human and social sphere, which has engendered among many peoples a group of culture-heroes, such as Kinuras, Hiawatha, Bragi. How- ever, it is not a primitive document, at least in the form presented to us : the metre, a short dactyhc-trochaic system, simple and beautiful enough, may be pre-Homeric, but the language belongs to the later Ionic epic. Again, the view presented above contains an inherent difficulty, and clashes most discordantly with certain other facts. If Linos aboriginally belonged merely to the type of culture-heroes, why was he universally and ceremoniously bewailed ? Every ' hero ' had of course to die, but only to very few was a ritual of ceremonious mourning consecrated. Other culture-heroes, Kinuras, Daidalos, Orpheus, Ardalos, are not known to have been bewailed. And how should we explain the Homeric passage, which must rank as our oldest ) 26 HEROES AND HEROINES OF document, and in which Linos is presented as the theme of the harvest-song of vintagers, if aboriginally he was wholly a hero of art and culture ? But the facts that speak most strongly against this theory are the Argive ritual and the Argive legend, now to be considered. It was in Argolis that his name and personality seem to have been most deeply rooted in native legend and public ritual. According to the story there current Linos was the son of Apollo and the mortal maiden Psamathe, who, through fear of her father's wrath, exposed the fruit of her amour with the god ; and a shepherd found and nurtured the infant Linos as his own, until one day by an unlucky accident the shepherd-dogs tore him to pieces. The pas- sionate grief into which Psamathe was plunged by this bereavement revealed her lapse to her father, Krotopos, who put her to death. Then Apollo, wroth at the death of his beloved Psamathe, punished the Argives with famine ; and when they consulted the oracle concerning means of escape, he bade them make religious atonement to Linos and his mother. This they did in various ways, and among other rites they instituted choruses of women and girls to bewail Linos. The Argive month in which the festival of Linos was held was called the Lamb-month, because Linos had been brought up among the lambs ; also his festival and sacrifice were called ' the feast of the lamb ', apvCs. And on this day the Argives were in the habit of killing any dogs that they found going about. This is Konon's copious narrative, and the interesting ritual detail at the close of it «^ is corroborated by ' Athenaeus' statement that the Argives solemnized a sacrifice called Kvvo Cf. the Greek ritual of Leukothea at Rome, in which the matrons introduce a slave woman into the shrine for the purpose of slapping her face and beating her with rods (R. 17^). 2460 D 34 HEROES AND HEROINES OF looks as if this had happened to the young Charila ; she is hung among the trees as beneficent and full of vitalizing power ; she is then insulted, beaten, and buried in a barren place among the hills as if she embodied the spirit of decay and famine ^ ; this is negative or apotropaeic magic, and explains why the ceremony is described as partly cathartic. The contradiction in the varying treatment and estimate of the same image and the same personage glimmers through in the record of the Attic Thargelia, in respect of the handling of the ^ap\iaKoi ^. Another rituahstic mode of disposing of the body or the puppet that contained the spirit of the vegetation-daimon was the periodic casting of it into the sea, either for the purpose of ejecting it as hopelessly decayed or of refreshing it and recovering it. Dionysos and Aphrodite were once treated thus, either in the person of their priest or in their puppet-form. Hence arose romantic 'stories of heroines, who, to avoid some amorous pursuit or for other motives, threw themselves down from a rock, and afterwards received heroic or divine honours. In many of these cases we can discern the hieratic source of the story and the divine origin of the personality. Britomartis, ' the sweet maid ' of pre-Hellenic Crete, becomes in the local legend a chaste heroine, who flings herself into the sea to escape the love of Minos ; but in cult she was recognized always as a goddess *=. The same may be said of the Carian maidens Molpadias the ' Melo- dious ' and Parthenos the ' Virgin ', whose names, like that of their sister 'Potw, ' she of the pomegranate ', are trans- parent divine appellatives, probably late echoes of the cult-invocations of the great goddess of Asia Minor, akin to Artemis- Aphrodite ^^^ ^s j^ the local Carian legend they figured as mortal maidens who flung themselves into the sea to avoid their father's wrath, which they dreaded, because they had heedlessly allowed swine to break his wine-pots that they were set to guard. The story as given by Diodorus is full of hieratic details. He further informs us that » The legend proves this, though Plutarch's record of the ritual omits it, " Vide Cidts, 4, pp. 280-281. •= Vide Cults, 2, p. 476. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 35 Molpadias was worshipped after her death under the name 'Hixidca, which suggests merely heroic honours ; and yet in the same context he speaks of her as a goddess. So far as we have evidence of the cult of a Parthenos, it was always a goddess-cult. Ino-Leukothea The interpretation of these transparent ritual figures is simple : their legend is hieratic wholly ; they have little or no secular character, not to say epic or heroic. But a more prominent example of the heroine-goddess and a more im- portant cult-figure is Ino-Leukothea " ; and the interpre- tation of her character and personality is a far more difficult task for the historian of Greek religion. The name Ino, which is the prior fact, fails to help us ; it may be Hellenic or not, but its root-meaning and root-affinities have escaped us. The first literary notice of her is in Homer, in the thrilling narrative where, as a kindly sea-fairy, she aids the drowning Odysseus. But the poet is aware that this is not her original character, for he describes her as ' Ino Leukothea of the fair ankles, daughter of Kadmos, who was once a mortal speaking with the tongue of men, but now in the salt sea-waters has received honour at the hands of the Gods '. For Homer, then, she is merely one of that type with which we are familiar, the mortal translated to the divine sphere ; and though he remembers her Cadmeian origin and parentage, she must before his period have already assumed her maritime godhead and her name, Leukothea, ' White Goddess ', whatever that may mean. Hesiod speaks of her only by her name Ino, in his catalogue of ' glorious children ' produced by the union of a mortal with a goddess : thus from Kadmos and Harmonia sprang Ino, Semele, and Agaue ; and while he knows that Semele was raised to the rank of a goddess, he does not tell us what he thought of Ino ; but there is no reason to suppose that his view of her was different from Homer's. A little later comes the testimony of Alkman ; in a fragment of his verse Ino is called the Queen of the Sea {aaXaaaofitboiaa) ; similarly Pindar speaks of Ino-Leukothea as ' sharer of the sea- D 2 36 HEROES AND HEROINES OF Nereids' bower ' ; and a dedicatory epigram in the Greek anthology associated her and MeHkertes with the sea- divinities Glaukos Nereus, Zeus Buthios (the God of the Sea-depths) , and the Samothracian divinities ^. But her marine character is far less clearly expressed in legend and ritual than her chthonian ; and she must be primarily regarded as earth-sprung, as a vegetation heroine- goddess of the Boeotian soil. This explains her close con- nexion with the earth-goddess Semele and the vegetation god Dionysos, her fosterling ^, whose orgy she traditionally leads, so that even the later Magnesians of the Maiander desire to import Maenads from Thebes, ' who are of the race of the Kadmeian Ino ' ". Like Dionysos himself in Argolis, she was supposed in South Laconia to live at the bottom of a deep pool i' ^, into which a sacrifice of barley cakes was periodically thrown, an offering meet for the earth-mother. Like Dionysos she has her mysteries '*, which in the Greek world are only attached to chthonian powers. Like Diony- sos, she dies and is honoured, as was Linos, Adonis, and Huakinthos, with a ritual of sorrow and wailing ^' ^. There was no motive for bewailing a sea-goddess, for the powers of this element did not die ; but to bewail a goddess of fruits and verdure when she decayed was as natural as it was for the women to weep for Tammuz ; and this deep- seated instinct of old earth-religion was misunderstood by the philosopher Xenophanes when he gave that memorable and elevated answer to the question of the men of Elea, whether they should sacrifice to Leukothea and bewail her — ' if you regard her as a goddess, do not bewail her, if as a mortal, do not sacrifice ' ". However far she might travel over the sea, she seems never to have lost her chthonian character ; for even at Pantikapaion, in the distant waters of the Euxine, she was worshipped as Leukothea x^Bovia, '■ Anth. Pal. Anath. 164 {Cults, i, p. 149, R. 40''). *> Paus. 3. 24. 3 ; Eur. Bacch. 683. ■^ Kern, Inschrift. von Magnesia, 215 ; Cults, 5, p. 298, R. 68*. •^ Libanius 2, p. no (Reiske, p. 448). e Plutarch, p. 228 f ., tells the same story of the Thebans. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 37 and grouped with Hermes, Hekate, Plouton, and Persephone in the formula of a curse " ", by which a Hfe was devoted to the nether powers. In keeping with this character, she. possessed an oracle-seat in South Laconia, where, as in other mantic seats of the earth-powers, the consultant slept on the ground to obtain prophetic dreams ^'^}. And the quaint secular story that she persuaded the women of Boeotia to roast the corn-seeds before sowing them, in order to bring Nephele into trouble, may well have been suggested by the consciousness of her vegetation-powers " ''. As pre-eminently an earth-goddess she would be KovpoTpo^os, interested in the nurture of children, and this would be the hieratic reason for her constant association with the infant or the youth Melikertes, and would explain the institution of a con- test of boys in her honour at Miletos ^^ '. This would also explain the votive dedications made to her by Thessalian women, which were evidently not infrequent, and which were more probably prompted by the experiences of child- bearing than of sea-travel " ^ ; and we can thus understand the doubtful designation of her once famous and wealthy temple at Purgoi near Caere, which Aristotle assigns to Leukothea, Strabo to Eileithuia, the goddess of travail "y. In fact we have scarcely any attestation in the domain of cult proper of the maritime character of Ino-Leukothea, except a somewhat doubtfully recorded inscription from the Athenian theatre mentioning Leukothea, the Saviour, the Harbour-goddess ^. There is no reason to suppose from her very name that Leukothea must originally have belonged to the sea, as if none but a goddess of the foam could be called the ' White Goddess '. We need not be affected by the record that Mursilos, a late writer of Lesbos, appHed the name Leukothea to all Nereids ^, for he may have only been follow- ing the literary tradition of Homer, Alkman, and Pindar. The name is embedded in the inland cults of Boeotia at "^ C. I. A. 3. 368 [A*vKo]ff«as ScuT^pas (sic) eWtfifvias : the phrase must be in the genitive. ^ Et. Mag. p. 56, s.v. AevKoQia : cf. Miiller, F. H. G. 4, p. 458, Hesych. S.V. \evKoOfai ndaat at ■n6vTiai, 38 HEROES AND HEROINES OF Thebes and Chaironeia ^' ^> ^, where the earthly and chthonian character of the goddess is manifest. Nevertheless, the full religious account of Ino-Leukothea ought to answer the question why Homer and the other poets present her maritime character so prominently, and in answering will have to consider the probable ethnic origin or origins of the goddess with the double name. We must consider for a moment the Boeotian and Megarian legend, which has many points of hieratic interest. Ino, the second or first wife of Athamas, king of the Minyan Orcho- menos, plots against the children of his other wife Nephele ; the plot fails, and Athamas is smitten with a madness that is given a Bacchic colouring in some of the versions. He kills his son Learchos, and Ino escapes with the other, Melikertes, and leaps with him over a cliff into the sea ^. The Megarians claimed that she sprang from the rock called Molouris in their territory, and in its locality was a space called ' the running-course of the fair one ' " ^. And the view appears to have prevailed in antiquity that the name Leuko- thea was a later accretion and was affixed to Ino after her leap into the sea, the Megarians claiming that they were the first to affix it to her. We are tempted to explain these cult-phenomena by the hypothesis that Ino was the aboriginal earth-goddess who became accidentally contaminated with an independent maritime goddess called Leukothea, who belonged to a different, perhaps an earlier, ethnic stratum. But this hypothesis lacks reality; there is no trace of an original Leukothea apart from Ino, and, as we have seen from the evidences of cult, one name had as little maritime association as the other ; we note alsouthat Leukothea seems to have been the official name used in the inland Boeotian cults of Thebes and Chaironeia ^. We may also affirm with some certainty that the leap from the rock into the sea was a hieratic legend which could easily transform itself into a * Vide Schol. Pind. iiroO. 'laOfi. Apollod. 3. 4. 3. " Vide Cuits, 2, pp. 447 (note c), 477-478, 637-638 (note a); Diod. Sic. 5. 62. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 39 secular-romantic one ; it is told of divinities, Dionysos, Aphrodite, or ' heroic ' personages with divine names, such as Molpadias (or Hemithea) and Parthenos of Caria, Dictunna Britomartis of Crete ; and none of these are primarily sea- divinities, but vegetation-powers, and the ritual is vegetative, not marine, to be interpreted as the casting out of the decaying image of the vegetation-deity, so that it might be refreshed by the quickening waters and brought back to land with renewed powers. The ' leap ' in nearly all these cases is preceded by a pursuit which in legend might be amorous or angry, but in reality was solemn and ' hieratic '. It was probably this ritual that gave rise to the poetic idea, which first finds expression in Homer, that Ino- Leukothea was essentially a sea-goddess, a view of her which as we have seen scarcely receives any corroboration in real cult. It may have also given rise to the double name ; for if the process of throwing the goddess into the sea was regarded as purificatory and rejuvenating, the title A^vKoOia may have been ceremoniously affixed to Ino when she emerged, the name ' White Goddess ' being a name of brightness and good omen. We may see a parallel to this in the Arcadian cult and legend of the ' Maniai ' or Eumenides, who were at one time regarded as ' Black ', at another as ' White ' ^. And the theory just suggested would explain the persistency of the legend that Ino was only called Leukothea after her leap ^. But we must also reckon with the possibihty that Ino is her pre-Hellenic name, of which Leukothea is the Hellenic equivalent, and that the double title is an interesting evidence of a bilingual period. The same question arises about Melikertes-Palaimon, the child hero-god who is associatq^ with Ino and who appears to have the same double character. As regards that association, a recent view has been expressed by Weizsacker "" that Ino and Melikertes were originally distinct and indepen- » Cults, 5, pp. 442-443- '' Paus. I. 42. 7, cf. 4. 34. 4 : Apollod. 3. 4. 3. •^ Roschcr, Lttmkon, 3, p. 1257, followed by Tillyard in Hell. Journ. 1913. P- 308. 40 HEROES AND HEROINES OF dent, on the ground that in the cults of Ino at Thebes, Chaironeia, Megara, and in South Laconia the latter does not appear and that he himself is worshipped alone in the Isthmus of Corinth and at Tenedos. But our records of all these cults are far too meagre to draw an induction from them that contradicts the prevailing legend of the close sacred association of mother and son, which certainly was in- digenous in Boeotia and was accepted in the Megarid and probably at Corinth also ; for in the peribolos of Poseidon's temple there, there was a shrine of Palaimon containing a statue of Leukothea i' \ We do not know that his cult at Tenedos ignored Leukothea, whose name at least appears in a legend of the island ^ ; and we may assume that her rites at Miletos, as they included a contest of boys, were inspired by a consciousness of the mother and son. Nor is it a priori probable, as he was everywhere imagined as a person of immature or tender years, that his cult would have arisen independently, though occasionally either goddess or son might be worshipped apart . And the cult-aspect of Melikertes reflects that of the mother : his religious significance consists in the very fact that he dies and is worshipped as a young buried hero with chthonian rites, with offerings of black oxen, and even, if we may trust Philostratos, with mysteries ^' ' which in Greece are only found in the sphere of chthonian religion. Assuming then that Ino and Melikertes arose together as the divine couple of mother and son in the nature-sphere of fertility, and that the ritual-legend of the leap and Meli- kertes' association with pine-trees ^ may be thus interpreted, we have to explain the name Palaimon. Is it a mere coinci- dence in regard to both these pairs of names, Ino-Leukothea and Melikertes-Palaimon, that each of the second names in the pairs is obviously Greek — for the ancients and most moderns naturally interpret ' Palaimon ' as the wrestler — and that each of the first has a non-Hellenic or at least a doubtful appearance ? Also, according to the legend, both names, Leukothea and Palaimon •", were only attached to the " Schol. Ven. A. //. i. 38. ^ Paus. i. 44. 8. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 41 divinities after their experience in the sea and their rescue or return to land. And whatever we may say of Ino-Leukothea, we can hardly beheve that the appellative naAaijucoj^/ the Wrestler', was a Greek translation of Melikertes ; for we cannot under- stand how Melikertes, who was always imagined in the legend and figured in art as a child or a boy, should have been aboriginally styled ' a wrestler '. Now we have no evidence that this name was attached to Melikertes in Boeotia, for Herakles-Palaimon, whose cult at Koroneia is attested by the almost certain restoration of an inscription "*, has nothing to do with the child of Ino. It is only in the Isthmus in the neighbourhood of Corinth that we have clear evidence of Palaimon as a cult-title of the boy-god. Therefore we may conclude that Melikertes was given this title here, because of his association with the Isthmian games ; and to attach such a functional appellative as ' Wrestler ' even to a child or boy, whose spirit happened to preside over the local athletic contests, was in accordance with a certain trend of Greek religious thought ; no incongruity would be felt. To this association of a buried child with a great ' agon ' we have the curious parallel not far away at Nemea. Here again the prevailing tradition connected the establishment of the games with the fate of the infant Opheltes -^, who was slain by a serpent when his nurse Hupsipule left her charge in order to get water for the army of the Seven against Thebes ^. In pity for his fate, the Argives give him a sumptuous funeral with the customary games, and Pausanias attests that Opheltes was worshipped with altar and temenos. The legend as usual is based on certain undoubted facts ; part of the ritual of the Nemean games was chthonian, for the judges wore dark garments, and the parsley-crown was a symbol of death according to the ancient interpretation. Obviously Opheltes — whose doubtful other name Archemoros has at least an allusion to death and the lower world — is no secular child, but a figure of old religion. The meaning of the name ' Opheltes ', ' the giver of increase ', and his associa- ^ C. I. G. Sept. I. 2874 ; cf. Et. Mag. p. 511, s.v.Ki^p. '* Vide v-noOeais Hefiluv, Schol. Pind. Boeckh, p. 425. 42 HEROES AND HEROINES OF tion with the snake, the earth-animal, suggest that he, Hke Palaimon, is the child-son of the earth-mother, who dies in the heat of the year ^. His legend has been more human- ized than that of Melikertes, the snake has been misunder- stood, and the figure of the mother has been obliterated from the later forms at least of the Opheltes-cult. But its affinity with the Isthmian is striking enough, though it does not appear to have been generally noticed ^. And to these we may add another obvious parallel from the cult and legend of the mother and snake-child Sosipolis of Elis ". The ritual and the legend, so far as they have been at present examined, appear to reveal Ino and Melikertes as an aboriginal couple of mother and child and as belonging to the earth rather than to the sea, probably to the company of vegetation-powers. The legend of the leap discloses and attests a fertilizing or cathartic rite that we find widespread in the Mediterranean area. Of similar value and of equal interest is the story of the cauldron, into which one or both of the two children Learchos and Melikertes were said to be plunged either by their father or mother. The versions are various and conflicting. According to Euripides'^, the mother slew both her children, but the manner of their slaying he does not specify, and he was probably careless of the current legend, according to which Athamas killed one and Ino the other. But evidently the cauldron played a different part in the different versions. According to Apollodoros ^, it was Ino who, in her madness, plunged Melikertes into a boiling cauldron, presumably to kiU him, and then fled with his corpse ; but one account preserved by the scholiasts who wrote the vTroOea-ts of Pindar's Isthmia narrates that Athamas, having already slain Learchos, was about to throw his remaining son into the cauldron when Ino rescued him and fled and, being pursued, sprang with him into the sea. So far such legends might be interpreted as reflecting a horrible * The games were held near or after midsummer. '' Clemens, Protrept. p. 29 (Pott.) merely links them together in the same context. '^ Vide Ctilts, ■?., p. 610-61 1. ^ Med. 1284. * 3- 4- 3- DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 43 ritual of child-sacrifice very similar to that practised by the Carthaginians in honour of Moloch ; and such sacrifice may have been cannibahstic as well, for we find in the legend of the Bacchic madness of the Minyan women, with whom and whose story Ino is closely connected, traces of a cannibahstic sacrifice of children, and hence we should explain the worship of Palaimon, ' the child-killer ', in Tenedos. On this theory the ' cauldron ' is the sacrificial cooking-pot. But another form of the story is given by the same scholiasts : ' Athamas in his madness slew Learchos, whereupon his mother placed him in a cauldron of boiling water ; but she herself then went mad and sprang with Melikertes into the sea.' The important divergence of this version has curiously escaped the attention of scholars. What can we conjecture was the motive of the sane mother placing her child in the boiUng cauldron after he had been slain ? We can only suppose that she did it in order to restore him to life, that the cauldron is the implement not of a cannibahstic sacrament, but of a resurrection-magic, easily misunderstood by later people : we are the more inclined to this version and view of it when we find that it plays the same part in the other myth, also Minyan, of Medeia's cauldron, in which she restored the youth of Aison and offered to revivify Pelias ; another parallel is the legend that the dismembered child Pelops was resusci- tated in the ' pure cauldron ' by Klotho or by Rhea". Finally the ritualistic significance of these legends is attested and may be illuminated by the discovery in Syria of an inscription belonging to the period of Trajan^^'^ which may be thus translated — ' in behalf of the safety of the Emperor Trajan, Menneas the son of Beeliabes, the son of Beeliabes the father of Neteiros, who was apotheosized in the cauldron which is used for the ritual of the festivals ^, having super- '' Pind. 01. 1 . 37-40 ; Schol. ibid. The ritual motive of a cauldron that conferred immortality is slightly modified in the legend narrated in the Aigimiosepic that Thetis plunged her children into a boiling cauldron to test their mortality or immortality : none of them survived the test. Schol. Laur. ad ApoU. Rhod. 4. 816. '' This seems to be the natural translation of rod diroOeudfvroi- li/ t£> Xi&rjri S«' ov a\ ioprai dyuvTai, 44 HEROES AND HEROINES OF vised all the things done here, piously dedicated and erected this monument to the goddess Leukothea '. The phrase aiiodeoidels h ro) X€^r\TL in a ritual inscription concerning Leuko- thea is deeply interesting. To interpret it with Dittenberger as meaning ' buried in the urn ' is futile ; to see in it, as Clermont-Ganneau does, an allusion to human sacrifice is perverse, for one cannot suppose that the dedicator wished to call the attention of Trajan to the fact that under his rule they were cooking people in cauldrons in Syria, at a period when human sacrifice had almost died out in the Mediterranean. Now, though the dedicator is a Hellenized Syrian, yet the strange coincidence of the association of the ' lebes ' with Leukothea compels us to endeavour to interpret the mysterious phrase on the lines of the Thessalian-Boeotian legend and ritual ; and we ought not to evade the problem by the supposition that we are here confronted with some unknown oriental rite. But there is evidence which has been noted of a resurrection or resuscitation ritual reflected in the old Minyan;legend of Ino-Leukothea. This could have been developed in a later mystery into a ritual of rebirth and transubstantiation in which the catechumen died in his natural body and was raised a spiritual body, the ' lebes ' serving as a, baptismal re-creative font, and such a trans- formed personage could well be described as dmodi^inQih h rw Ae/Srjrt, just as in the Orphic sacred text it is said of the trans- formed Bacchic initiate 'from man thou didst become God'. We know that certain mysteries of Ino and her son were still popular in the days of Libanius '' ; and in the last period of Paganism a successful mystery was most likely to enshrine a doctrine of rebirth and resurrection, especially if it was to appeal to an Anatolian population. A careful survey of the cult may shed a ray of light on the ethnic problem. We need not greatly concern ourselves about Phoenicia. The days are past when we believed in Kadmos the Phoenician ; and we are not now deceived by the accidental resemblance in sound of Melikertes and Melqart, seeing that Melqart, the bearded god, had no » 2, p. iio(p.448 R.). DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 45 affinity in form or myth with the child or boy-deity and was moreover always identified with Herakles : nor do we know anything about Melqart that would explain the figure of Ino, who is aboriginally inseparable from Melikertes. The ritual of the cauldron need not turn our eyes to Moloch, especially if the new explanation of it just offered be accepted. The ethnic stock in which the legend and the cult seem most deeply rooted was the Minyan. Athamas himself was in one genealogy the son of Minyas -'' and king of the Minyan Orchomenos ; his children Phrixos and Helle are interwoven with the Argonaut story ; as Ino, the nurse of Bacchos, in ^' her madness murders one of her children, so do the Minyan women who are devoted to the same god ''. Again, the sporadic diffusion of the cult of Ino and the child may be partly, if not mainly, explained by Minyan settlement and migration ; by this channel it may have reached Attica ^ the Isthmus of Corinth, and the south coast of Laconia, which is full of Minyan settlement-legends '', and where — at Brasiai— the myth of Ino's arrival was interwoven with that of Semele's with her divine babe ; the same people may have implanted it in Messene and Lemnos. Miletos may have received it from the Minyans, and it was probably Miletos that transported it to the Black Sea, as she transplanted the Argonaut-story. If the Minyan stock alone were the parents of the cult, we should have the right to call it aboriginally Hellenic, as nearly all the evidence is in favour of the Hellenic character of the Minyans. And yet the names Ino and Mehkertes arouse our sus- picions that the Minyans may only have been its chief propagators, having received it from elswhere. Here, as so often in our quest of Hellenic origins, we find ourselves on a track that leads to Crete and the adjacent lands. The ritual-story of Ino's sea-leap occurs again in the legend of Diktunna-Britomartis ; and the central figure in the pre- x/ Hellenic religion of Crete was an earth-goddess associated » Schol. ApoU. Rhod. i. 230. ^ Vide Cults, 5, p. iii. "= Vide Cults, 4, pp. 40-43. d Paus. 3. 24. 3-4 ; cf. 3. 23. 8 ; 3. 26. i. 46 HEROES AND HEROINES OF with a youth or a child. Also, it is significant to note that one of the maidens who found and cherished the body of Ino washed up on the shore of Megara was Tauropolis, the daughter of Ariadne ^, and that a statue of Pasiphae, the Cretan heroine-goddess, stood in the temple of Ino in South Laconia ^. The temple of the doubtful goddess called Leukothea or Eileithuia at Purgoi, near Caere, which was vaguely regarded as a ' Pelasgic ' foundation, may have been the product of early Cretan maritime activity. We know that Delos was a link in an ancient trade-route between Crete and Athens, and we find Leukothea at Delos. This theory of the Cretan origin of the cult could, however, only be pressed with conviction if we found clear evidence in the historic records of the island of the recognition of the goddess and her name ; and this is unfortunately lacking ^ But prehistoric Crete was closely associated with Rhodes and Caria ; and in Rhodes the myth of the nymph Halia, called Leukothea after her leap into the sea, though quite remote from Ino's in other respects, touches it at this point ^. And again the Carian legend of the goddess ' Hemithea ' and her sister Rhoio must be considered in this discussion. In the story given by Diodorus ^ the former and her sister leap into the sea to avoid their father's anger, and both receive divine honours in the Carian Chersonese. But another legend about Hemithea is preserved by Konon *", that she and her young brother Tennes were put into a chest and sent out to the mercy of the waves by their angry father Kuknos, and wafted ashore at Tenedos, the island whose ancient badge was the Cretan double-axe and where we also find Palaimon. In the same story, as given by a scholiast on the Iliad ", this Hemithea is called Leukothea ; and Hemithea, like Leukothea, worked a dream-oracle for the cure of diseases. It seems possible that the Carians received from Crete the ■•■ Paus. 1. 42. 7 ; cf. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 3. 997. *> Paus. 3. 26. i. "^ The gloss. Hesych. 'Ivaxia eopr^ AevKoOtas ev ^PVtti diro 'Ivaxov has been unconvincingly emended 'ivovs 'Axv ', ' the sorrows of Ino ' is an unlikely name for a Greek festival. •J Diod. Sic. 5. 55. " 5. 63. f C. 28 ; cf, Paus. 10. 14. 1-4. ? II. i. 38. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 47 goddess of this doubtful name and the ritual-legend of the leap or the exposure in the chest ; and the sister Rhoio, who is put to sea in a ' larnax ' with her infant son, and who drifts into Delos where Apollo recognizes the child as his own, is probably, like the other sister Parthenos, 'the Maiden', only another form and title of the same divinity. And we may suspect that the cult of Leukothea in Kos was not Dorian but of Carian importationa We may at least be allowed to draw the conclusion that the Minyan stock and Creto-Carian influences have had most to do with the emergence and the diffusion of the cult of Ino- Leukothea and Palaimon-Melikertes. Finally, we now have evidence that Minoan culture from Crete penetrated Syria in the prehistoric period ^, and may have brought the Leuko- thea-cult with it, of which the Syrian inscription discussed above is late evidence. Europa The great goddess of old Cretan-Mycenaean religion has left many descendants, some of whom are still familiar names of our later mythologic literature. In Europa and Ariadne we have conspicuous examples of personalities that lingered in the Hellenic imagination on the border-line between the divine and the human. But both are primarily divinities, and the line of origin of both points back to Crete. The personality and legend of Europa ^^ attest the con- nexion between the great island and the Minyan era of Cadmeian Thebes. Reasons have been given elsewhere for the interpretation of Europa as in the main an earth-goddess ^ and therefore her union with Zeus may be interpreted as a special form of the Upbs ydixos, the Holy Marriage between the Sky-God and Mother Earth ; and in Boeotia at Lebadeia we find her name attached to the earth-goddess Demeter ''. Her original divinity has been obscured in Greek legend and genealogy, and it is doubtful if it was preserved even in * Vide Sir Arthur Evans, ' The Tomb of the Double Axes ' (1914), pp. 93-94- *> Cults, 2, pp. 479, 632-633, <^ Ibid. 3, pp. 30, 219. 48 HEROES AND HEROINES OF Crete ; for in the Cretan festival of the Hellotia, the only recorded ceremony in which Europa was worshipped, we hear indeed of the procession of a gigantic garland, appropriate to a goddess of vegetation, but also a procession of Europa's bones which certainly suggests that the idea of her as a mortal heroine was the prevalent one even in her ancient home ^. The name was appropriate to an earth-goddess ; but it was by no means exclusively of divine significance, being applied to various other figures, some of them mortal, in Greek mythology, and this fact alone would account for the gradual fading of her divinity. Ariadne On the other hand her cognate figure, Ariadne *, of the same local origin, and like Europa a Hellenized transforma- tion of the Cretan goddess, has been more richly endowed by a romantic mythology, in which she figures as the sorrowful heroine betrayed by her lover ; nevertheless, she main- tained, or at least, in association with Dionysos and Aphro- dite, recovered her aboriginal godhead. The essential divinity of her name, ' the very holy one ', was never wholly forgotten ; and it is not clear that she was worshipped any- where merely as a heroine. Of any cult of her on the Greek mainland we have only the scantiest traces, at Athens in the records of the Oschophoria and in Lokris at Oinoe in the festival called ' Ariadneia '. We hear of her grave at Argos, at Amathous in Cyprus, in the grove of Aphrodite- Ariadne, and in Naxos, where it was associated with a ritual of gloom and sorrow. The Greek legend of Ariadne, in fact, springs originally from the chthonian character of Aphrodite, with whom — ^as the Cypriotes and probably other of the Greeks were aware — she was really identical ; hence both Aphrodite and Ariadne were the guides of Theseus, and both were said to have their tombs in Cyprus. The tomb need only be the underground shrine of the earth-goddess ; therefore the tomb in Naxos does not show that Ariadne had the status * Cults, I, 'Athena', R. 20: Pfister, Der Reliquienkult im Alterthum, pp. 324, 432, regards the rite as oriental. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 49 merely of a heroine there. The sorrowful ritual attaching to it need not have been suggested by any myth, but by the same psychic cause that evoked the lamentation for Linos and Adonis. On the other hand, the radiant nature of the earth-goddess belonged also to Ariadne, and was recognized in another recorded festival of Naxos. But both these religious traits of hers were transformed by a poetic human- izing mythology, telling of her desertion by Theseus and her consolation and translation to a higher life by Dionysos. Both became motives of literatm-e and art-work, which remain to us as a far-descended legacy from prehistoric Crete. And we may suppose that to the average Hellene, so far as his imagination occupied itself with Ariadne, she signified a princess of past time who had achieved a blessed and divine immortality ; hence, her myths depicted on later sarcophagi might faintly suggest this hope to others. She has her value also for the student of Mediterranean ethno- graphy, as attesting an ancient line of connexion between Crete, Cyprus, Naxos, Delos, and Athens. Aristaios We are struck with the multitude of female embodiments of the earth-spirit, evolved by the Hellenic imagination of the earth as personal. The concept of this great reproductive power as feminine seems most natural, and as a matter of fact is widespread. Yet there is no rigorous law con- cerning sex in the growths of polytheism. The earth- daimon could be imagined by the Greeks, as by other peoples, occasionally as male. Hence a Trophonios or Eunostos could arise ; and the sorrow for the passing of the verdure or of the harvest could be infused into such creations as Linos or Huakinthos. To these we may add another interesting male daimon, partly hero, partly god, Aristaios ^, whom we know best through the ninth Pythian ode of Pindar and Vergil's fourth Georgic. He stood in the closest relations with Apollo ^, being his son by Kurene the nymph of Thessaly and goddess-queen of Libya, * Vide ' Apollo ', Cults, 4, p. 123. 2460 E 50 HRROES AND HEROINES OF and it might seem natural to explain his name as a mere title of Apollo's, detached from the god and giving rise to a new personality. But his mythic genealogy is against this view. The name ' Aristaios ' may be explained as ' sprung from the Best ' — 'kpicnr] — and Ariste was probably a title of Artemis in Athens ^ and, we must suppose, of Kurene, the Thes- salian huntress-goddess, the double of Artemis. We cannot separate Kurene from Aristaios, and we cannot relegate Aristaios to the shadow-group of mere ' functional ' daimones. His name implies a powerful goddess and her son. Are we transported back once again to the domain of Cretan religion, with its great goddess and youthful companion-god ? We have noted some of the Minyan associations with Crete ; and the theory of Minyan origin would explain the Aristaios- cult in Thessaly, Kurene, and Arcadia ^ ; we note also that Hesiod connects Aristaios by marriage with the Minyan family of Kadmos "=. His origin was evidently divine ; and we can understand that if his name and person were suggested by a reminiscence of the youthful deity of Crete, the son or lover of the goddess, his godhead might be dimmed by the time that the tradition reached Thessaly, and he could become, what Aristaios appears to be in the popular legend, a culture-hero rather than a god. For in character and career he differs from such figures as Linos and Huakinthos ; he is no daimon of the verdure or the harvest ; he does not die, and after his dis- appearance no one laments him ; he is rather the civilizer of mankind in the arts of the pastoral and agricultural life. And he understood weather-magic ; for he taught the men of Keos magic rites whereby they could assuage the heat of Sirius and bring on the cooling Etesian winds ; so that the Ceans in later times, almost alone among the Greeks so far as our record goes, maintained an annual ritual of this star-magic. They bestowed upon him the high title ' Zeus-Aristaios ', from which we gather that they worshipped * Paus. I. 29. 2. '' For a Minyan strain in Arcadia see Cults, 4, pp. 18, 19, 44. "= Theog. 977. DIVINE OR DAIMONIAC ORIGIN 51 him as a god rather than as a hero, but we must not draw the conclusion that they were conscious of his original identity with any high god. The late cult of Zeus- Agamemnon shows that an ordinary hero could be so honoured. Aristaios draws near to Apollo also and bears some of his pastoral titles, but his cult and legend show that there was no real fusion between the two. Of divine origin, he is brought by the popular imagination within the human heroic group. The personages studied in this chapter of hero-cults have been grouped together on evidence of var3nng degrees of cogency, as belonging to the domain of vegetation and agriculture and mainly personifying the physical life of the earth and the phenomena of growth and decay. The evidence is sometimes the transparent name like Trophonios, Huakinthos, Eunostos, Pandrosos, and others, sometimes the myth that reflects clearly some known vegetation-ritual. A careful estimate of such mjrths suggests an observation that may be of im- portance. Many modern writers who have been attracted to this portion of Greek mythology, because of its obvious value for anthropology, have formed the hasty induction that all myths are based on ritual. The truth is rather that only a very small portion of m3rthology, Greek and other, can be shown with any probability to be so. Even the legends told about these daimones of the field and the soil are often quite independent of their origin or of the magic or ritual attached to them. The critical mythologist is aware that just as divine myths may come to be attached to real men, so real stories about historic persons may be fastened upon gods and spirits ^. The legendary biography of Trophonios, ' the nourishing one ', is humorously free and freakish. Even Eunostos, the transparent harvest- hero, has a human career that is far freer than John Barleycorn's. As for those astonishing twins, the Aloades, * A clear and interesting example of the latter process is found in the ' Huron and Wyandot Mjrthology ' (by C. M. Barbeau, Canada Geological Survey, Memoir 80, p. 22) ; a veracious narrative concerning a Seneca chief, a religious reformer of about a century ago, gets attached in the Algonquin tribe to a mythic divine being called Lox. E 2 52 HEROES AND HEROINES who were worshipped even in late times in Naxos and per- haps at Anthedon ^ *, and whose name almost compels us to explain them as cereal daimones of the threshing-floor, their varied adventures and achievements remain an enigma for any science of mythology. In such cases we recognize the mythopoeic exuberance of the Hellenic mind, that refuses to be bound by logic or by hieratic relevance. We also gather the useful conviction that our mythologic science is never likely to explain more than a fraction of the whole, and that no great results are likely to be reached by the application of a single idea or a single method. CHAPTER I II SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES ^o-^* A SMALL but interesting group of Greek hero-cults is attached to personages of sacral or sacerdotal or otherwise religious character or function whose legend generally associates them closely with some divinity as minister or missionary. We have noted the probabihty that in pre- historic times the priest who in his hfetime might be ' honoured as a god among the people ' would occasionally receive heroic honours after his death, especially if he was buried within the precincts of the temple that he served. We are now discerning more clearly how rich is the deposit of real human history buried beneath the tangled over- growth of Greek mythology. It is most credible and probable that the priest or priestess who instituted a rite or a mystery or who founded a new shrine or introduced a new divinitj^ would be remembered and the name pre- served by the temple-record. And in reviewing this limited group of hero-cults of ' sacral ' personages, we come upon names that can only be explained as marking human individuals believed to have been real, too obscure for epic fame or Panhellenic legend, and only remembered in a particular locahty in connexion with a particular cult. Such are Anios of Delos ^'', priest of Apollo, but with Diony- siac associations, whose daughters, the Oinotropoi, worked magic for the increase of the vines ; Kaukon and Eurutos **, whose cult is Hnked with the mysteries of the ' great goddesses ' at Andania, the former being recorded as the traditional founder ; Eurupulos at Patrai ^^, the apostle and missionary of Dionysos, who was receiving heroic honours in the time of Pausanias, as was also a nameless hero in Laconia who was dimly remembered as the introducer of Dionysos '-" ; lodama, Athena's prehistoric priestess at » Paus. 3. 13. 7. 54 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES Koroneia, to whom an altar was consecrated in the temple of the goddess and a daily fire maintained upon it, the priestess thrice uttering the invocation ' lodama lives and demands fire ' ; if a stone statue of her had once existed in the shrine we could understand how the story arose that lodama had been turned to stone by the sight of the Gorgon ■*" ; Mantiklos, who founded the cult of Herakles in Messenia and was commemorated by the attachment of his name to Herakles as ' Herakles-Mantiklos ' "" ; Preugenes at Patrai, associated with the eponymous ancestor Patreus and worshipped with heroic rites as the founder of the festival of Artemis-Limnatis ^^ ; Pelarge at Thebes ''*', to whom a Dodonaean oracle ordered a pregnant victim to be offered as being the second foundress of the Kabeiroi mysteries ; Phuskoa of Elis, a female priestly figure, regarded as once the bride of Dionysos and one of the founders of his local cult and worshipped also by a sacred chorus of the famous * sixteen women ' ^^''. Now to none of the personages in this short list can the theory of the ' faded god ' be applied with any plausibility. None of them are names of such a stamp that we can explain them as originally divine appellatives, which became detached from their respective divinities and then evolved human personahties subordinate to them. Prima facie, we must take them as human names of various local traditions ; and if we feel conscientiously obliged to regard them as fictitious, we cannot hope to explain the fiction. Their only value to us is the evidence they afford that it seemed natural to the Greeks to bestow heroic honours on certain ministers and founders of divine cults. A few other of these ' sacral ' personages are easily explained fictions of the familiar type called ' eponymous ', the name of a priestly clan evolving a personal ancestor to whom a heroic cult might later be attached ; for instance, the Branchidai, who first administered the cult of Apollo near Miletos, evolved Branchos ^^, the Euangelidai, ' those who bring good tidings', the family that managed the * Palis. 4. 23. 10. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 55 oracle later, naturally proclaimed a ' Euangelos ' as their ancestor ^^, who appears to have received heroic honours in connexion with the temple at Ephesos. Aeneas It is notable how easily such fictions could be clothed by the Greek imagination with verisimilitude and flesh. One of the greatest personages of European epic literature, Aeneas of Troy and Rome, may well have been of such an origin^", for reasons have been shown for believing that he arose as the ' eponym ' of a clan called Aineiadai, devoted to the service of Aphrodite ' Aineias ', who gave them her name. An alternative view would be that we start with ' Aineias ', the name of a real man, handed down in the tradition to Homer, the priest of Aphrodite, the founder of a clan called ' Aineiadai ', and that Aphrodite, perhaps under epic influence, took his name, as Athena took the name AlavTLs from Aias, where we find his hero-cult in the later Greek world, in Ambrakia, Actium, or Sicily. We can only explain it as deposited by that clan, who migrated from the neighbourhood of Mount Ida to various parts of the Medi- terranean. Iphigeneia "^^ •'' There are other familiar names in this list of sacral-heroic personages, in regard to which the difficulty of finding a convincing theory is still greater. We are all interested in Iphigeneia, because her story has inspired some of our greatest literature and music ; and the question of her origin and the explanation of her myth is of high interest both for the study of Greek religion and Greek colonization. How did she arise ? Was she in very truth a princess of a powerful Mycenaean house appointed to an important priesthood of Artemis ? If she was pure fiction, can we suggest the origin of the fiction and the causes which gave it prevalence and persuasiveness ? Was she a ' faded goddess ', an emanation of Artemis who was herself called Iphigeneia, ' she of mighty birth ' ? Was she the ' the- anthropic ' animal of sacrifice, probably a bear, slain 56 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES sacramentally in the ritual of a bear-goddess, the animal and the goddess being called equally ' Iphigeneia ' ? All these theories can be and have been maintained, and yet none in itself offers a full explanation of the cult-facts and of the growth of the famous myth. That Iphigeneia was originally the goddess herself is a conclusion that many scholars have reached, and there is much to be said for it •''. The name is equally appropriate to a goddess or a princess ; but we are told by Hesychios that Artemis actually bore the name, and we have the more precise record of Pausanias, who found a shrine of Artemis-Iphigeneia at Hermione ; it appears also from Euripides that in his period offerings were made to the heroized Iphigeneia at Brauron on the Attic east coast of the raiment of women that had died in child-birth; and such offerings might naturally be made to the goddess who had slain them. Finally, a poet of the Hesiodic circle interprets her as Hekate, declaring that she had not really died. We can repudiate the dictum of a recent unimaginative German writer, that all Greek heroines must have been originally goddesses because no woman could naturally become a heroine. We can believe that a powerful priestess or a queen of a Minoan-Mycenaean or of the Achaean dynasty might achieve heroic status after her death. Nevertheless, the reasons given above seem strong for the belief that Iphigeneia was a double of Artemis ; but further comparison shows that they are not so con- vincing as they appear. Certainly a mortal hero or heroine could arise from the detached appellative of a divinity ; but a divinity could also take a title from the name of a mortal, as Herakles did from Mantiklos, Athena from Aias, Zeus from Agamemnon. Therefore the existence of the cult-phrase, Artemis-Iphigeneia, is not sufficient to prove the original divinity of Iphigeneia or disprove the theory of her original humanity. And a real human priestess could in her lifetime take on the name of her divinity; as we find that the priestesses of the Leukippides'' * This is the theory that I have maintained in my chapter on ' Artemis ', Cults, 2, pp. 438-441. " Paus. 3. 16. I. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 57 at Sparta were themselves called Leukippides, and that the H3rperborean maidens, whose graves were in Delos, mortal ministers whether mythical or real of Apollo and Artemis, were called after the deities themselves, Opis, Hekaerge, Loxo 54. Again, a heroized priestess might receive offerings after her death that were appropriate to the goddess she served ; therefore the oblation of raiment to Iphigeneia at Brauron does not prove that she was Artemis in disguise, any more than we can confidently argue that Iphinoc*^, the daughter of King Alkathous, at Megara was originally the goddess herself because the girls brought libations to her tomb and dedicated their locks to her before their marriage ^. Iphinoe, ' she of the mighty mind ', Iphigeneia, ' the mightily-born ', are equally good names for mortals as for divinities. It has been thought that the ritual of AuHs and Brauron could explain the genesis of the famous Iphigeneia myth. The records of that ritual have been scrutinized and evalu- ated by modern scholars ; having laboured much at it myself I cannot say that the results hitherto attained have been satisfactory ^. A curious complex of legends associated with Artemis of Brauron and Aulis enables us to discern the prehistoric figure of a bear-goddess and a ritual in which the bear was sacred and yet slain, and in which the custom of human sacrifice had once been practised, and the per- sistent legend of it clave to these spots. But there is no hint in legend or record that the bear was ever called Iphigeneia or that the priestess herself was sacrificed. The epic poet who was responsible for our interest in Iphigeneia is quite clear that she was sacrificed, not as a priestess but as the daughter of a great king. It is only in the worship of Dionysos and Demeter "" that a glimmering of evidence can be seen of the ritualistic death of the priest or minister. On the other hand, it was quite in accordance with the religious feehng of prehistoric Greece, as of Israel and other Semitic communities, that a king or army-leader * Paus. I. 43. 4 ; vide Cults, 2, ' Artemis ', R. 79 *. " Vide Cults, loc. cit. *= Cults, 3, pp. 93-94- 58 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES might have to sacrifice his daughter or nearest and dearest before a great expedition. The ritual of AuHs and Brauron, however we press and even torture the facts, does not explain the rise of the epic story. Can we suppose that the epic poet, aware of a goddess at Aulis and Brauron who was perhaps called Iphigeneia and perhaps died a periodical death in ritual, was audacious enough to start the fiction that this Iphigeneia was the daughter of Agamemnon and that she was sacrificed at Aulis because the pan-Hellenic fleet had assembled in that fatal place and could not extricate itself otherwise ? It is doubtful if a pure fiction, especially as it had not the authority of a Homer behind it, would have gained such a hold. There is still room for a new theory to explain the construction of the epic poet. The name * Iphigeneia ' may have had originally a double application. It may have been an appellative of Artemis at Aulis and Brauron ; and in- dependently it may have been in the Pelopid saga a traditional human name of a princess : furthermore there was a strong tradition that the royal leader of the expedition against Troy sacrificed his daughter to the goddess. The later epic poet, combining these facts, may have set that sacrifice, at Aulis because the goddess there happened to be called by that name and because there was a ritual or a tradition of human sacrifice in her cult ; and we cannot so easily reject, as Dr. Leaf would have us, the prevalent story that Aulis was the real starting-point of the fleet "". The later heroic cult that Iphi- geneia received at Megara may have been inspired merely by the saga-genealogy of the house of Agamemnon, for there, and there alone, we find her without any association with Artemis. The later diffusion of her legend belongs rather to the history of Artemis-worship ^'. Amphiaraos^^ Another imposing figure of debatable origin who stands on the confines between humanity and divinity is Am- * Vide Mr. Allen, The Homeric Catalogue of Ships, p. 49. " Culls, 2, pp. 452-455. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 59 ^hiaraos ; and his personality also has left a deep impress Dn the higher Hterature of Greece. We are familiar with he thrilling fate of the warrior-prophet, and with the :ragic story of his wife's betrayal and subsequent punish- Tient. The older epic poetry and then the lyric had dealt with his part in the expedition of the Seven against Thebes md had fixed the traditional traits of his character. In the sixth Olympian ode Pindar puts into the mouth of Adrastos, lamenting the fate of the seven heroes, a melodious dirge over Amphiaraos "" : 'I long for him who was the eye of my host, both a good prophet and good in battle with the spear ' : at least the last part of his phrase has been culled from the lost epic called the ' Thebais '. Aeschylus has left us his characterization of the man in a notable passage, r a man of most temperate wisdom, a prophet most valiant iin war .,. . for he willeth not to seem but to be the best, reaping a rich furrow of wisdom deep down in his soul, whence spring his sure and trusty counsels ', the one righteous man in an unrighteous fellowship. We might believe that these words are the echo of a long human tradition con- cerning Amphiaraos that preserved not only the name and personality but the leading traits of character ; and that saga-tradition was occasionally capable of this has been well maintained by Mr. Chadwick in dealing with the Teutonic cycle. We are fortunate that Greek literature has been able, in this instance and again in the Teiresias of Sophokles, to preserve and present to us so august a type of the righteous prophet that it rivals the noblest of the Old Testament. Only, unhke those, Amphiaraos is a warrior-prophet, in conformity with the facts and customs of the Homeric and heroic age. Yet the human Amphiaraos is a mere fiction, according to the apparently unanimous view of modern scholars who have written on the theme, and who assume without hesitation that he was aboriginally a chthonian god who, like Trophonios, degenerated into a man by misinterpretation. ^ 11. 24-25. 6o SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES I The records of his cult, then, must be carefully considered. He was worshipped with great splendour, especially in the Hellenistic age, in his shrine near Oropos ; and the story prevailed that this was the spot where, flying m his chariot after the defeat of the Seven against Thebes, he was swallowed up in the earth with his horses. A fairly ample record both of literature and epigraphy throws light on the Oropian cult. He was evidently worshipped as a god — in fact, according to Dikaiarchos, as Zeus-Amphiaraos — and the Oropians boasted to be the first who had recognized his divinity and set an example which the rest of the Hellenes followed. The shrine which contained his marble statue was, as far as we can gather, of the ordinary Olympian type. The altar was divided into different parts and consecrated not only to Amphiaraos but to different heroes and heroines and to various divinities, most of them divinities of health ; for the shrine was oracular, and evidently the object of consultation was generally the cure of disease. Also, the process was similar to that in vogue in the Asklepios shrines, namely incubation ; the consultant, after elaborate purifica- tion — abstaining one day from food and three days from wine and having sacrificed the purificatory offering of a ram — slept on the skin of the ram and expected a prophetic dream. As a tribute of gratitude for a cure, it was the fashion to fling a gold or silver goblet into the fountain which was consecrated to Amphiaraos just outside the temple and was so holy that its water could not even be used for sacred purposes. The ritual of purification, the taboo on wine, the dream-oracle, reveal Amphiaraos here as a chthonian god, who becomes, Hke other buried heroes, a healer of disease. Therefore when his cult penetrated Attica, as it did at least as early as the beginning of the fourth century, he was naturally associated with the old local physician heroes and with Hugieia ; and his form on an Attic reUef and on an imperial coin of Oropos resembles that of Asklepios, the snake appearing near his throne. It is only at Oropos that there is clear evidence of his divinity. We have record of his cult at Argos, to which he SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 6i specially belonged and where he was linked in the mythic genealogies with the Minyan Melampous ; but there is no indication that the Argives worshipped him as a god. At Phhous an ancient house was consecrated to him, where he was supposed to have first practised divination by dreams, and the story points to the heroic-human conception of him. At Sparta, that borrowed so much of the pre-Dorian Argive mythology, his cult was merely heroic, and he was regarded as the kinsman of the Tundaridai ; finally, at Byzantium, we have a doubtful reference to an altar of ' the hero Amphiaraos '. Now the theory of his aboriginal godhead is not supported by the mere record of his divinity at Oropos. For the local legend quoted above seems to posit his apotheosis as a secondary and somewhat later fact in his history. Nor did the Oropian cult pretend to be aboriginal ; and Strabo preserves the record that it migrated here from Theban territory. Herodotus never mentions the Oropian shrine, but speaks more than once of an Amphiaraion as under Theban management. Its exact site is uncertain, but that it was not far from Thebes is implied by the graphic passage in Pindar describing the hero as raising his buried head and praising the Epigonoi who were storming the gates of Thebes and showing themselves valiant sons of their fathers^. It is of this shrine that Herodotus elsewhere tells us that no Theban consultant was admitted ; for Amphiaraos had given the Thebans the choice of his services as prophet or as ally, and they preferred the latter. It seems that the Thebans merely revered him as a hero of great fame and prophetic potency. He may have possessed more than one holy place in Boeotia, but everywhere the human-epic legend of his flight and mysterious disappearance prevailed. The dogma, then, of his original divinity rests on no mythic or archaeologic support. It has been uncritically accepted merely because modern scholars seem possessed with a conviction that any hero who came to be called a god, such as Theseus was and even Protesilaos, must have * Pyth. 8. 55. 62 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES been a god from the beginning. To maintain this is to misunderstand a considerable portion of Greek religion. An ingenious but fruitless attempt to find a daimoniac origin for Amphiaraos has been made by a recent German scholar, following on the track of Wilamowitz ; the original birthplace of Amphiaraos was a lake by the Boeotian "Apjxa, which itself was called Amphiaros, ' holy all round ', and was itself an object of reverence ; from this holy element emerged a personal phantom, that gradually clothed itself in flesh and blood and grew into the robust figure of the warrior-prophet ^. Even if this theory was as well founded as it is frail, we should feel, as some of us felt when we were informed that Queen Penelope had been discovered to be a wild duck, that the discovery of origins darkens rather than enlightens our understanding of the evolution of myths. There is nothing in what we know about Amphiaraos that suggests his descent from an aboriginal chthonian god ; he shows no interest in vegetation but remains specialized to the function of oracular prophecy. The other explanation is here the more natural and more in accordance with the given facts : namely, that his human- ity and his fame as a prophet are the starting-points of his career and the cause of his heroic and finally of his divine elevation. Nor need we regard him as a fiction, and so make trouble for ourselves, if we realize that early Greece was capable of remembering the impressive personality of a prophet and consecrating to him heroic honours after death. The name itself, ' Amphiaraos ', the ' very sacred one ', agrees better with this theory ; for it is not a natural name for a divinity — no god in earHer literature is ever called Upo's ^ — but it is quite suitable for a priestly or prophetic man. * F. Kutsch, Attischc Heilgotter und Heroen, pp. 44-45 ; cf. Wilamowitz, Hermes, 21, 1886, p. 91 : we do not know that that Boeotian lake was ever called ' Anaphiaraos ' ; and to find an ethnic connexion between it and the Ampsancti Valles of the Hirpini (Verg. Aen. 7. 565) is a far cry. " In a late Orphic hymn (18. 17) Hades is called Upwraros, in another {77. 2) the Muses are called Upai: Bruchmann, Epitheta Deorum, p. 158, quotes @ffiis UpA from Pindar, Pytk. 1 1 . 1 5, but the epithet probably belongs there to the adjacent word nvOwva. The proper cult-term for the idea is 'Ayvos. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 63 Melampous ^*^ A similar figure in type and easier to interpret was Melampous of Minyan origin and connexions, known to Homer ^ as one of a prophetic family that included Am- phiaraos and Theoklumenos, and whose residence was Pylos and Argos. Melampous is presented in the earlier records as a sort of prophet-king who succeeded Proitos at Tiruns or Argos. But his special interest for us among the figures of the earlier mythology is that he fulfils the role of the missionary or apostle of Dionysos in the Peloponnese. We have the interesting story first narrated by Hesiod in the poem called ' Melampodeia ' of the madness of the daughters of Proitos, who roamed in ecstatic ravings throughout the Peloponnese and drew the other women after them ; this part of the myth obviously reflects the Maenad-ritual. Melampous undertook to heal them, having covenanted with Proitos to receive a portion of the kingdom as his reward. He effects their cure by a characteristically Bacchic ' Katharsis '. He drilled some ' powerful young men ', and his troop pursued the Proitides ' with loud Bacchic cries and inspired dancing ' '\ Many a modern savage would have understood the value of this homoeo- pathic medicine. The usual Bacchic dance consisted of women ; but Melampous understood his patients, who were all restored to sanity save one. We have here a salient mythic example of the Bacchic ritual regarded as a Kadapais T7 adriixaTcdv, and it was religious experience such as this which may have suggested to Aristotle his strange theory that tragedy, that fairest growth of the Bacchic religion, was ' a Katharsis ' of certain emotions. Melampous, then, for the heroic period of Greece was what Epimenides was for Athens in the sixth century. He is a stronger figure of flesh and blood than Orpheus. The part played by the Minyan stock in the propagation of the strange wild religion from the North has been often noted *=: Melampous was * Od. 15. 225. ^ The authorities of ApoUodoros are Hesiod and Akousilaos. " Cults, 5, pp. Ill, 236. 64 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES a Minyan and may have claimed a family connexion with Dionysos, to whom his descendant Polueidos at Megara erected a shrine under the name of ' Dionysos the ancestor ' ^. His fame survived through the ages, and Herodotos regards him as the prime introducer of the Bacchic ritual. It is not surprising, then, to find that in more than one place the cult of Melampous was established : at Aigosthena in the Megarid, where from Pausanias' account and from somewhat doubtful evidence of coins we should gather that his cult was heroic merely, associated with his grave ^ ; but an inscription that has been found there speaks of him as 6 9(6s ; also at Orchomenos, where an inscription of the fourth century has been recently found mentioning his shrine. There is no trace of original godhead about Melampous ; his name itself forbids such a supposition. The whole Jegend is ' true to type '. And we can believe that an impressive prophet of a religion that made a new appeal might achieve dynastic power and heroic honours after death. Though the position that is here assigned to these two striking personalities cannot be historically proved, yet their cult has value for our present theme. For it is certain that the average Greek who offered divine or heroic honours to Amphiaraos and Melampous regarded them as having once lived a mortal life on earth and as having achieved through their earthly religious fame a semi-divine immor- tality. Nor need we doubt, in the face of all the mythic evidence, that sacral character and priestly power was in the period that we call prehistoric a source of hero-worship. Hippolutos *i The last personage that claims critical consideration in this chapter is Hippolutos of Troizen and Athens. On the whole it is reasonable to class him in the category of sacral heroes. But his personality and legend give rise to most '' Cults, 'Dionysos', 5, p. 291, R. 51 ». ^ VideJImhoof-Blumer, Gardner, Num. Comm. Pausan. p. 9. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 65 perplexing problems. The genius of Greek tragedy has familiarized the ancient and the modern world with the romantic story of the chaste and beautiful young athlete, the votary of Artemis and the scorner of Aphrodite, beloved, tempted in vain, and wrongfully accused by the wicked stepmother ; and of the curse pronounced upon him by his father Theseus, which brings him to a dreadful end. So enduring was his memory that it survived the downfall of paganism, and he entered on a new career as a Christian saint, St. Hippolyte. It is hard, therefore, to avoid the temptation to theorize about his origin. But, first, the cult-facts must be borne clearly in mind. The earliest clear record of his worship is the closing lines of the tragedy of Euripides, in which the goddess promises him that as a recompense for his sufferings she will give him ' the greatest honours in the city of Troizen ; for young virgins before their marriage shall shear their locks for thee ; and for long ages thou shalt reap the tribute of their mournful weeping, and for ever shalt thou be a theme of the maiden's song '. This proves cult, but does not attest divinity ; all this ritual of sorrow, the singing at the grave, the dedication 1 of hair, is proper to hero-cult. The affirmation of his divinity is first seen in the statement of Diodorus Siculus that ' he obtained divine honours (tVo^ewy rtiiiav) among the Troezenians ', and the longer account given by Pausanias leaves us in no doubt that this was his status at least in the later period : we hear of ' a conspicuous temenos and shrine and an ancient image ', a lifelong priesthood attached to it and yearly sacrifices, and the offering of maidens' hair before marriage. And Pausanias connects this worship with the name of Diomedes, believing it to be prehistoric. At some undefined period then, Hippolutos had won the position of a divinity at Troizen. But from other casual remarks of Pausanias we discern that he was also regarded at Troizen as a hero. They knew of his grave, though they would not show it, and they had erected a grave-memorial {fxvrjixa) ; their local folk-lore preserved the tradition of Phaidra's love, and they showed the tree against which 2460 F 66 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES his chariot had been shattered, which caused his death ; they even showed his house, and declared that he had dedicated the temple of Artemis- Lykeia. This is evidence that while worshipping him as a god they believed in his original mortality. We may suppose, then, that this represented their earliest tradition of him, and that his godhead was a later development. And elsewhere, at Sparta, Athens, Epidauros, where he dedicated in gratitude twenty horses to Asklepios, who had brought him back to life, he had obviously the status merely of a hero. Finally, we note his close association with two leading divinities, Artemis and Aphrodite. As regards the former, not only is there the well-known legend of his devotion and of his dedication of the temple at Troizen to her, but also the maidens' sacrifice to him of their hair before marriage puts him into a sacral connexion with Artemis, to whom such expiatory rites for the removing of a taboo were customary on these occasions ''. Equally close is his association with Aphrodite, whose temple, dedicated to her under the title of KaraaKo-nia and linked with the story of Phaidra's passion, stood in the precincts of his temenos at Troizen, and who at Athens was worshipped on the south side of the Akropolis under the name of Aphrodite ((f)' 'IttttoAt^Vw, which should be explained as ' Aphrodite on — or by — the grave or shrine of Hippolutos '. There is no real inconsistency in this double association of his ; for the Cretan goddess Aphrodite had close affinities with Artemis ; and the Phaidra of the legend, who comes from Crete, may be another of her names. But this position of Hippolutos in relation to the two divinities suggests the sacral-heroic rather than the divine character. These are the facts on which any theory of his origin must be based ''. It might affect our view if we could determine their chronology. But we have no clue for answering the questions when first he emerged as a god, or * That the offering should be made to the priest-hero instead of to the goddess is not without analogy ; cf . the similar offerings of the hair before marriage to Iphinoe at Megara and Hekaerge and Opis at Delos, Cults, 2, ' Artemis ', R. 79*. '' His later assimilation to Virbius of Aricia does not help us at all. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 67 when first the legend arose of his singular death, of his resurrection and of the revengeful passion of Phaidra. We can only say that none of these were due to the invention of Euripides ; for it seems clear that the author of the Naiipaktia was familiar with the two latter motives, and if Pausanias •' was right in his interpretation of the Delphic painting, the legend of Phaidra's suicide by hanging was known to Polugnotos, But such vague' chronology does not help to reveal the original significance of Hippolutos. The various schools of mythology have tried their various methods upon him, and their methods have proved futile. M. Reinach has well exposed the uselessness and ' imper- tinence ' of the explanations offered by the older school, the devotees of solar and astral symbolism '^ ; their chief defect is the entire lack of evidence for them. But the same defect attaches to the theories put forth about him by modern anthropology. The assumption that he is the ' Year-Daimon ', who is torn to pieces and born again in ritual, has been confidently put forth, but without criticism or attempt at proof ^ But M. Reinach's exposition in the paper just quoted is more serious and more elaborate, and deserves attention ; according to him, Hippolutos was originally a sacred horse, a divinity of the zoolatric or theriomorphic age which preceded anthropomorphism, who in an annual ritual was torn to pieces and sacramentally devoured by his votaries, themselves called horses as being thus assimilated to their god ; immediately the sacred animal rises again in a new incarnation ; gradually the animal-deity becomes humanized and his ritual-death is misrepresented as a secular catastrophe that might happen to any ancient charioteer or modern rider. He regards his death, then, as of the same type as that of Orpheus, Pen- theus, and the Dionysiac o-Trapay/xo'?, in which the divine victim is rent to pieces and devoured '^ This theory still fails to explain the romantic story of Phaidra's love ; but * 9. 29. 3. '' Vide Archiv f. Religionswiss. 1907, p. 47. ■"' By Professor Murray in Miss Harrison's Themis, p. 346. '* Vide Cults, 5, pp. 95-106, 166-172. F 2 68 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES it explains quite enough, and we should welcome it if it rested, as M. Reinach claims that it does, and as the Dionysiac legends certainly rest, on facts of real ritual. But it rests solely on the author's new interpretation of the name Hippolutos ; he has the credit of discerning, what has escaped the notice of Pick =* and other philologists, that the verbal ending of the name ought from its form to have a passive sense ; the word therefore cannot mean ' the loosener ( = the unyoker) of horses ', but might mean ' loosened by horses ' and Xvsw is supposed here to possess an older sense, ' to rend', a sense not found in classic literature. His state- ment is not satisfactory on this point ; and we may doubt whether at any period of the Greek language a man rent asunder by horses would be called l-mroKvTO'i to mark that fact. We may allow that the name ought to have a passive sense, and may more easily interpret it as ' he of the loosened horse ', ' the free rider ' or ' the fast driver ', just as ' Leuk- ippos ' means ' he of the white horse '. The name Hip- polutos then would be appropriate to the reckless driver, and might itself suggest the tradition of his passion for horses, and might conceivably give rise to the story of his fatal end. The name is one that could be given to an actual man, and was in this case attached to a personage whom we regard as fictitious. It is not a natural name for a Greek god or daimon, nor one that could have arisen from any known ritual. Apart from the name, there is no direct evidence adduced by M. Reinach to clinch his theory, only analogies which we may be deceived in regarding as relevant. There are no ritual facts directly connected with Hippolutos that support it. He has no proved ritual- connexion with horses ; the horse is not offered to him nor tabooed at Troizen ; neither he nor his worshippers were ever known to have been called ' horses ' ; all we have is * In his Personennamen he explains it as equivalent to the name ' Lusippos ', where the verbal part is obviously active. The nearest analogy is ojpoKvToju, an epithet in the genitive of Zeus and Hera in a late inscription from Kameiros ; this must be active, ' the looseners of the Hours ' ; but does it come from 'np6\vTos or 'ClpoKvTTjs ? Vide C. I. G. 12, i. No. 786 ; Cults, I, p. 176, R. 155. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 69 a tradition that as a hunter he was fond of horses, that he dedicated twenty horses to Asklepios in gratitude for his restoration to Hfe, and that horses were the cause of his death. In none of our accounts has this last legend any ritual-colour at all ; and the people of Troizen rejected it as untrue, whence we may gather that there was nothing in their ritual that accorded with it. Here as so often in the mythologic exegesis of the modern anthropologic school, the ' hieratic ' explanation of legend has been unnaturally forced and overstrained. Yet some positive theory might be built on the facts given us concerning Hippolutos of Troizen, without travelling very far away from them. They suggest a sacerdotal figure attendant on a goddess that might be interpreted as Artemis -Aphrodite or Phaidra. Suppose that during his tenure of office he was vowed to chastity, a taboo by no means uncommon in the old Greek world ; hence could easily arise the story that the goddess loved him and loved in vain, and the goddess could naturally degenerate into a mortal woman called ' Phaidra ', a name as appropriate to a woman as a goddess. Suppose again that in or near the temple which enshrined the tradition of the beautiful and chaste young priest, the ritual of the hanging goddess noted above, was in practice : then if the goddess was transformed into the mortal woman, ' Phaidra ' the loving stepmother, the hanging would be explained as the desperate act of unrequited love ; and we might add this to the many stories of romance that arose from ritual. Such a hypothesis leaves something unexplained ; nearly all our hypotheses on Greek mythology, unless pushed to absurdity, do that. It does not give a ' scientific ' reason for the name Hippolutos. But it is no stranger name for a priest than Melampous for a prophet or Lusippos for a sculptor, and it does not ' explain ' the peculiar death. Perhaps this actually happened. Such things happen in life and in fiction ; and who in this field of study can clearly separate fact and fiction ? To demand too much ' scientific ' explanation in the realm of mythology, on the assumption 70 SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES that all the personages and events are fictitious and therefore must be explained differently from the casual facts of real life, is as hopeless as it is unscientific. Whoever Hippolutos was, and in whatever category of mankind or god-kind he should be placed, his tradition and personality, of the highest importance for our literary inheritance, are important also for the ethnic question of prehistoric Greece ; for they are the product and deposit of an Ionic settlement that connected Troizen and Attica and that in the latter country was associated with the names and cult of Theseus and Aphrodite-Pandemos, the goddess of the united Ionic State "". * Vide Cttlts, 2, pp. 658, 663. CHAPTER IV FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND ' SONDER-GOTTER ' It has been said that all study of popular religion is a study of popular psychology ; and this is true so far as our main object is to discover the feelings or ideas that underlie the ritual or external act of worship, the early and often prehistoric thought that inspired it, as well as the later thought of any given historic period. This is especially difficult in regard to a class of cult-figures in Greek religion that may seem to belong, and have been explained as belonging, to an older stratum of national belief than that with which the Greek student is familiar, a * polydaemonism ' rather than a polytheism. These figures are in some sense nameless, in that they seem to have possessed no substan- tival proper names but merely appellative epithets which usually reveal the narrow function or department to which their daemonistic agency may have been confined. As a rule, there is little legend attaching to them, they have rarely a genealogy or family history, but appear as barren and isolated personalities standing apart from the warm life of Greek polytheism. They seem at first sight nothing more than shadowy potencies of the field and fold, of the human household or State, or sometimes of the arts and higher functions of life, and they are called indifferently 0eot, Aaiixovesy "Hpwes. For the purposes of a general survey, we may classify them according to their departments. As powers of the field and the crops the record gives us Evvoo-tos at Tanagra, the hero who brings a good yield of corn, 'ExerAatosT//3ajs, the well-known ' hero of the ploughshare ' at Marathon, Kua/^irrjs, the bean-'hero, whose shrine was on the sacred way to Eleusis ; with these we may consider Av^rjaia of Algina, and &a\\ powers of the sacred hearth. Sometimes a hero or daimon might protect the gateway of the house or city or the city- I walls or the entrance to the temple, as we hear of a ijpios nrpd TTvX&v in Thrace, of an eTrtreytos ijpcos and T^xocfyvXa^ at Athens, the guardian of roof and wall, of KAaiKo^opos, the ' holder of the temple-keys ', at Epidauros. At the banquet, not only were the high gods remembered, but possibly such personages as AatTJjs at the later Ilion, 'AKparoTroTTj? at Mounuchia, AeiTTvevs in Achaia, Kepawr and MdTTv IcrobaiTrjs, the daimon who presided ' over the equal feast '. Again, the potter's art at Athens seems to have required a ijpu>s K€pap.os, the medical a ijpoos larpos at Marathon, Athens, Eleusis, the nautical a ijpuis Kara -npvixvav at Phaleron, and a r/pcos aTpaTi]y6i is mentioned in an Athenian inscription. The enigmatical name BXavTi] occurs on an inscription of a late period found on the Akropolis, from which we learn that she shared a shrine with Kouporpd^o?. We might be tempted to accept Kohler's suggestion that the word is really BAdo-TTj, an appellative of a spirit of vegeta- tion. But the letters as they are given in the Carpus Inscriptionum Atticarum appear to have been correctly transcribed. If we may trust a gloss in Pollux, there was a i7pa)s eTTt ^kavTj] at Athens, and ^kavrrj was the name of a kind of sandal, and we seem to be dealing with the patron saint of shoemakers, though why such a person should have shared the shrine of KovpoTp6s liTe(j)avr](f)6pos at Athens, the ^iiovbaCooi' baCpLcov on the Akropohs, a kindred personage to the baCixcov e7rt8wr7]s or the 'Aya9ds baCfxcou, and TeXca-ihpojjLos at Eleusis, apparently a hero presiding over the athletic contest in the Eleusinian festival. At Delphoi a parallel figure toTeAeo-iS/aojuo? has been discovered in EvbpofjLos, whose chapel is attested there by a fifth-century inscription, the hero to whom the runners prayed. At Lesbos we recognize a daimon of the weather, whose function possibly was to give the favourable breeze, in 'ExTjc^iAa or UvtaTta 'ETr](\>iXa, mentioned with Poseidon in a long ritual inscription. And at Knidos the 'E-n-ijuaxos mentioned in an inscription already noticed may belong to the adjacent name of Plouton, though it does not seem to be an epithet natural to this god, and it may be the appellative of a distinct cult-figure. The list closes with the names of two whom we should rather expect to find in the Roman Indigitamenta than in a catalogue of Greek heroes, the hero ' who frightened horses ' in the race-course at Olympia and on the Isthmus, and the ' Fly-catcher ' at Aliphera in Arcadia, Tapd^nmo'i and Mway/aos. To the same stage of religious psychology at which these cult-figures might seem likely to have developed may have belonged those vague groups of divine personages who are characterized by a functional appellative rather than by a proper or substantival name ; for if the single functional daimon appears to lack individuality and concrete person- ality, compared with the high gods and goddesses of poly- theism, groups of such characters united only by a single functional name will be likely to be still more shadowy and amorphous. While detailed criticism of these may be reserved for the present, the following list presents them in alphabetical order. The 0eot 'ATTor/aoTraioi were worshipped at Sikuon near the grave of Epopeus, the mythic ancestor ; and, as Pausanias tells us, rites were performed to them such as were usual among the Greeks ' for the turning aside of evils ' : his words imply that there were images of them erected near the grave : the 0eot Tiv^rvWihis and KcoAidSev were deities of 74 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND child-birth much worshipped by Attic women, greatly to the sorrow and cost of the husbands, if we may trust Lucian : the Evbdvefxot appear to have been a group of weather- daimons or wind-charmers, to whom an altar was conse- crated in the Kerameikos and apparently another at Eleusis. The &eol KadapoC at Pallantion in Arcadia are the subject of a very interesting note in Pausanias : ' there is a temple of &€oi still standing on the top of the ridge : they are called KaOapoL, and oaths on matters of the greatest import are taken before them. The people do not know their names, or knowing them are unwilling to pronounce them. One may conjecture that they were called Kadapoi because Pallas offered to them a different kind of sacrifice from that which his father (King Lykaon) offered to Zeus AvKaios.' Pausanias has probably the Delian altar in his mind that was called Kadapoi because no blood was ever shed upon it. The 0eoi MttAt'xtot at Myonia in Lokris may have been a similar concept : we can gather that they were chthonian powers, to whom rites of purification for sin, probably the sin of bloodshed, were performed by night. Certain ©eol MvXdvTeioi are mentioned by Hesychius and defined as ' deities of the mill ' ; but his explanation is very doubtful ; he elsewhere speaks of a UpofxvAevi, a goddess whose statue was erected in corn mills. More important is the worship of the Qeol UpaiLhiKaL on Mount Tilphossion, near Haliartos. Pausanias mentions their hypaethral temple there and adds that the oaths taken in their name had the most binding force. It may have been a Minyan migration from this part of Boeotia that brought the cult to the shores of Laconia near Guthion, where Pausanias found in the popular tradition the remini- scence of a 0ea npa^ibUa, whose cult was associated with the return of Menelaos from Troy. The significance of the name is obvious ; the Upa^LbiKai are local variants of the 'Epiyves, their appellative expressing more clearly the abstract conception of moral retribution. The apixaKCbes at Thebes may once have been the vague personages of an early cult, and akin to the EiXddviai, the divine powers that could aid or retard child-birth. • SONDER-GOTTER ' 75 Before raising any further question about such groups, or considering how the conception of divinity that attaches to them differs from that of ordinary pol3rtheism, it may be well to put oneself on one's guard. A divine group united by some common appellative may have consisted merely of some well-known high gods, whose figures were as concrete and well defined within the group as without it. For instance, the term &eol 'Ayopaxoi certainly describes no shadowy com- pany of half-formed haCfMoves, but denotes the deities whose statues happened to stand in the 'Ayopd, and these were usually Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Athena. Or again, the 0€oi UpobofxeXs, who were worshipped at a eorta in Megara, may indeed have been a group of nameless ' functional ' baiixov€9, who had to be appeased before the building of cities ; for, according to the legend, sacrifice was offered to them by Alkathous, the founder of Megara, before he began to erect the wall : but the context suggests that Apollo, the god who was pre-eminently the city-builder, was one of them, and that we should explain them differently, as the deities whose statues ' stood before the houses ', such as Apollo, Artemis, or Hekate. Similarly the &€ol pi]TpioL at Naples, known to us only through inscriptions of the Roman period, appear to have been worshipped, not as the heroic ancestors of the clans, but as the deities who presided over the organization of the phratry. In other parts of Greece these were certain well-defined divinities such as Zeus, Athena, even Poseidon : and perhaps the group at Naples consisted merely of such figures as these. Or the designation may have acquired a certain quasi- Roman vagueness, and connoted, for instance, Zeus, Athena, and ' some others ', the vaguely comprehensive term being chosen so that no deity might be offended by inadvertent neglect. Finally, we can say nothing positive about the 'AXuibai, the name of ' certain gods in Lacedaemon '} as we learn from the doubtful authority of Hesychius. If the gloss is correct, we may have here either the appellative of vaguely conceived divinities, who never acquired proper names, 76 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND and were known only as the ' mighty ones ', or the compli- mentary title of certain ordinary and well-known personages of Greek polytheism. It is quite possible, then, that in these latter instances there is no distinct religious fact that wants explaining. The case may be otherwise in regard to the other groups : and we must consider these in connexion with the cults of those separate SaiVores or rjpoies above enumerated, who are known to us only through adjectival appellations, not by any proper or substantival names. The important question is whether all or some of these are the products of an earlier prehistoric stage of religious thought, a stage of what may be hypothetically called ' polydaemonism ', a conception preceding in the history of our race the emer- gence of such articulate and concrete individualities as are the anthropomorphic figures of Greek polytheism. Before going further in the examination of this question, it is proper to consider whether the name hai\x(i)v, which is attached to many of these indeterminate figures, affords us any clue. The etymology of this word, even if it were certain, is no sure guide. Its literary and popular usage may be shortly stated thus : in the Homeric poems it is synonymous sometimes with &e6s and designates a personal deity : frequently it expresses for Homer the more abstract divine force, especially fate or the destiny of man's life, and, in a narrower sense, the doom of death. Hesiod twice employs it in this sense, and twice applies it to individual men or demigods who have become glorified after their death or during their life : he nowhere clearly uses it as a synonym for the personal higher gods. In a fragment of Alkman (69) it occurs in an impersonal sense, meaning apparently the distribution of human lots. Empedokles uses the term — not indeed as an equivalent for the ordinary human soul, as Rohde supposes — but for the immortal prenatal soul which, having offended some divine law, is cast out from heaven, and, descending into a man, passes through a long cycle of existences : with this view we may connect the later application of it, which is sometimes ' SONDER-GOTTEK ' 77 found, for instance, in Pindar and Menander, to a man's personal genius. On the other hand, from the fifth century downwards, it bears two senses, both of which are concrete and anthropomorphic ; the Tragedians can designate as haifjioov the deceased hero or heroine, Darius or Alkestis ; and the popular usage was often in accord with them, for the ferocious spirit of Temesa was a haifKnv, but he was also the "HpcDs, the companion of Odysseus who was slain by the inhabi- tants. Finally, the word came often to denote an inferior or subordinate deity, as in a Dodonaean inscription we find 6io\ ijpoies baiixoves given as a full classification of all the divine powers to whom prayer or sacrifice might be offered. In this sense Attis and the Korybantes are called AaCfioves. It may be that 0eoi and AaCfioves have both been handed down from an equally ancient stage of Hellenic speech, both appHcable in the same sense to ' gods ' : and we may find instances in other languages for the co-existence of synonyms expressing the same idea of divinity. The terms will probably tend to differentiation, as, in fact, baCfxcov became variously differentiated. But the origin of terms does not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that when applied to these cults which we are examining — of which the record is comparatively late — it need not be regarded as investing the cult-figure with a vaguer or more impalpable or abstract character than that of the Olympians themselves. On the other hand, we must lay stress on the fact that most of these personages in the scanty list given above, which I have endeavoured to make complete, are designated as ijpoies : and the value of this term for the popular imagination is at least clear : it denoted a glorified man once existing upon the earth. Therefore the "Hpws 'EinTeyios or 'ExerXaios is qua "Hpto? as real and palpable a personage as Apollo or Hermes. If his personality is to be regarded as a survival from a period of vaguer and more amorphous religious conception, it must be on the ground of his designation by a mere appellative and the absence of a personal and concrete name. The facts so far set forth have been made part of the 78 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND foundation of a far-reaching theory promulgated by Usener in a treatise on the Gottemamen, a work of importance and value, of which the main results appear to have been rather widely accepted. This is no place for detailed criticism, but some consideration of his leading principles and conclusions is essential here. He correlates the Greek facts with the Roman Indigitamenta and certain phenomena he has observed in the Lithuanian religion ; and the conclu- sion towards which he draws is that the Indo-Germanic nations, on the way to the higher polytheism, passed through an earlier stage when the objects of cult were beings whom he designates by the newly-coined words ' Augenblick- Gotter ' and ' Sonder-Gotter ' ; that out of these the ' Olympian order ', the concrete anthropomorphic gods of Greece and Italy, of the Indo-Iranians, the Persians and Slavs, were evolved, whose, more vigorous personalities absorbed the earlier and vaguer forms, and whose concrete proper names now attracted to themselves the mass of adjectives and epithets that were once the independent and sole designation of the older divine beings ; finally that traces of this evolution can be found in certain later survivals of the historic cults. Now the importance of the theory very much depends on what we mean by a ' Sonder-Gott '. Usener develops his definition from Varro's phrase — ' certi dei ' — which occurs in a passage of Servius •'' : ' pontifices dicunt singulis actibus proprios deos praeesse, hos Varro certos deos appellal.' He finds the essential characteristic of a Sonder-Gott, first, in the narrow limitation of his nature or concept, which seems relative only to a particular act or state, or even to a particular moment in that act or state ; secondly in the open transparency of the name which, whether substantival or adjectival, expresses just the single function that the divine being exists to perform. So far we may accept this as prima facie a fair account of the complex Roman system which is presented in the Indigitamenta. We owe the statement of this system to "* Acn. 2. 141. • SONDER-GOTTER ' 79 the Christian Fathers, Arnobius and Augustine, who reproduce Varro, and Varro appears to have drawn from the pontifical books. As regards the absolute authenticity of this record, I cannot express an opinion : it may be that some of these appellatives in the Indigitamenta are only thin disguises of well-known concrete gods, such as Faunus and Jupiter , as a late American scholar, J. B. Carter, has endeavoured to prove in a treatise ' de deorum Romanorum cognominibus '. But, if we accept the main account of Varro as authentic, we may well sympathize with St. Augustine's humorous protest against the abnormal ' religi- osity ' of the Romans that seemed to leave nothing to unaided human initiative. And it is very difficult to find the right expression by which to designate this system in terms of the ordinary nomenclature of anthropology. It cannot be called fetichism, still less pantheism. If it really was to the Roman as it appears to us, we may be tempted to regard it as a very abstract and spiritual form of animism. If it be a right account of animism that it endows inanimate and material objects with quasi-human consciousness and emotions, and sometimes with a super- human power and volition which suggests worship, we may perhaps extend the term to cover a religious system that imagines an immanent semi-conscious or sub-conscious divine potency to reside in passing acts and states of man or fleeting operations of nature. This leads us to the next consideration, which is of still greater importance. Are these ' Sonder-Gotter ' conceived as personal gods ? Usener does not always speak quite clearly on this point ; he maintains, on the one hand, that a few of them can be proved to have had a personal reality for the ItaHans, yet his tendency is to distinguish this Roman system, which he finds also in Greece and Lithuania, from the polytheistic belief in personal gods. If this distinction on the ground of personality is justified, it is vital ; because in tracing the evolution of religion, and in classifying recorded or existing forms, the most far-reaching principle of classifica- tion is the distinction between the anthropomorphic and So FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND non-anthropomorphic forms of belief, the personal and the impersonal or half-personal objects of reverence. Supposing, then, that the above-given account of the Sonder-Gotter is correct, have we the right to regard them as belonging always and everywhere to that more primitive stage of belief which preceded pol3^theism and led up to it ? Looking first at the minute specialization of divine functions on which the system is based, we cannot regard this as a decisive test of primitiveness. Such specialization may indeed be found among early races, nor am I inclined to believe in the neo-totemistic dogma ' one clan one totem- god '. Some of Usener's Lithuanian parallels may be accurate illustrations of the species that he is formulating, though I do not recognize the value of all of them ; certainly ' the Fly-Buzzer God ', a Lithuanian form of Mviaypos, the ' God of the Besom ', the ' God that makes the grass green ', the ' God who makes the beer sour ', are deities with a distinctly Roman flavour about them. Having tried to go farther afield I have been able to find only a few exact parallels. Dorsey, in his Study of Sioux Cults, mentions the Indian's invocation of his hunting-trap and all the various parts of it, and his prayers to the tent-pole, which are quite after the fashion and spirit of the Roman Indigita- menta. Traces of the same system seem to appear in the religion of the Kenyahs, a tribe on the Baram river in Borneo, described by Messrs. Hose and McDougall ^ : ' Balli Atap (Atap = roof) is the spirit or god that protects the household from harm of all sorts ', and reminds us of the "Hpcas 'ETTtreyto? at Athens ; and in the prayers of certain heathen tribes in Russia we may detect the same ' Indigita- menta ' style ''. But I imagine we should find this rigorous apportionment of special functions, this minute articulation of the divine world, at least as frequently in the latter days of a well-organized polytheism, of which it is often a mere by-product. While many of the personal gods in Greece expanded their individualities and widened their range of * Joitrn. Anthrop. Inst. 1901, pp. 174-175. i" Archiv f. Religionswiss. 1906, p. 284. ' SONDER-GOTTER ' 8i functions, many were, obliged to contract and to specialize. Ares and Pan were once more manifold gods than they afterwards became ; and the same is true of Aphrodite and Eros, and in some degree of Artemis. And such personal deities as Eros and Asklepios beget such transparent and limited personages as Himeros and Pothos, laso Akesis, Panakeia : while Nikjj, Unda), Ne/xeo-i?, most absolute ' Sonder- Gdtter', are late products of polytheism, and the first two, if not the third also, are probably emanations of concrete and personal deities. The specialization of functions, then, is not a test that helps us to distinguish the ' Sonder-Gotter ' system from personal polytheism, or to assign the former of necessity to a more primitive stage. But the greater or less degree of anthropomorphism in these strange Greek, Roman, and Lithuanian forms, if we could appreciate it, would be a much more important clue. And it is in dealing with this question that Usener's work appears least satisfactory. It is obvious, as Mr. Warde Fowler and other writers on Roman religion have often pointed out, that it was far less anthropomorphic than the Greek, that it presented less concrete individualities to the imagination. The chief deities of the Italic tribes were personal and anthropo- morphic in so far as they were distinct in sex and were worshipped occasionally with idols ; but the high powers of the Roman religion seem to stand apart, each for himself or herself, in a cold aloofness. Little or no myth is told of them, rarely a legend of marriage or affiliation. Were, then, Inuus, Occator, Dea Panda, Deus Lactans, Dea Mena, and all the crowd of deities of procreation, nutrition, and birth, invested with a personality very much vaguer and thinner than were Vesta and Minerva ? And, if so, are they to be regarded as the survivals of an older stratum of religion, or rather as the late development of a certain logical tendency in Roman religious thought ? The record is late, and gives us little more than a bare list of names ; and no clue is offered by any tradition or any reported ritual. Nor is this a place to attempt the solution of the Roman problem. 2460 G 82 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND As regards the Lithuanian evidence, the exposition of it by Usener fails to show the different degrees of strength with which the various functional agencies in his list were personified, or to distinguish between the more concrete and the vaguer forms. It is very interesting in itself, but I do not think it solves this particular problem of Greek polytheism. We can now confine our attention exclusively to the Greek evidence. We have every reason to believe that the Hellenic perception of divinity had become concrete and precise at a very early period ^ ; even if theriomorphism occasionally prevailed, the clear outlines of the divine personality need not have been much impaired ; there is nothing necessarily vague or nebulous about a horse-headed Demeter. More- over, the chief divine personalities had at an early period become anthropomorphic. The view is quite tenable that many of the anthropomorphic deities were already the common possession of the Greek tribes before the migration into Hellas. The extreme antiquity and obscurity of most of their personal names would itself support this view. And the impulse in Greek religion towards the creation of clearly outlined personal forms was a devouring impulse that might well have obliterated the traces of a previous more amorphous animistic system. Yet such traces may be found, and in other directions more clearly perhaps than in the domain of the ' Sonder-Gotter '. The worship of the stone, the pillar, the tree-trunk, even the axe, is proved of the pre- historic period, and it survived in the historic. It is sufficient to observe here that such aniconic cults are compatible and often contemporaneous with an anthropomorphic and personal conception of the divinity, though they may have arisen under the influence of animism, fetichism, or from mere ' teratology ' ^\ Thus the ' Mycenaeans ' possessed * Usener himself admits this, Goiter namen, p. 302. '' Statements about the animistic worship of stones and trees are often deceptive ; the words of Miss Alice Fletcher in the Peabody Museum Reports, vol. 3, p. 276, ' Careful inquiry fails to show that the Indian actually worships the objects that are set up or mentioned by him in his ceremonies. The earth, the four winds, the sun, moon and stars, the stones, the water. ' SONDER-GOTTER ' 83 human and personal gods, though their ayaA/xara were the pillar, the tree, or the axe : as witness we have the sacrificial scene on a Mycenaean gem, possessed and published by Sir Arthur Evans, where a god is seen hovering above his own pillar, having been evoked by the prayers or the ritual. But the Arcadian cults of Zeus Kcpawos, Zcvs KaTrirwras, in which Zeus was actually identified with the thunder and the meteor-stone, and the fetich-worship of the sceptre of Agamemnon at Chaironeia, seem to belong to some primitive stratum of pre-anthropomorphic religion. We must believe in the existence of this stratum in the buried soil of the Hellenic or pre-Hellenic religions as a vera causa that might explain certain anomalies among the religious facts of the historic period. But it is very doubtful if we need invoke the aid of this hypothesis to explain the facts upon which Usener has built his theory ; and there are some that it would fail altogether to explain. There is one important point that we must insist on at the outset. A god is not necessarily nameless because he is not named or is usually addressed by a simple appellative. There are many reasons for concealing the proper name. One is the superstitious fear that the enemy may come to possess it, and work evil through the magical power that the possession may give him. For the same reason many savages conceal their own true name and the names of their friends ; and this is occasionally found even in civilized communities ; as, for instance, it was improper to mention the personal name of the babovxos at Athens on account of his sacred character. Again, it was ill-omened to use the name of the deities of the nether world, because of their associations with death. Thus arose euphemisms for the name of Hades ; and the designation of the god and goddess of the lower world as 6 0€o's and rj 0ea, which came into vogue at Eleusis in the fifth the various animals, are all exponents of a mysterious life and power encompassing the Indian and filling him with vague apprehension and desire to propitiate. . . . These various objects are stopping-places of the god,' may serve as a correction of hastily gathered impressions. G 2 84 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND century b. c, may be due to the same motive, and need not be supposed to have descended from a system of nameless deities of dateless antiquity. A similar feeling prompted the habit of passing the graves of the dead, and especially of the dead hero, in silence ; and from this practice the buried hero at Oropos received the name 2iyi]\o's. And as many heroes came thus to be designated simply as 6 "Hpcos, the personal names could easily pass out of recollection. What was superstition in one age becomes merely respectful reserve in another ; and the modern man rarely speaks of God by any personal name, but most frequently by some vaguer title such as 'the Deity'. At Boulis, near Phokis, the chief god was always addressed merely by the worshipful title of Meyio-ros, and never by any proper name, according to Pausanias ^ : but there is no reason to suppose that they had not advanced as far in the evolution of anthropomorphic and concrete divinities as their neighbours, or to gainsay the view of Pausanias, that Meytoro? was none other than Zeus himself ^. We may next observe that many of the divine appellatives that Usener presses into the support of his theory are no signs of any earlier and distinct religious stage at all, but are as anthropomorphic in their connotation as any individual proper name, and many have a generally descrip- tive and no functional sense whatever, and therefore are by no means to be compared with the Roman Indigitamenta. For instance, we find in him the strange suggestion (which is almost a reductio ad ahsurdum of his theory) that Demeter Eavdr] derived her appellative from an old god called "EavOos ', the only person so named was a secular hero, and there is no evidence of a divine personage so called except for those who hold, like Usener, the almost obsolete and very narrow '' It is particulaiiy in the Eastern Hellenized world, in various districts of Asia Minor, especially Phrygia, that we mark the tendency gaining force in the later period to designate the divinity by a vague descriptive name of reverential import, such as ' the Highest God ' : two newly- discovered inscriptions of the Roman period at Miletos show the existence there of a cult of o a-yiwraTos 6(bs "Ttf/iaros Zcot??/), who was a god of divination and served by a npo, I venture this explanation : the guild of cooks, like other guilds and like clans of kinsmen, would be tempted to invent for themselves an eponymous ancestor ; so fictitious heroes arise, whose names stamp them as the patron-saints of the arts of cooking. We can similarly explain Ke'pa/xo? as the eponymous hero of the potters' guild, who gave his name to a deme of the Akamantid tribe. Nor must we take these fictions too seriously. 'A/!xod,.is a living force, as Sir Alfred Lyall has emphatically pointed out, in India and China to this day. He records the case of the very real Indian, Hurdeo Lala, becoming after his death the ' functional ' god of cholera '■'. It would be quite natural, from the Greek point of view, that when an individual was deified or ' heroized ' after his death a new » Asiatic Studies, 2nd ser., p. 287. 90 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND and functional name should be then attached to him, expressive of the benign influence which he was called upon to exert in behalf of his worshippers. This would explain such family cults as those of Epimachos at Knidos and Eruthrai, and of Summachos at Pharsalos. That these are the cults of real men is certain in the latter case ^ and probable in the former. Similarly, the cult of the "Hptos SrpaDjyo's- at Athens, of which we have proof in the first century B.C., may well have been the cult of a real historical personage whose name was concealed and lost. The "Hpcoes 'Tarpoi in different parts of Attica may with perfectly good reason be supposed to have been real men, who had an existence apart from their ' function ', or at least ancestors imagined and worshipped as real, who take over the art of healing, as every ' hero ' always could if he wished. And of two of these glorified 'larpoi personal names are actually recorded. The Tjpcos Kara irpyfivav at Phaleron need not originally have been the functional demon-impersonation of steering, but a buried and sacred personage whose name was lost, and who was believed to have been the steersman of Theseus, and thus came to be an occasional patron-saint of mariners. Greece was full of forgotten graves belonging to an im- memorial past. Many were beheved to be, and ver}^ likely were, the resting-places of ancestral chiefs, and cults conse- crated to them may often have arisen or been revived after the name had been forgotten. We know that tombs were frequently near or within the precincts of temples, and from this local accident the buried ancestor might acquire a new descriptive name, such as KAatKO(/)opos, the ' porter of the temple '. A clear instance of an apparently functional cult which may be thus explained, and to which Usener's theory can be proved inappropriate, was that of the hero Tapaf 177-7709 at Olympia and on the Isthmus. Near the entrance * B.C.H. 12, p. 1S4. On a relief found at Pharsalos, of the fourth century B.C., Summachos is seen standing by his horse, and his type is common for that of the ' heroized ' dead ; near him is a seated goddess whom the remains of letters prove to be Hestia. As the writer of the article points out, this is a unique instance of the figure of Hestia being use^d as the divine symbol of a family cult. •' SONDER-GOTTER ' 91 to the race-course at Olympia was an altar which appears to have been erected over a grave, where we may suppose that some one had been really buried, and at this place horses habitually shied. What was more natural than to account for their fear by supposing the ghost to be the cause of it ? It was most important, then, to know the name of that ghost, but though various theories as to his personal name were put forward, none could prevail, and the most reasonable course was adopted of calling him Tupa^L-mroi. As the institution of the races at Olympia is comparatively late, Tapd^nnroi at least is not a remnant of a prehistoric religion. Again, there are other appellatives in this list that we may quite reasonably explain as the sheddings and leavings of concrete high divinities, 'EpC^oia, for instance, in Lesbos, being very probably an epithet of Demeter, Ev^oaia or Eviroa-Ca in Phrygia of Agrippina-Demeter. And what are we to saj' of 'Io-o8aiT7j9 ? We can understand the creation or evolution of a ' daimon of the banquet ', but the ' daimon of the equal banquet ' seems a somewhat stranger fiction. The record in Harpokration gives us a clue to a different explanation. We are told that he was a feriKo? Aat/xco?' at Athens, who was worshipped by .women of doubtful character. Now, there were certain foreign cults of Dionysos, mystic and disrepu- table, that were in vogue at Athens from the fifth century onwards, and were specially attractive to women, and Plutarch tells us that in mystic circles Dionysos was called lo-oSatVrjs, Moreimportant are thecults of KaAAty€i'€ta,and Kouporpo'c^os, both of whom are ' Sonder-Gottheiten ' in Usener's list. Ka\\iyev€ta may be interpreted as the goddess of fair offspring, or as she who gives fair offspring. The ancient writers, both learned and popular, were doubtful about her, but all associated her with Demeter ; and it is in the com- pany of this goddess that we meet with her both at Athens and in Sicily. The name must be considered in close relation to the ritual of the KaXkLyevdo, which took place in the great festival of Demeter, the Thesmophoria, on the 92 FUNCTIONAL HEROES AND day after the N-qa-reCa. Wherever the Thesmophoria was held in Greece, the KaWiyeveia must have usually formed part of it, for Plutarch specially notes its non-existence at Eretria. It is a legitimate conjecture that on this day the goddess was believed to have been reunited with Kore, and that the women then prayed for fair offspring to the goddess of fair offspring, the 0eo-juo<^o'pta being specially a festival of married women. But Kalhgeneia herself was almost certainly a later fiction like Amphidromos, an imaginary personality invented to explain the name of the festival-day, TCI KaAAiyt'z'eta ^. As regards Kou/oorpo'<^os at Athens, we cannot be sure that she did not once possess a more concrete proper name. Many goddesses were called by this adjective, and the type of a female di\dnity holding a child in her arms, or giving suck to it, was widely spread over the Mediter- ranean at a very early time, and it has recently been dis- covered that Aphaia in Aigina was thus represented. The very multipHcity of the proper names that might claim the epithet might be a reason for a cautious cult preferring to use the epithet alone. But in any case the KovpoTp6(f)Oi at Athens was a robust and personal figure closely akin to the earth-goddess, and whether the earth-mother is called Ge or KovpoTp6(f)Oi, or Tlavbojpa, the conception may be equally anthropomorphic and personal in each case, and this is really the important fact to bear in view. I have reserved for the close of this short critical account the consideration of Mviaypos, ' the Fly-Chaser ', at Aliphera ; for Usener's theory might really make more out of this humble personage than out of any of his confreres. The facts that illustrate the cult are interesting. At Leukas and Actium they sacrificed to the flies before the great ritual in honour of Apollo began. This was perhaps the simplest and most primitive thing to do ; it does not imply fly- worship, but the preliminary offering to them of a piece of cooked meat was a bribe to the flies to go away and not disturb the worshippers at the solemn function that was to follow, where any disturbance would be ill-omened, and where the * Vide Cti/ts, 3, pp. 95-96. ' SONDER-GOTTER ' 93 flies were likely, unless pacified first, to be attracted by the savour of the burnt-sacrifice. As thought advances, a hero, Mviaypos, is evolved at Aliphera, to look after the flies before the sacrifice to Athena. We have traces of the same hero at Olympia, though here his function was at last absorbed by Zeus 'ATTo'/xuto?. Here, then, in Mviaypos is almost the true ' Sonder-Gott ', almost the ' Augenblick-Gott ' ; for his function is very limited, and his value for the worshipper was probably little more than momentary, nor are any stories told about him. Yet he is a late invention, impljnng the pre-existence of the higher gods, for whose better ministration he was created and ordained. Likewise, he is called a ijpm by Pausanias, and therefore by him at least regarded as personal. It seems, then, that scarcely any figure in this brief catalogue entirely satisfies Usener's definition of a ' Sonder- Gott ' ; those that may be supposed to have descended from a remote past yet possess a personal character which betrays the same religious thought as that which produced the personal gods of polytheism. Many of the figures imply the high gods, and some are probably emanations from them. The more shadowy and impalpable forms can be sometimes proved, and often suspected, to be the products of the latest period. The ancestor of a personal deity may be often more Umited in function, but appears sometimes to be more complex than his descendant. An adjectival name may have been originally chosen to designate the Godhead ; the name ' Christ ' was adjectival, and originally ' Zeus ' may have only signified ' the Bright One '. But such names may in thought have been connected with many other qualities that make up personality, and may have at once denoted full concrete individuals. Doubtless a divine individuaUty often grows in the course of time more com- plex and more intensely conceived, and sometimes we can mark the stages of its growth. But Usener's learned and, in many respects, valuable treatise has not proved, or even made probable, its theorem that in the immediate background of Greek polytheism, out of which much of it 94 FUNCTIONAL HEROES developed, was a shadowy world of functional, half-imper- sonal ' numina '. Greek religion early and late had always its animistic and daemonistic elements ; and in the history of our race animism probably preceded theism and poly- theism ; but our present knowledge points to the belief that the ancestors of the historic Greeks brought with them a personal religion of concrete divinities, and found a personal polytheism in many respects differing from their own, but in other ways akin, on the soil that they conquered. CHAPTER V ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE CULT OF HERAKLES On a higher plane and of more varied interest than any of the personages of the type of hero-deity hitherto examined are Herakles, the Dioskouroi, and Asklepios, and much the same rehgious problems arise in regard to them all, though they differ in their life-history, character, and functions. In the galaxy of Greek heroes Herakles is pre-eminent, not merely in respect of his irresistible might, but in respect of the richness of the legend that has grown up around him. He is the ijpoos par excellence, so that Pindar by a bold com- bination of terms could style him the T/pws 6^6$ =', 'and for ' many of the communities he was both a hero and a god at~ the same time. We know that the term Oto'i was often vaguely and thoughtlessly applied by the litterateurs of Greece ; but in actual ritual the distinction between hero and the gods of the upper world was sharply maintained, and too palpable for one to be confused with the other. The animals offered were mostly the same, except that the goat is scarcely mentioned among the offerings to heroes ; but the hero-sacrifice was called by a different name, eyayi(r/ia, as distinct from dvaia, and was very rarely partaken by the worshipper, whereas the common meal near the altar was the rule in the service of the god. When a community possessed the tomb of the hero, the blood of the victim might be poured down through a ^odpos, or hole in the ground, and the victim would be sacrificed with his head held down over the hole, whereas the animal sacrificed to the upper powers was lifted up from the ground, and the neck drawn back so that the head faced the sky ; and the hero's altar, which was strictly and technically called ((rxapa, ^ Nem. 3. 22. 96 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE was much lower in height than the Boifjioi, the altar of the deity, and of round form ^ ; it served for libations only, and its shape was convenient for allowing them to run down into the earth. Finally, the sacrificial service of the hero was dis- tinguished from that of the deity by the general rule that the former was fixed in the calendar for one day only in the year, probably the supposed day of his death ^. Therefore we may trust the ancient authorities where they definitely assert that the sacrifice was either of the heroic or the divine type. In regard, however, to Herakles, a special uncertainty might arise from the fact that no com- munity is known to have claimed to possess his tomb or his reUcs ; therefore it would be impossible to arrange his service on the ordinary lines of sepulchral ritual. But sufficient archaeological proof has been adduced that a special architectural structure became linked with the cult of Herakles, as a traditional and distinctive mark : from Attica, Boeotia, Andros, and Ithome we have a series of reliefs and vases showing a peculiar form of the ' heroon ' or hero-shrine of Herakles, consisting of a quadrilateral stone basis supporting four pillars at the comers, the two front ones surmounted by a pediment and the space between them unroofed ; the form agrees exactly with the type of grave described by Pausanias as prevalent in Sikuon " ; in the rest of Greece it is found associated with no divinity and no other hero save Herakles. Now we have clear testimony of an ancient hero-cult of him at Sikuon ^, which always survived in conj unction with the theistic ritual ; and Herodotus impUes in one text that this combination of the two was not infrequent. There is a record also that only heroic honours were assigned him in Lokris "^ and in early times in Thebes itself ^ where later his divinity became so strong a dogma of faith that Isokrates ' declared he was more honoured there than all the other * The two terms Pojf^ui and kffxapa are often used indiscriminately, e. g. Pans. I. 19. 3 and Pollux, On. 1.8; but vide Schol. Eur. Phoin. 274. ^ Kar eviavTuv Ovtiv is the usual phrase. " 2. 7. 2. ^ Paus. 2. 10. I. « Diod. Sic. 4. 39. ' Philipp. p. 88. CULT OF HERAKLES 97 deities, and a Theban hymn pronounced him the son of Zeus and Hera "". In Messene it is not certain that he was raised above heroic rank, for he is not mentioned among the deities to whom special prayers were made on the restoration of the Messenians after Epaminondas' victory ; in his shrine at Abia on the coast he was identified with Mantiklos, the Messenian hero who founded his worship there ^, and a reUef found at Ithome shows him standing by a heroon of the sepulchral type described above "=. Even at Argos, whence so much of his myth is supposed to have emanated ^, there is no mention of a temple, and a decree of the early Roman imperial period '', mentioning that 'the honours of Perseus and Herakles' were voted to a certain citizen, suggests only heroic cult. Even in Attica, the land which claimed to be the first to consecrate divine worship to Herakles, we hear of no mo's, the proper name of the deity's temple, assigned to him ; his shrine at Melite, said to be the most conspicuous, appears to have been a heroon of the above-described type '. On the other hand, the usual Attic sacrifice to Herakles appears to have been of the ' Olympian ' type, the ox being lifted from the ground and his neck drawn back s. In view then of this dual aspect of him, a question of interest for the history of religion at once arises : which of these two aspects of Herakles is the aboriginal one ? Is the human conception of him the prior fact or the divine ? Was his career that of the dethroned god, who, after much suffering and achievement in the human world, was at last reinstated in his divinity ? Or is he one of the earliest examples in Greek religion of the apotheosis of a distinguished man, once living or imagined to have hved on the earth, who after his death received heroic and later divine honours ? * Ptoiem. Nov. Hist. 3 (Westermann, Mythogr. p. 186). *• Paus. 4. 30. I. ^ Hell. Journ. 1902, p. 2. '^ Vide VoUgraff, Neue Jahrb. Jur Class. Alterth. 1910, pp. 305-317, ' Rhodes Oder Argos ' (claims for Argos the development of the labour- cycle myths) . " C.I.G. 1 123. f Schol. Arist. Ran. 504. Upuv is a vague word applicable to any sacred enclosure, whether consecrated to deity or hero. s Vide Theophr. Charac. 29. 2460 H 98 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE The answer of the Greeks themselves to these questions is not without value. Herodotus appears to have been alone in maintaining the aboriginal divinity of Herakles ; he believed him to have been one of the early twelve deities of Egypt, and that the son of Amphitruon, in his view a real man, was born some thousands of years after him, and was named after the god by his parents, who were of Egyptian origin ; therefore the historian approves of the Greeks who distinguished in their ritual between Herakles the God and Herakles the Hero ^. But his theory arises from no tradition that could possibly avail us. It is one of his paradoxes, into which he was misled by his Egyptian teachers. But the other Greeks, so far as there is record of their voices, were unanimous for the opposite view of him, maintaining that he was first man, then hero, then god. And we find a fairly clear reflection of this view of him in Homer, our earliest literary authority, if we combine many passages in the poems with the well- known scene in the Nekuia ^, wherein the wraith of Herakles appears in Hades leading the same shadowy and futile life as the ghosts of other dead men, while his real self ' is happy at the banquets of the immortal Gods, and has for his bride fair-ankled Hebe '. The same view is presented of him in the Hesiodic Theogony ''. Granting therefore, if we choose, that the passage in the Nekuia is a later addition, we may say that we know the dogma that was prevalent concerning Herakles in the eighth century. Nor we can wholly despise the tradition that the consecration to him of heroic honours was prior in time to his divine worship. The Athenians made their claim heard that they were the first to honour him as a god, and that the rest of the Greeks then followed their example ^ ; according to Arrian, it was a Delphic oracle that first confirmed his apotheosis some long time after his death ". According to a Sicyonic legend, it was a Cretan called ^ 2. 44. '■ Od. II. 601. ■" Theog. 950. 'i Diod. Sic. 4. 39. " Anab. 4. 11. 7 : Aristides characteristically declares that this oracle was uttered first to the Athenians immediately after his death or assump- tion, Or. 5 (Dind. i, p. 58). CULT OF HERAKLES 99 Phaistos who first persuaded the men of that territory, who had hitherto been worshipping Herakles merely as a hero, henceforth to worship him as a god •'', We may say, then, that there was a strong and cumulative tradition among the Hellenes that the godhead of Herakles was the secondary and later fact, and that his manhood was the primary and earlier. However, the partisans of the ' decayed god '-theory will not be moved by the mere authoritative tradition of the classic period. We must seek more decisive criteria. That theory is only convincing when the so-called hero has a hieratic name or a wholly hieratic legend or both ; it explains convincingly a Trophenios, a Eubouleus, a Britomartis. It is irrelevant and wrong- headed in regard to this divine man, this ijpMs-Oeos- of Greek mythology. The strongest argument against that theory and by far the most interesting criterion that we possess for deciding the question is the name 'HpaKA^y itself, which has been the occasion of much sophistry in ancient and modern specu- lation. It is idle to mangle the name into something else, in order to explain it, or to be affected by the joke of a fifth- century comedian, who distorts it into meaning ' little hero '. It is still more unscientific to set the name ' Herakles ' aside as a later and secondary fact, and to believe that our hero was originally called by some other name '' ; merely because some unauthoritative mythographers and schohasts of a late period choose to maintain that 'AXjcaio?, ' the Strong', was his original name, and that it was the Pythian oracle who afterwards christened him ' Herakles ' ^ We are familiar with the attempt of the later Pythian oracle to regulate the career of the hero, and here we find it at last pretending to be his godfather. Such statements are only freakish. In explaining his origin, the scientific mythologist must start with the name 'HpaKXrjs, just as in Celtic mythology he would start with the name ' Arthur ' in attempting to explain that hero. No other real hero's name on Greek * Paus. 2. 10. I. '' Vide Wilamowitz, Herakl. Mainom. p. 293. "^ Dio. Chrys. Or. 31, p. 615 R. H 2 u ic 100 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE mythology is so patent and so certain. As Fick and other scholars who have specially studied the formative laws of Greek personal names have long recognized, it can mean nothing else than ' the glory of Hera ' : it can hardly belong to the embryonic period of the Greek language ; it is formed exactly on the same lines as other names of the classic period, Diokles, Androkles, Perikles. ' The glory of Hera ' is just such an auspicious name that hopeful and grateful parents might give to a new-born real infant whom they had received from the marriage-goddess ^. The name appears so natural in the Greek religious view that one might expect it to be very common. We must suppose that the prodigious character of the real or imaginary individual who once bore it debarred even the most sanguine parent from giving it to his own son. This simple view of the name will explain the apparent inconsistency between the name and the legend of Hera's constant hostility to the hero who bore it. It could easily happen that the babe who was auspiciously named ' the glory of Hera ' might grow up to be obnoxious to that goddess, just as a Diokles might grow up to reflect no credit on Zeus^and a ' Perikles ' might pass his mature life in obscurity. \^e also observe that Hera's hatred of Herakles was nowhere reflected in cult \ he is nowhere excluded from her worship as was Dionys'os ; on the contrary, one of her temples at Sparta was supposed to have been built by him ; an ancient hymn sung in later times at Thebes proclaimed him as the son of Zeus and Hera, and the curious epithet "Hpaios which the authority of Hesychius attaches to him may have arisen from some cult- relation between him and the goddess, perhaps at Athens. In fact, the myth that prevailed in later times of the formal reconciliation of the goddess and the hero after his apo- theosis, or of her actual adoption of him as her son, may have been invented merely to explain the simple fact that in religion there was no trace at all of any feud between * Wilamowitz, Herakl. Mainom. p. 293, accepts the derivation, but main- tains that the name could only have arisen at Argos the city of Hera ; this is as fallacious as it woukl be to maintain that the name Diokles could only have arisen at Olympia. I CITLT OF HERAKLES loi ^^ them. We are entitled therefore to maintain that the legend of Hera's hostility is not an original fact, but may merely reflect the mythic enmity between Argos, her city whence he was driven, and Thebes, where he became indigenous We shall in any case avoid Mr. Cook's quaint and desperate liypothesis that Herakles in his earliest career was the husband of Hera, until at least he produces better evidence or can show that a Greek husband was ever named ' the glory oLhis wife '. (jhe name Herakles is a normal and natural name for a man, an entirely abnormal and unnatural name for a Greek god, if we can trust at all the analogies of" other divine names in GreeceJ Our conclusion is then that in its original application the name first denoted an individual man ; whether real or imaginary is a question that does not fall within the range of any possible decision . But we are enabled to say that the career of Herakles as a hero precedes his career as a god, so far as the name gives evidence. Nor does the dogma of his aboriginal godhead receive any support from his legend. The current myths concerning his achievements do not bear on the face of them any ritualistic or hieratic character, such as many of the myths of Dionysos and the story of Eubouleus ; though we may note one or two local and unheroic stories about him that are ' aetio- logic ', reflecting special ritual. UThe prevalent legends arrange themselves under three categories : the epicrhistoric, such as the legends of his wars and conquests, the capture of Oichalia, the conquest of the Druopes, his raid on the Pythian oracle, his campaigns in Elis ; the folklore-fantastic, his combats with monsters and magical animals, his pursuit of the hind with golden horns, his capture of magical cattle, his quest of magical booty at far ends of the earth, his descent into hell ; the cultural, that reveal him as the civilizing hero, the maker of roads, the drainer of swamps. All these types of myth are found in the mythology and hagiography of other peoples, in the legends of Arthur, Sigurd, Rustem, St. Patrick. No known Greek god has a mythic career at all resembling this. Even if we believed the solar explanation -> V 102 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE of the stealing of the cows of Geruon or of the descent into hell, such explanations being often merely arbitrary, we need not be disturbed in our view of the whole complex of the facts. The sun-god could lend Herakles a cup to sail the ocean in, just as Odin might give Sigmund a sword ; and a culture-hero is always liable to attract a solar or a cosmic story ^. Finally, when we critically examine the evidence of the ritual, both in literature and monuments, and of the cult- names attached to him, we find nothing to suggest, still less to persuade us, that his divine or daimonistic character was 'the original fact and his human-heroic a later development ^. In monuments that are generally too late to be of service for the question of origin he carries the cornucopia, and springs, especially hot springs ", were often named after him. It is perverse to argue that therefore he started his career '---as a fertility-daimon or a water-sprite. A merely fighting hero, who came to be widely worshipped after his death, would naturally come to assist in the processes of vegetation and healing ; otherwise the peasant and the townsman of the later times would not have much use for him. And so the evangelists and Christian saints acquired the posthumous function of looking after vineyards and healing sickness. When therefore in the later cults we find Herakles blessing the crops and healing the sick, we may see the end of a civilizing development, not the survival of aboriginal func- tion. We should only be obliged to maintain his daimonistic origin if we believed that the personality of the Cretan Herakles, one of the Dactuloi, little culture-daimones of pre-Hellenic Crete, was the parent-source of our Hellenic hero. But no one, except Kaibel '', has put forward so '^ The article by Dr. Verrall, Class. Rev. 1896, p. 85, on the calenelar- machinery of Sophokle.s' Trachiniai is ingenious and attractive, but contri- butes nothing to any solar theory of Herakles himself. " This is the view put forth by Miss Harrison in Themis, chap, ix ; but the evidence she gives is not critically examined nor correlated with the whole complex of facts, and belongs at the earliest to the fifth century ; vide Furtwangler in Roscher's Lexikon. " e.g. at Thermopulai, Herod. 7. 176 ; cf. Athenae. p. 514 F. '' Nachr. d. Gotting. dcs. 1901. CULT OF HERAKLES 103 perverse a theory. The ' Idaean ' Herakles, as the Cretan was called, does not help us at all. He is an eccentric pheno- menon that must be studied apart. The ethnic question naturally arises now, was this real or imaginary hero-ancestor a tradition common to the leading Hellenic stocks or the privilege of one or a few only ? The theory dear to O. Miiller and others, that he belonged in origin solely to the Dorian stock cannot be maintained, as it is in contradiction with certain facts, such as the very early prevalence of his fame and cult in other Hellenic communities. Had he been purely Dorian in origin, we should naturally explain the widespread expansion of the name and legend as due to the great expansion of that stock which ended in the transformation of the Peloponnese. But the evidence of the Homeric poems alone suggests a much earlier date than that semi-historic event for the diffusion of the Herakles-legend and cult. And this impression be- comes stronger when we critically examine the records from Argos, Thebes, and Attica. And something in the person- ality of the hero, his use of the bow and poisoned arrows, seems to point to a very early culture-epoch in the history of Hellas*. Moreover, attached as were the Dorian com- munities to him, their genealogical attempts to connect themselves with him are -weak and futile ; the old Dorian king Aigimios is no blood-relation of his, and only one of the three Dorian tribes, the Hullaeis, claimed one of his sons as ' eponymos '. The Spartan kings were Herakleidai par ^ excellence ; but they claimed to stand apart from the Dorian people and to be of different blood from them. X^ A wider view is taken of his origin by Wilamowitz- ) Moellendorff ^, who supposes him to have been the legendary / hero-god of a group that once lived together in North Greece/ ■^ The club also was probably part of his primitive equipment. We must not assign too much weight to the statement of Suidas (s.v. Peisan- dros) that Peisandros, the epic poet of Rhodes, was the first to assign this weapon to him ; the fact that Homer does not mention the club and that the Hesiodic poem represented the hero as a hoplite would suggest such a statement to a litterateur (of. Strab. p. 688). The club belongs to the earliest art-type. See Furtwangler in Roscher's Lexikon, i. p. 2138. ^ In his commentarv on the Herakles Mainomenos of Euripides 104 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE in the neighbourhood of the Pindos, the Dores, Boiotoi, and Thessaloi. Certainly we have reason to believe that these three tribes possessed him at an early period, whether by adoption or ancient inheritance ; but there is no trust- worthy evidence that they ever lived together in a single community. The fact that much of his legend, and the story of some of his striking achievements and death, is rooted in the north of Greece, especially in the region of Oita and Trachis, though it cannot definitely decide the question of ethnic origin, is yet of some significance for it ; it prevents us, for instance, listening to any hypothesis of a Minoan-Mycenaean origin. (But we cannot claim any single tribe or community as the source whence he sprung or his earliest legend arose. "^^ And no Greek people dared to claim his grave, though in the hot competition for heroic relics the temptation must have been sore. These facts combine with what was noted just above, the air of great antiquity that surrounds his personality, to suggest that at an early period after the migration of the leading tribes into Hellas from the north, most of them already possessed the tradition of his fame and cult ; for hero-worship, unlike ancestor-worship, spreads easily over contiguous areas ^. It may have been at this earliest period that it penetrated Macedon, where we find him styled by the Greek-Macedonian epithet, "ApTjros', ' the warlike '^; nor can we gainsay the probability of an original ethnic connexion between some of the northern Greek tribes and the Makedones. The view here put forth in no way clashes with the '■^ Friedlander, ' HeraMes ' {Philologische Untersiichungen, 1907), maintains a special and narrower view of the origin and diffusion of Herakles-cult and legend : originally a hero of Tiruns, he does not penetrate north ol the Istlunus much before the seventh century b.c. : his cult and legend in North Greece, Boeotia, and Attica are due to the influence of Rhodian and Samian epic poetry ; he maintains that Rhodes also in the period 01 her early thalassocracy was responsible for almost the whole of his dififusion in the Greek colonies of the Mediterranean. His treatise contains some valuable matter, but liis whole theory is injured by the excessive influence he ascribes to mere poetry in the matter of engendering powerful local cults : it conspicuously breaks down in attempting to explain the Boeotian Herakles. '' Hesych. s.v. 'ApTjroy. CULT OF HERAKLES 105 evidence that we have gleaned from the name Herakles. That name could only have arisen among a people who "Worshipped Hera^ But, so far as our evidence allows us to judge, we cannot say that there was any genuine Greek tribe that did not ; and the name Hera is to all appearance Greek, and was probably brought in by the earliest Hellenic tribes, Achaeans, Dorians, and others from the north, and finally attached to the great pre-Hellenic goddess of Argos, after the amalgamation of the northern with the Mediterranean stocks. We may then continue our ethnic survey untroubled by i/ the question wiio_ffiere his first worshippers. It is of suffirient importance to note that he was already powerful in North Greece, m Thessaly, and in the regions of Oita and Par- . nassos, before th e Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese ^ . l/ The story that the Druopes were driven out of the country that became known as Doris by Herakles and the Malieis, and at the bidding of the Delphic oracle were transplanted by the hero to Asine and Hermione ^, has some religious and historic value. This may be the earliest example of a tendency, which / might seem natural a priori, to connect the name and legend ^ of Herakles with the ma veiftent&jTid conquests of tlip pm i^n T>eQgle^ And this ancient tradition of his hostility to the "TJruopes acquires a certain reality from the absence of any record or trace of his worship in the Dryopian settlements in the Peloponnese, Asine, and Hermione. The Dorian influence of Corinth might explain the legendary claim of Herakles and his children to Ambrakia, where he was honoured as the founder '^. But his worship may be an old Achaean tradition in Phokis, where an interesting cult of him is recorded '^ ; and certainly his recognition and prestige in Thessaly were independent of any Dorian influence "". The Aleuadai traced their descent " Friedlander, op. cit. pp. 94-108, regards all the Thessalian connexions with Herakles as relatively late ; but he fails to explain satisfactorily the Homeric genealogy of Thessalos of Kos. " Pans, 4. 34. 6 ; Herod. 8. 43. " Vide Ctdts, 4, ' Apollo ', R. 154. '' Vide infra, p. 163. " Find. Pyth. 10. 2 ; cf. Schol. Deni. Ol. i. 20. io6 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE from him ; wherefore Pindar places Thessaly in regard to him on the same footing as Laconia ; and we should under- stand the Homeric view of him the better if we suppose that the Thessalian Achaeans had admitted his claims already in the prc-Homeric period •''. But the narrowness of the theory that would explain Herakles as aboriginally a Dorian hero is most clearly exposed by the records of his cult and legend in Boeotia. The record is far richer than those of Laconia or the Argolid. In nearly every part of Boeotia his worship was established, whether of the hero or of the god ; and as regards the Thebans, Isokrates assures us that they honoured him more than any other deity with processions and sacrifices ''. Yet he was not intimately interwoven with their oldest heroic saga and genealogies ; he has no real footing in the old Cadmeian family, which was of Minyan affinities ; he marries Megara, the daughter of Kreon, but that is what any distinguished alien might have done ; he is hostile to the Minyans, and destroys Erginos, the Minyan king of Orcho- menos, just as, according to another legend known to Homer, he attacks and defeats the Minyan Neleidai at Pylos. He was indeed born in Thebes, as the prevailing legend insisted *=, but his reputed father, Amphitruon, and his mother, AJkmena, had come from Tiruns, according to the current tradition. If we must seek in some migration or tribal settlement for the cause of the hero's predominance in Boeotia, we might have recourse to the Thucydidean tradition of an invasion of Boiotoi from the north, who dispossessed the older inhabitants and spread the reverence for their favourite hero Herakles far and wide through the land. But the more one examines that tradition in the light of other legends and of the Homeric evidence, the less one is inclined to believe it, or, in fact, to believe at all in the existence of a single tribe called Boiotoi, whether as coming * This might explain the conjunction of the Aeacid Telemon and Herakles in the myth of the first expedition against Troy. " Philipp. p. 88. '- Already in Hom. //. 19. 99: it is onlyDiodorus Siculus who places his birth at Tiruns (4. 10). CULT OF HERAKLES 107 from Pindos or Thessaly. At any rate, no tradition of their conquest is linked with the name of Herakles, nor did any Boeotian stock regard itself as Herakleidai. The Theban devotion to Herakles seems to have been purely personal, unconnected with any history of tribal settlement. ( Nor does it appear that they worshipped him as ancestor \ and though his Theban children by Megara were still receiving heroic honours in Pindar's time "", they are not worked into the genealogies of Theban families. And the Theban legend agrees on the whole with the Argive in regard to the birth of the hero and his relations with Eurustheus. For instance, we are told that just before the annual festival of Herakles at Thebes offerings were always made to a heroine called Galinthias ^, who in the local folk-lore was reputed to have been a daughter of Proitos and a priestess of Hekate, and was turned into a weasel — hence her name from yakri — ^by the Moirai, who were wroth with her because she assisted the birth of Herakles. We discern clearly the Argive strain in this Theban folk-lore in the name of Proitos, and the tradition that the Moirai endeavoured to hinder the fateful birth. In fact early legend and legendary names suggest a close intercourse between Thebes and Argos in prehistoric times, an intercourse that need not be explained by any actual migration of tribes. Herakles as a wandering hero could have arrived at Thebes from Argos ; or he may in very early days have entered Boeotia from the north, and part of his legend may have reached Thebes later from Argos "^^^ It is the nature of hero-cult, as distinct from the worship of | ancestors, to spread spontaneously over a wide area, if it J possesses sufficient energy and attractiveness. As regards the cult of Herakles in Attica, the record, though doubtless incomplete, is fairly full, and allows us to draw certain historical conclusions. It is clear that this '■ Isthm. 3. 79. ^ Anton. Liber. Transf. 29. *= Friedlander, ' Herakles ' {Philog. Untersuch. 19, 1907), pp. 45-59, rightly maintains that Herakles was an intruder into Boeotia (noting that the name would have been ZlpanK^s if genuine Boeotian) ; but his view that he arrived late from Rhodes under the influence of the Rhodian epic is not based on anv real evidence. io8 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE hero-god does not belong to the aboriginal stratum of Attic religion and rnythology, that which we may call Erechtheid or Kekropid. (^Therefore he^had no place on the Akropolis, \^he oldest centre of cult J v£he localities where he was most ardently worshipped were either th e suburb s, such places as Melite on the south-west '', and Kunosarges, with its adjacent district called Diomeia ^, or demes remote from the city, Marathon especially, and in the Mesogaia. And these cult- facts agree with the view of him presented by Attic legend. Attica is the scene of none of his achievements, but he comes to the land as a welcome guest, especially honoured by Theseus. As a stranger he was by special privilege admitted to the Eleusinia, a story which could only arise after the mysteries were thrown open to the Greek world, that is to say, not earlier than 600 b. c. We have noted the claim of the Athenians to have been the first to deify him. It is easier for the majestic stranger to be deified than the resident hero. No more here than in the case of Thebes are we obliged to suppose that the cult was imported by some tribal movement or irruption, '^ievertheless, in looking at the Attic phenomena, we seem justified in drawing a probable ethnic conclusion; namely, that the hero who in this land was soon to become divine, was introduced by lonians from Boeotia^, (Tlrhe Marathonian tetrapolis, fervently devoted to Herakles, where games of Panhellenic prestige were held in his honoiu: in the fifth century, was a centre of early Ionic influence*^ the district of Diomeia, where his cult was powerful, was connected with the Aegeid tribe, a probably Ionic appellative ; and his close association in Attica with Theseus, attested not only by fEuripidg s in his Herakles Mainomenos, but also by Plutarch from other sources, may be explained in this way : for Theseus represents an Ionic element in the population. That the lonians had at an earlier stage in their history been resident in Boeotia is a belief that is gaining ground among those * Schol. Arist. Ran. 504. " Paus. I. 19. 3; Herod. 6. 116; Steph. Byz. s.v. Kvp<.',aapyei ; Arist. Ran. 651. CULT OF HERAKLES 109 scholars who are capable of being persuaded by the evidence of cult and cult-names. And that this people reverenced Herakles already while in Boeotia is in a high degree probable, though the}^ never claimed race-affinity with him. Moreover, the theory that the Attic cult was derived from Boeotia would explain two somewhat singular facts. The cult of Herakles Mrikiav, to which a curious ritual-legend attaches that will be examined below, is recorded of both the two countries. Secondly, we learn from Pindar that the Thebans offered in his own day heroic honours to the children of Herakles ; nowhere else in the whole Greek world has-this cult been reported^, except at Prasiai on the Attic coast, where an inscription of about 400 B. c. attests a ' l]paK\€Lb&v caxapa ^, a nethcr-altar consecrated to the worship of the children of Herakles ; and Prasiai lay on an old religious route con- necting the coast of Euboea with the Ionic Delos. We may suppose with some reason, then, that the^onians brought with them from Boeotia into Attica this cult of the children as well as that of the father^ And this peculiar religious fact in Attica may explain the legend for which no rational ethnic solution has ever been found, that Attica protected the Herakleidai against the tyranny of Eurustheus. That legend cannot be a mere barefaced invention of Attic vanity ; else it would not have been accepted so widely in the Greek world and at so early a period as the time of Pherekudes. A certain genuine folk-lore was likely to arise to explain how it was that the children of Herakles were worshipped in Attica, also that at Kunosarges were altars of Herakles, Hebe, Alkmene, and the Boeotian lolaos <=. When the impulse of the Argive epic tradition reached Attica, the story could hence arise that this pious land had protected the children against the ruthless invader from Argos, and that lolaos had miraculously come to their help ; there was a Theban * The grave of his son Hullos on the confines of Megara, reported by Pausanias, i. 41. 2, does not seem to have received heroic cult. " The inscription — C.I. A. 2. 1658 — was first published in Eph. Arch. 2ndser., 1862, p. 83, no. 84 ; it was found on a slab which probably marked the boundary of the precinct. "^ Pans. i. 19. 3. no ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE saga that he had risen from the dead for that purpose ; the Attic story that he was miraculously rejuvenated in the battle might have been suggested by his association with Hebe in the cult at Kunosarges.'CEuripides evidently drew the greater part of the plot of hisU erakleidai from genuine popular sources ; and he rightly lays the scene in the Marathonian district ; in this district was the fountain Makaria, and the place near it where Eurustheus was sup- posed to have been killed, was still called EvpvaOiois K€^a\i^ in the days of Pausanias^. The worship of the children of Herakles in Attica was probably a mere casual fact, arising, we may believe, from some cult-influence radiating from Thebes. But it was bound to be drawn into the vortex of the great Argive-Dorian legend of the ' return of the Herakleidai '. The view to which these data point, that Herakles came into Attica not merely as a wandering hero but in company with a migratory tribe, such as the lonians entering from Boeotia, is suggested also by his title 'Apx^yyeVrj? attached to him in an inscription found on the Akropolis, of which the reading is certain but the context lost ^. 'Apxny^rrjs is the appropriate title for gods and heroes who lead the new colony or guide the people in their migrations. Nowhere else in the Greek world dy we find Herakles so designated, not even in Laconia. (Wi^d unless this phrase in the in- scription is a mere meanmgless freak, we must say that it enshrines the memory of Herakles as the leader of some immigrant stockA X bis would nat urally be Ionian ; for it could not be of the Minyan peopleT^o wHom he was hostile everywhere and always ; and we know of no other alien Hellenic stock that made its way into Attica. As our ethnic survey approaches the Isthmus and the * We may suppose that Strabo, p. 377, and Pausanias, i. 44. 13, give us genuine Megarian and Attic folk-lore about the expedition of Eurustheus. But Euripides may have transformed the fountain Makaria into the lieroic maiden who sacrifices herself for her family ; for the story has no independent testimony, the later writers who quote it seeming to be merely drawing from him. It is also possible that he heard it in the countryside. " C. I. A. 2. 947. CULT OF hp:rakles hi Peloponnese the Dorian question becomes the primary one ; and those who beUeve that this stock had a special preroga- tive in the cult of Herakles are apt to regard its establishment in the various communities of this region as a result of Dorian conquest. But, as we have seen, the facts by no means bear out that belief. Therefore we should only be induced to regard any particular Peloponnesian cult as a Dorian deposit if some legend or specific feature definitely pointed to or suggested Dorian influence. Otherwise, we have just as much right to ascribe any local worship of him in the Peloponnese to the pre-Dorian period. In most cases we fail to find any clue. The very scanty record, ,both literary and archaeological, of Herakles-cult in Aigina ^ and Megara suffices to prove that he was acknowledged as divine or semi-divine in these communities ; for Aigina both Pindar and Xenophon attest his temenos, and at one city in the Megarid we have epigraphic evidence of a IJerakleioi^V- His figure does not appear on the coinage of either State, and we are justified in concluding that he occupied a prominent place neither in the mythology nor the worship of these Dorian communities^?) The legendary grave of Hullos near Megara no doubt conserved the tradition of the return of the Herakleidai. Megara also possessed a grave, or at least a sepulchral monument, of Alkmene *=, and we might at first sight be inclined to believe that this was a Dorian fiction, the incoming conquerors being anxious to claim for their new settlement some relic of the ancestress of their kingly house. But it is possible that the name and cult of Alkmene reached the Megarid from Thebes and Argos in the pre- Dorian period. 'iki Corinth we hear of no cult of him at all, but merely of an archaic wooden image of him that stood near the temple of Athena XaAtwris, and which was supposed to be the work of Daidalos^ This attribution, if made on good grounds, dates the statue near to 600 b. c, and we may regard it as a Dorian dedication ^. But his figure is not found among the »■ Xen. Hell. 5. i. 10 ; Find. Nem. 7. 94- '' <^^ I- G- -^cpt. i. 213. = Paus. I. 41. I. ' Id. 2. 4. 5. \ 112 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE coin-types of Corinth until the third century a.d., and then only as an art-type, an imitation of the statue by Glukon ^. He is somewhat more prominent in Sikuon ; but neither his monuments nor his cult can be proved to have any special connexion with the Dorian supremacy in this State. The earliest statue recorded was one by Dipoinos and Skullis of Crete, whose period probably coincided with the supremacy of Kleisthenes, the avowed enemy of the Dorian population ^. The most interesting cult-legend is that which refers to the change in the form of his worship, whereby the originally merely heroic ritual was combined with a form of sacrifice that marked him as a god ". But from what we can learn of his cult in other Dorian communities, we have no right to assume that such a change points to Dorian influence. And the legend attaching to it disproves such an assumption ; for the change is associated with the arrival and the influence of Phaistos, whose name connects him plainly with Crete, the land which claimed to be the parent of much Hellenic religion. The legend belongs clearly to a pre-Dorian stratum. The utmost that we can say is that the affiliation of Phaistos to Herakles may betray the pressure of Dorian influence. As our survey penetrates farther into the Peloponnese, which is the arena of so many of the legendary exploits of Herakles, we might naturally expect to find in them some impress or reflection of Dorian conquests. It would be futile, of course, to search for this in the mere stories of folk-lore, such as the slaying of the Nemean lion, the pursuit of the Arcadian hind, and the others of this type. But it might be thought that such heroic and quasi-historic sagas as the campaigns of Herakles against Angelas and the sons of Aktor, against Hippokoon and his sons, against the Pylians of Neleus' territory, legends associated with the conquest of Elis, Sparta and the destruction of the Minyans of Messene, have some ethnic value as the dim memorials of tribal struggles. This is probably true, but they have no ethnic value for the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese. A search- '^ Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Corinth ', p. 87, PL xxii. 5. b Plin. Nat. Hist. 35. 4. i. " Paus. 2. 10. i. CULT OF HERAKLES 113 ing and detailed analysis of them reveals them as belonging to a far earlier stratum of legend-deposit ; and it may be said of the whole Heraklean legend in the Peloponnese that it is indefinitely pre-Dorian. It is also significant that the later and canonical traditions of the Dorian conquests of the Argolid, Laconia, and Messenia have nothing to say about Herakles at all. The legend of the hatred of the Argive Goddess for Herakles has been explained as reflecting the feeling of the pre-Dorian Achaeans towards the invading Dorians ^ : the contemptible character of Emrustheus and the offensive name of his minister Koirpevs show, it is said, the Dorian prejudice. But this theory is beset with a very grave difficulty ; we shall have to believe that the Iliad shares and maintains the Dorian prejudice ; for the poet takes that view of Eurustheus and knows both the name and the functions of Kopreus ^. The theory does not explain under what influences the poet, at the same time as he mentions and describes the contemptible Kopreus, should be at pains to glorify his son Periphetes ". To search for Dorian prejudice in the Iliad is to search for a chimera. It has been suggested above that the tradition of Hera's hatred may reflect the tradition of the prehistoric hostility between Argos and Thebes. We may also regard it as an aetiologic myth, imagined in order to explain certain facts, namely, that on the one hand the Achaeans, like other tribes, admitted his primacy among all heroes and claimed the Peloponnese as the scene of his leading adventures and the Argolid as the birthplace of his family, and that on the other hand he was not admitted into the roll of the Argive kings nor enjoyed any prominent cult in Argive territory. For unless our record is wholly at fault, this seems to have been the case even in the Dorian and historic period. At Kleonai we hear of a temple, perhaps associated with the legend of the death of the sons of Aktor, the Molionides, at * By Humbert in Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites, 3, p. 85, follovnng Wilamowitz, Herakl. Mainom. p. 295. b II. 19. 118. « 15. 638. 2460 I 114 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE the hero's hands ^, These facts make strongly against the view taken by Vollgraflf in the article quoted above, ' Rhodos oder Argos '. CULT OF HERAKLES 115 the name of Kresphontes, the Dorian King of Messenia •'*. Xln the city of Messene itself was an ancient shrine, said to (_ have been built by a certain Mantiklos about the middle of the seventh century ; by a somewhat unusual process Herakles attached the name Mantiklos to himself, and was worshipped by the double title 'HpaKkrjs MdinKXa^ not only here but in the Sicilian Messene also ^. That his ritual on Mount Ithome in the fourth century w^ heroic, not divine, is attested by archaeological evidence quoted above. Among the favourable omens that occurred just before the restoration of Messene by Epaminondas, Pausanias recounts that the priest of Herakles in the Sicilian Messene dreamed that Herakles Mantiklos had been invited to Ithome by Zeus to a festival of the gods ". It strikes us, therefore, as all the more strange that the name of Herakles should be omitted in Pausanias' record of the religious and festal celebrations at the foundation of the new city, when so many deities and Messenian heroes were invoked **. Nor do the coin-types of the city show the figure of the hero. Religious evidence from this long-ruined land must always be inconclusive ; but there is nothing to suggest that the religious imagination of the Dorian Messenians cherished the cult of Herakles with any peculiar fervour. Pausanias, in his picturesque account of one of their earliest battles with the Lacedaemonians, chooses to make them revile the latter for their impiety in attacking those who have the same ' ancestral ' god, Herakles ; but this is only what the late writer thinks was natural for them to say. We come now to the crucial question of the Lacedae^ monian cult and myth. We should expect to find the figure of Herakles more prominent in the Dorian community of Laconia than in any other Greek State ; for he was the accepted traditional ancestor of their kings, and only among them did royalty remain a living institution throughout the period of their independence. And we may believe that the Greek world generally recognized the peculiar intimacy between the hero and the » Paus. 4. 30. I. " Id. 4. 23. 10. " 4. 26. 3. ■' 4. 27. 6-7, I 2 \ ii6 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE Spartan State. T^rrtaeus appealed to them in the Messenian war to ' stand fast, for ye are of the Uneage of unconquered Herakles ' ^ ; Xenophon puts into the mouth of Kallias, the Athenian ambassador to Sparta, a plea for her close friend- ship with Athens, based on the legend that Athens had admitted Herakles ' the founder of your State — 6 v/xeVepo? apxnyerns ' — to the Holy Mysteries of Eleusis by peculiar privilege ^ ; and Cicero, doubtless on good authority, narrates that the statue of Herakles in his Spartan shrine streamed with sweat before the battle of Leuktra, as if he more than any divine power was specially disturbed by the prescience of the calamity impending over his people ". ^ We must, then, scrutinize closely the facts of Laconian cult. Pausanias ^ mentions the shrine of Herakles within and near the wall of Sparta, in which was a statue represent- ing him in hoplite-armour, probably the same as that to which Cicero refers. We note that his primitive and \\dlder outfit has been changed to suit the character of the Dorian war-hero, but the explanatory legend attaching to the statue referred to pre-Dorian events. This is the only, temple recorded at Sparta or in the vicinity ; but two other cult- statues are mentioned, one near the place called ' Dromos ' ^ where the epheboi sacrificed to him on reaching man's estate ; the other on one of the bridges leading to the island near Platanistai *", on which the annual combats between the two parties of the epheboi took place : the first of these images Pausanias declares to be ancient, the second may have been contemporary with the late revival of so-called Lycurgean institutions. /-^he only festival consecrated to Herakles at Sparta was one called 'Epyana s, if we may trust Hesychius. It is a strange word, and the explanation that may at once occur I to us that it was a festival commemorating the ^pya, the deeds 'of Herakles is not convincing; Greek festivals were not usually instituted to commemorate myths. Assuming that * Fr. II. '■ Hell. 6. 3. 6 {Cults, 3, ' Demeter ', R. 170). ■= De Divin. 1, 34, p. 74. '^ 3. 15. 3. -■ Id. 3. 14. 6. •' Id. 3. 14. 8. ^ Hesych. s.v. cf. 'HXaKcmLa. CULT OF HERAKLES T17 its association with Herakles was aboriginal, we must consider it in connexion with another record, that at Megalo- polis Herakles was included in a special group of deities called 'Epydrai ^ : the others were Athena ' Ergane ', Apollo Aguieus ', Hermes, and Eileithuia, and to none of these could the title 'EpyaTrjs be applied in a martial or chivalrous sense. And the term would more normally allude to agriculture and the handicrafts. It might be suggested that the festival kpydna was consecrated to Herakles not as hero- A r-j warrior of the Dorians, not as the hero of the twelve adven- \ ^ lures, but to the ' Idaean ' Herakles, the Daktyl, the \ mysterious semi-divine craftsman. The reality of this" latter figure will be considered in a later section. But if this explanation were correct, we should not be inclined to regard the festival as a Dorian institution. And the question how much of his cult and legend at Sparta is due to Dorian influence is not an easy one to decide. The sculptor Gitiadas in the sixth century, working for the Dorian State, carved the achievements of Herakles on the bronze walls of Athena ' of the Brazen House ' ^', and their association with Herakles dictated the consecration of the epheboi to him at the statue near ' the Dromos '. The most obvious imprint of the Dorian tradition is his cult -epithet yivdpxr)s, which is found nowhere else and which is only attested by a late inscription of the Roman period '', when his worship had fallen into the hands of a priestess who succeeded to it by hereditary right ; the appellative ' the founder of the race ' refers, of course, to the tradition of the Herakleidai, but it is very likely an archaizing sobriquet invented by the decadent period ; we find other inscriptions of the Roman Imperial period mentioning priests who, like the ancient Spartan kings, boasted to be descended from him like the ancient kings ; but these are not chronicles of genuine Dorism. In fact, considering the tradition of the Herakleidai, we have the right to be surprised at the paucity of his cult- record and legend in the city of Sparta. » Paus. 8. 32. 4. '■ Paus. 3. 17. 3. -^ C. I. G. 1446. ii8 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE There is no proof or hint that they regarded him as a god, and, as a hero, the record leaves us in doubt whether he appealed to them as strongly as Lukourgos, the Dioskouroi, and the Achaean heroes, Agamemnon and Menelaos. The Dorians in Laconia were eager to appropriate the heroic figures of Homeric and pre-Dorian saga ; '[but neither the literary nor the art-record of the country suggests that they were eager to proclaim the glory of Herakles, as we might suppose that they would be if he were typically the Dorian man. It is strange that even their kings, who claimed descent from him, do not appear in the account given us by Herodotus ^ of their religious functions to have had any special cult-relations with him. Nor is there any single Laconian myth current about him that can with any vraisemhlance be called Dorian. In fact there is only one Laconian legend current about him, the story of his attack upon the Spartan or Amyclaean Hippokoon and his sons. This story is strangely prevalent in Laconia, cropping up nearly in every place where his name was preserved. It was used to explain why his temple-statue was armed, why he founded at Sparta the shrines of Athena 'AfioVoii^oj ' the goddess of the just requital ' (he had justly requited Hippo- koon), of Hera Atyoc^dyov, who had not thwarted him as usual in the battle, of Asklepios KorvAews, who had healed his wound in the knee-cap (kotvAt/), why he hid on Taiigetos with Demeter Eleusinia in order to recover from his wound. We find it again at Skotitas on the Argive border, one of the few places in the country where a memorial of him occurred, a statue and a trophy said to have been erected by him to celebrate the victory over Hippokoon. .The legend, which has nothing hieratic in it ^ or any trait that suggests the struggles of migrating races, belongs to the pre-Dorian tradition ; Herakles having slain Hippokoon gives the rule to Tundareus. And in the country of Laconia, apart from Sparta, it is hard to discern traces of the ' Dorian ' Herakles : ' 6. 56-57. •" Wide's explanation of it in Lakonische Kulte as a lepos- A070S concerning Herakles' contest with Hades and Cerberus is forced and artificial. CULT OF HERAKLES 119 except perhaps at Guthion, of which Herakles was regarded as the founder conjointly with Apollo ^, their two statues standing together in the market-place ; for the legend may be taken to reflect the Spartan devotion to Delphoi. Lastly, Pausanias saw traces of his worship among the ruins of Las ^ ; but when and how it originated in this old Achaean settle- ment we cannot decide. So far, then, as the existing records allow us to draw any conclusion, we cannot say that the Dorian communities of the Peloponnese put Herakles in the forefront of their tribal legend or tribal cult, nor have we any proof that they deified him, nor can we detect any clear imprint of the Dorian migration on the Heraklean cults or traditions of these communities, except faintly in Laconia, where the survival of the monarchy might have given Herakles greater promi- nence than he enjoyed in the Argolid or Messenia or Sikuon or Corinth. But before a fair conclusion can be arrived at concerning the relations of Herakles to the Dorian community, the cults and traditions of the Dorian Hexapolis and Crete must be considered. Interesting questions arise concerning Kos and Rhodes that bear also on the higher Homeric criticism. In the fourteenth book of the Iliad " the poet preserves the tradition that the hero returning after his conquest of Troy was WTecked by Hera's malice on the shores of Kos ; and in the Ships' Catalogue, where the men of Kos are reckoned among the Achaean contingents, their leaders are the sons of Thessalos, who is the son of Herakles. Now modern writers have been inclined to interpret this legend and genealogy as proof of the Dorian occupation of Kos, and have similarly interpreted another passage in the Catalogue concerning the colonization of Rhodes by Tlepolemos '^ as a proof of the Dorian migration to Rhodes ; and, in view of the facts that the Homeric poems as a whole show no knowledge of any Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese, have either suspected these passages for later ' Dorizing ' interpolations or have drawn the conclusion that the Dorian stocks reached these * Paus. 3. 21. 8. '* 3. 24. 6. " 1. 255. ^ 2. 653-670. 120 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THF islands and Crete from the north of Greece at an earlier period than before their Peloponnesian conquests. Now, as regards Kos, this theory about the Homeric legend rests on one single piece of evidence, the name of Herakles alone, and therefore it rests on the frailest foundation ; for the right to assume a Dorian conquest or migration wherever in prehistoric epic-legend the name of Herakles occurs is disproved by all the facts that have been attested and examined hitherto. Nor do we find that the Dorian conquerors of the Peloponnese proclaimed Herakles as their supernatural leader and patron. Moreover, the legend which Plutarch preserves ^ — from what source we know not — that Herakles in his first conflict with the Meropes, the men of Kos, was defeated, and (disguising himself in female ^ttire fled for safety to the houSg'of a Thracian woman, is hot the kind of heroic legend that Dorians would be likely to intro- duce or to propagate concerning their hero. Let us also remark that the words of Homer himself discountenance any attempt to ' Dorize ' the legend, for he informs us that Herakles after his conquest of the island becomes the father of Thessalos by the daughter of the former king. This leads us then to look for the source of the legend in the migration of some Thessalian tribe ; we have other proofs of the close connexions between Kos and Thessaly and between Thessaly and Herakles. We may surmise, therefore, with more right that the notices about Kos represent a Thessalian-Achaean settlement and that the struggle of Eurupulos with Herakles represents a conflict of a Minyan population with an Achaean, as Herakles' relations with the Minyans are always hostile ^. From these considerations it follows that the legend and name of Herakles was well known in Kos before the Dorian settlement. Therefore we can have no certainty that what- ever forms of his cult we discover in the island are of Dorian institution. Nevertheless, Dorian influence at certain points is undoubted. A long inscription that appears to belong to " p. 304 C-D. ^ Vide Schol. //. 14. 255 (from Pherekudes) ; cf. Paton and Hicks, Inscr. Cos. pp. 344-345. CULT OF HERAKLES T2I the second century B.C. has been found on the ruins of Halasarna, containing in all probability the names of the three Doric tribes ^ ; its object is to regulate membership of the tribes, and the first few words of the decree which the inscription records show that the crucial significance of tribal membership was the right to participate in the religious services — to. Upd — of Apollo and Herakles. This I is proof that the religious-political tradition of the island / clave strongly to Herakles as an ancestral power. But the ' editors of the inscription ^ have shown reason for believing that the worship of Herakles was really the special privilege of the Hulleis, and that the other two tribes, the Dumanes and the Pamphuloi, did not regard Apollo as their tribal patron, for another inscription of somewhat older date, prescribing special tribal sacrifices to the eponymous heroes, lays down that the Hulleis shall sacrifice by the shrine of Herakles, the other two tribes elsewhere *". Yet we should probably be wrong in concluding that this tribe was respon- sible for the whole of the Coan cult of Herakles. For at least two centuries, from 400 to 200 b. c, his head is the predomi- nant type on the coins, and we have no reason to suppose that the Hyllean tribe dominated the administration of the State. And later writers like Aristides speak as if the Coan people generally wer(3ndevoted to him, worshipping him as "AAefis their ' Aid ' '^.VPid they worship him as God or hero -4^ or under both characters A The question is always of some interest for our estimate of the intensity of the popular devotion. The few literary records, such as that of Aristides, are vague ; if the Coans celebrated a holy marriage between him and Hebe, as a phrase of Cornutus " — who wrote on the ' Nature of the Gods ' in the time of Nero — ^suggests, we should conclude that these Dorians at least had raised him to the rank of an Ol3niipian divinity. Probably this was the popular view. For a Coan inscription, perhaps of the second century B.c.^ describes with great elaborateness a private * Paton and Hicks, op. cit. nos. 367, 368. '' Ibid. p. 259. "■ Ibid. no. 391. '' Vol. i, p. 60 (Dindorf). *■ C. 31. ' Paton and Hicks, ibid. no. 36. 122 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE cult of Herakles instituted and endowed by a certain Diomedon, in which Herakles is styled Ato/xeSoVreios, the name of the founder being attached to the divinity, as we find occasionally in Semitic communities and very rarely in Hellenic ^. The details and paraphernalia of the cult prescribed seem altogether theistic — we find mention of altars, ^(afxos as well as kayapa, a vaos or house of the divinity, of sacrifices being shared by the priest and worshipper : and the devotion that prompts all this would be inspired by a belief in the godhead of the recipient ; those of the family circle of worshippers are put specially under his protection by a formal presentation or consecration to him, and marriages were solemnized in his shrine. The evidence of the public inscriptions is less easy to interpret. The offerings of the Hyllean tribe, prescribed in the inscription noted above ^, appear to have been in the first instance heroic ; the young lamb that was burnt entire — apT]v kqvtos — may have been the victim made over by fire wholly to the hero, but on the same day an ox was sacrificed to him by the priest without any restrictions, and we may regard this as a sacrifice to he god. If this evidence from Kos has been correctly interpreted, we note that the hero was raised in this island, as in Attica and Thebes, to the higher plane which he does not seem to have attained in the leading Dorian communities of the Peloponnese ; but we shall still be in doubt whether this was due to the local Dorian devotion or to the older influences surviving in the island. The Homeric lines concerning Rhodes and the migration thither of Tlepolemos, the son of Herakles, who fled from his home because he had slain his uncle Likumnios, have been similarly interpreted as an allusion to the Dorian settlement of Rhodes and as revealing Dorian influence on the poem. This ethnic interpretation of the passage has more solid reasons in its favour than the similar one of the ' Vide the author's Greece and Babylon, pp. 195-196 ; cf. ' Hera?.-'es Mantiklos ' above. >> Ibid. no. 39. I" CULT OF HERAKLES 123 passages concerning Kos. It would, indeed, have no more value than the other if it only rested on the fact that Tlepole- mos was a Heracleid, for there were many other ' children of Herakles ' besides the Dorian kings. But there are other weightier indications that seem to have escaped general attention. In the first place, the Homeric poet imagines Tlepolemos to be living before his exile in a place where the ' sons and grandsons ' of Herakles are numerous and powerful. This for him would be either Thebes or the Argolid ; but we must suppose the latter, as Tlepolemos immediately after slaying Likumnios builds ships and sails away ; and this must^have been the Rhodian tradition which later mythologists, Pindar "", Diodoros '', Apollodoros ^ reproduce. Also, the personality of Likumnios is rooted in the Argolid. In the second place, the poet of the catalogue twice lays stress on the triple tribal organization of the emigrants whom Tlepolemos brought to Rhodes, as a curious fact that excited his interest ; and this is the hall-mark of the Dorian and, as far as we know, of no other Greek tribe. And this Homeric evidence is con- firmed by later good authorities ^, Thucydides and Pindar, both declaring that Rhodian Dorians were of Argive origin and Pindar attesting the fact that the Rhodians in his own day were worshipping Tlepolemos as the ' Tirynthian founder ' of their colony. The Dorism of Rhodes was thus linked with the name of^ / Herakles ; and it was a Rhodian poet Peisandros who pro- ! bably did most for the systematization of the Heracleai^l^ legend-cycle. But the religion and the mythic tradition of the island reveal but slight traces of this influence. Two inscriptions, one of a late period, attest a priesthood of Herakles at Kameiros and at Rhodes, and we may prima facie interpret as Dorian the sacrifice to Herakles at Lindos, with a curious ritual and a clownish story attaching to it that will be later examined. On the other hand the rich and » 01. 7. ^ 4. 58. ■= 2. 8. 2. ^ Strabo alone dissents and controverts the whole theory on the ground of his conviction that the Dorian colonization of the islands is subsequent to the return of the Herakleidai, and therefore post-Homeric, p. 653. 124 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE varied coinage of Rhodes takes no notice of the hero. In fact, the rehgious devotion of the island was attached to older and higher cults, pre-eminently and most passion- ately to Helios and, next to him, to Athene, both of these divinities belonging here in all probability to the pre- Hellenic world of Minoan tradition. Had the cult of Herakles been powerful and deep-rooted among these Dorians of the Hexapolis, we should certainly expect that it would have received recognition in the Triopian festival of Knidos, celebrated by the six Dorian States, Lindos, lalysos, Kameiros, Kos, Knidos, and Halikarnassos — afterwards reduced to five by the exclusion of Halikarnassos — the right to participate being a test of pure Dorian nation- ality '-". But we know that the chief god of the festival was Apollo, and that Poseidon and the Nymphs were accessory ^deities '' ; no record mentions Herakles as having any part in it. The same phenomenon confronts us in Crete, a land of traditional and conservative Dorism, which already was known to the poet of the Odyssey ^ as inhabited partly by ' the Dorians of three tribes ' : and Strabo "^ records the tradition of Althaimenes the Argive leading a Dorian colony here from Argos and Megara. Yet the later records scarcely reveal any trace of the cult of Herakles either divine or heroic, anywhere in the island ^ Almost the only evidence is supplied by the coins of the Cretan cities Allaria, Phaistos, Praisos, and Chersonesos, and the types of Herakles on these suggest mythologic art rather than a cult-figure, while that of the last-mentioned city is borrowed directly from the coinage of the Arcadian Stumphalos ' . We have a large number of Cretan inscriptions, both public and private, and many of them of the highest importance containing codes of law and treaties between cities sanctified by public oath ; '^ Herod, i. 144 "■ Schol. Theocr. 17, 69 {Cults, 4, ' Apollo ' Geogr. Reg. s.v. Knidos). ''' 19- 178. '' p. 653. •" The town that was said to be the port of Knossos, called Herakleion, is of unrecorded date, and we do not know whether to connect its name with the Dorian tradition (Steph. Byz. s.v. 'tipaKKeia. Strab. pp. 476, 484). ' Vide Head, Hisi. Num.-, p. 460. CULT OF HERAKLES 125 and these reveal a whole pantheon of pan-Hellenic and local divinities of higher and lower rank. We detect in many of them the strong and abiding tradition of the Minoan period and the deposits of many strata of Hellenic nationality ; but we nowhere find the name of Herakles in these historic -f- arphives ; we can only suppose him to be included among the general group of f/'pcoe? who were honoured with a common ritual. But if Crete supplies us with very slight evidence con- cerning the cult or high estimation of the Hellenic hero, it presents a curious problem in the personality of the ' Idaean ' Herakles, who was identified with one of the Cretan Daktyls, the most incongruous confusion in Greek mythology ; for these latter were a daimonistic company of dwarfs, ministers or attendants of the great goddess of Crete, semi-hieratic beings much connected with mysteries, Samothracian and other, having no secular tradition but devoted to the arts of metallurgy ; natural associates therefore for hierophants and mystagogues, such as Pythagoras and Onomakritos, but not for the robust Hellenic hero of high epic achievement who was no mystic devotee, had no natural affinity with the orgiastic earth-mother, no interest in the arts, and who, if not a giant, was certainly no dwarf and whose career was on the whole human and secular. It is as surprising as if we suddenly found Sigurd identified with Regin. The few scholars who have noticed the problem make little or no comment and offer no satisfactory explanation =^. We must first scrutinize the authority. The earliest author who vouches for Herakles the Daktyl appears to have been Onomakritos. In describing the cult of the ' Great goddesses ' at Megalopolis, Demeter and Kore, 1 Pausanias states that by the statue of Demeter was a dwarf- statue of Herakles, just a cubit in height ^' ; ' and ', he adds, ' Onomakritos in his verses declares that this Herakles is one of the so-called Idaean Daktyls '. Pausanias is clumsy * Except perhaps Lobeck Aglaophamus 1168-1178, who ascribes the fiction of Herakles the Daktyl mainly to Elean vanity excited by the altar at Olympia of Herakles napaararri's. •> 8. 31. 3. 126 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE in his way of putting it ; he must have known the date of Onomakritos and that he being contemporary with Peisi- stratos could not have described a monument of the city founded by Epaminondas. We may suppose that what he wanted to say was that this statue of diminutive size did not represent the heroic son of Alkmene but the Idaean dwarf, the Daktyl-Herakles, for whose existence Onomakritos was an authority. The latter was an oracle-monger and a forger of spurious literature. Still we must suppose that Pausanias found in verses published in his name an indication of a Daktyl-Herakles : and this is the earliest record we possess. The rest is given us by later writers such as Cicero, Dio- doros, and Pausanias himself. Diodoros records the view of certain people "", possibly Cretan antiquarians, that one of the Idaean Daktyls was called Herakles and that it was he, not the son of Alkmene, who instituted the Olympian contest. This view is further developed by Pausanias ^, who presents the theory of the antiquarians of Elis that the Kouretes who nurtured the new-born Zeus in Elis were really ' Idaean Daktyls ' who had come from Crete and whose special names were Herakles, Paionaios, Epimedes, lasios, and Idas, mostly names alluding to the art of healing ; and that the eldest, Herakles, instituted the Olympian games with the crown of wild olive. Almost immediately he gives another account, slightly inconsistent with the former, that a certain Cretan, a descendant of the Idaean Herakles came to Olympia fifty years after Deukalion's deluge, instituted the Olympian contest, and dedicated an altar to the Kouretes and among them specially to his ancestor Herakles, under the cult- title Uapaa-TaTT]^- ' the Aider '. The only other cult-chronicle of importance is Pausanias' statement concerning the temple of Demeter at Mukalessos in Boeotia on the Euripos "" : of this, he tells us, Herakles was the door-keeper, and the Boeotians * 5. 65 ; it is not clear if his statement is derived from Ephoros, whom he quotes for the earher part of his account of the Daktyls. " 5. 7. 6 ; of. 5. 8. I. " Vide Cults, 3, ' Demeter', R. 8. Pausanias' other statement (9. 27. 6) that the ancient cult of Thespiai was really a cult of the ' Idaean ' Daktyl- Herakles and not of the Hellenic hero is merely a freakish theory of his own. CULT OF HERAKLES 127 regarded him as one of the Idaean Daktyls, no doubt because they considered such a menial hieratic function as unsuitable to the adventurous Hellenic hero. The passage in Cicero's De Natura Deorum "" where he distinguishes many different ' Herakleis ', and designates the third in his list as ' the Idaean, to whom funeral offerings are brought ', is doubt- fully given in the manuscripts and has been rashly emended ; at the best it only shows that the theory of an Idaean Herakles had caught on among the later theologians, and that where they noted a funeral ritual in his cult they considered this to be intended rather for the inferior and mortal Daktyl than for the apotheosized hero. These are all the religious records that bear directly on the question, and we should consider a single genuine cult-inscription of greater value than all these. But no coin-legend, no archive of public or private religion betrays any recognition of this dubious figure. We may be inclined to ignore it as a fiction of uncritical litterateurs, of Diodoros misled by the claim of Crete to be the source of all mytho- logy, of Pausanias dupe of the local antiquarian. We may accept Lobeck's sceptical suggestion that this Daktyl- Herakles was a spurious product of Elean vanity, set working by the fact that the altar of ' the Aider '■ — in reality the Hellenic hero — had some accidental association with the Kouretes as well. But we may still feel bound to explain why the Eleans tried to ascribe the institution of the famous games to this hybrid Daktyl-hero, or at least to a Cretan descendant of his. Both suggestions were equally fatuous, and equally repugnant to the genuine Hellenic tradition. And if in general this Daktyl-Herakles was a mere freakish creation of the Eleans, how did they succeed in palming him off on the Athenian Onomakritos, who had no known re- lations with Elis, and on the Boeotians of Mukalessos, if we may trust Pausanias' account of the local ' exegesis ' there ? It is reasonable to suppose that there were certain facts that justified the Elean fiction and gave it a certain vitality. * 3- 10. 128 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE Possibly something had happened in Crete that might explain the mystery. It would be an absurd supposition to posit an aboriginal Cretan Herakles distinct from the Hellenic. He never enters into any Cretan myth or genealogy of the pre-Dorian, not to say the pre-Hellenic, period. We must suppose that one of the Dorian tribes, the HuUeis, brought him there as their ancestor, though they may have done little to develop or propagate his cult. We can hardly suppose that they deliberately identified him with one of the Daktyls, the mythic dwarf-artists who danced attendance on the Great Mother. Such identification of Hellenic with alien deities and heroes arose from some resemblance in the sound of the name or character or attributes and outfit. No such resemblance existed between Herakles and the Daktyls ; no beings could be more incongruous, the one to the other ; and originally the Daktyls as a vague company of daimones had no names, while those that later fiction invented for them, functional names relating to the metal- arts or to medicine, have no approximation in sound to the name ' Herakles '. Nor is there any shadow of a proof that there was ever a Daktyl-Herakles recognized as such by the people of Crete. But it is not in itself unlikely, though we have no evidence, that the personality of the Hellenic hero in Crete might have been attracted into the vortex of the great Minoan Goddess who under various names still remained dominant in Hellenic times, and who from of old had been accompanied by a youthful divine attendant or lover. If this had happened, then wherever the worship of Rhea or the ' Great Mother of the Gods ' engrafted itself from Crete on the mainland, as we have reason to suppose it did, it might have carried Herakles with it in the incongruous position of hieratic companion or minister. Now this might account for his position at Mukalessos in association with Demeter Europa, f(ir Demeter was not infrequently assimilated to Rhea- Kubele, and Europa is a title which suggests Cretan influence ; and we can multiply examples of legendary and religious influences from this island in Boeotia. Again, we find the hero associated with the Mother of the Gods on the road CULT OF HERAKLES 129 from Arcadia to Elis along the Alpheus ^, and the Cretan legend could have penetrated the former country from the latter. There were probably more examples of this associa- tion than our record has preserved, for Aristides speaks as if it were a common experience both in the mountain dis- j tricts and in the cities to find Herakles grouped with the / * Mother of the Gods ' ^. Aristides is inclined to vague exaggerations, but we have proof that what he here describes as usual had actually happened in certain localities of cult. But this occasional association of Herakles with the Great Mother of Crete, while it probably explains the idea of a ' Herakles of Ida ' vaguely set afloat in late antiquity, would not necessarily engender the incongruous personality of a Daktyl-Herakles, of whom there is no sign in Crete itself. There is every reason for thinking that this was a misleading fiction of the Eleans themselves, and it is possible to suggest the influences that may have led them to it. We have many indications of an early connexion between Crete and Ehs "" whereby the latter country received the names of Minos and the Idaean cave into its local geography, the myth of the birth of Zeus, the cults of Rhea Kronos and the Kouretes. The legend of Rhea and the birth when it reached Elis from Crete may have brought in its cycle the attendant figure of Herakles ; only in that case it must have migrated thither some time after the Dorian occupation of Crete. Or it may have reached there without him ; and some accidental contiguity of cult at Olympia, such as the proximity of the altar of Herakles Ylapa(TTaT7]s — a natural name for the Hellenic hero — to the altar of the Daktyls ^ may have suggested to the Eleans the heresy that the hero was really their brother : all the more easily if they were aware that in Crete he had actually been drawn into the cortege of Rhea. '^ Dio. Chrys. Or. i, p. 59 R. The association of Herakles with Demeter at Megalopohs (Cults, 3, 'Demeter', R. 8) and on Mount Taiigetos with Demeter Eleusinia (Paus. 3. 20. 5) may be due to Attic-Eleusinian influence bringing the story of his initiation at Eleusis. *> I, p. 62, Dindorf. " Vide Cults, 3, pp. 293-294, and R. 27, p. 384. ^ Vide Paus. 5.7.9; cf. the altar mentioned 5. 14.9, which was dubiously assigned to the son of Alkmene or to the Kouretes. 2460 K •i 130 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE And they had a motive for cultivating this fiction and pro- pagating it. There was a tradition, still living in the time of Pausanias ^, that the old Eleans strongly disliked the son of Alkmene. And they had good reason. He had slain Angelas and devastated the land ; he had slain the Elean heroes called the Molionides, and the discreditable tradition of his action in this matter is full of Elean rancour against him ; he had slain the Minyan Neleus and his sons, and the Minyan stock had deep roots in Elis. These legends meant more for the ancient local folk-lore and for the local anti- quarian minds who speculated upon them than for us. There- fore there is value in the statement of Pausanias that it was Iphitos the Aetolian who first taught the Eleans to suppress their animosity and to worship Herakles ^. We can understand, then, the motive of the later Elean myth-makers in working up the personality of the Idaean Herakles, proclaiming him as a Daktyl, and exploiting him in rivalry to the son of Alkmene. Their most audacious fiction was to attribute to this shadowy person the founda- tion of the Olympian games,(a fiction which clashed with the genuine and generally accepted tradition that the Hellenic Herakles founded them to commemorate his con- quest of Angelas^ For there is no reason to doubt that the version of their origin given by Pindar in the tenth Olympian ode was the authoritative one ; and Pindar shows no con- sciousness of the phantom from Crete. The local anti- quarianism of Elis which Pausanias reproduces has much of the character of Wardour Street ; while tr3dng to dis- credit the Pindaric version, it filches the highly original story that Pindar invented concerning the Hyperborean journey of the heroic Herakles to bring back the wild olive to Olympia, and attaches it to Herakles the Daktyl ^ We may beheve that the clean fabrication was of late birth. If Pindar had known of it, there are reasons for thinking that he would have mentioned it, interested as he was in Thebes and Olympia on the one hand, Herakles and the Great Mother on the other. Still more difficult would it be * Vide 5. 4. 6, " 5. 4. 3. " Paus. 5. 6. 7. CULT OF HERAKLES 131 to explain the entire silence of Herodotus, if it had been in vogue in his time ; for he expounds at length his Egyptian theory of the origin of Herakles ^, and distinguishes the Hellenic from the Egyptian, the Tyrian, and the Thasian, nowhere mentioning the Cretan. Spurious as it probably was, the Elean theory has imposed on some later mythographers and some modern ^. Of its actual religious influence outside Elis, there is no clear evidence. It may have inspired the Boeotian interpretation of his cult at Mukalessos ; it may have had some acceptance in Arcadia, so exposed to Elean influences ; but the mere statement that the image of Herakles in the tempk of Demeter at Megalopolis was only a cubit high does not convince us that he was represented here as a Daktyl. The Elean ' Daktyl-Herakles ' was vaguely regarded as one of the Kouretes, and they were not diminutive. This long digression was inevitable ; for if the ' Idaean Herakles ' was proved to be a real personality of Cretan religion, we should find here additional proof of the weakness of the Dorian tradition in Crete concerning Herakles ; for so long as that tradition was strong, it is unlikely that the Hellenic hero of the epic adventures would have faded into the vague daimon of an orgiastic cult. Even as it is, the evidence inclines us to believe that! neither the myth nor the cult of Herakles was of vital force in Crete. It is necessary to apply the same question in regard to the later Dorian colonies. Of the twenty-three towns ' called Herakleia, enumerated by Stephanus, the Dorian question only can arise about three of them, ' Herakleia Pontike ' on the Propontis, ' Herakleia Minoa ' in Sicily, and Herakleia in Magna Graecia. The first of these was certainly devoted to the hero to whom the city was con- secrated by name ; the Herakles type is very frequent on the » 2. 43-45. *> Having accepted it uncritically. Miss Harrison in her Themis, p. 372, makes the Daktyl-personality the original and germ-idea of the whole individuality of the hero. K 2 132 ORIGIN. AND DIFFUSION OF THE coins of the fifth and fourth centuries b. c, and the dedication sent to Olympia by the Herakleots in the time of their highest prosperity was a representation of the deeds of Herakles^. Now the city was founded by a combination of Megarians and Boeotians from Tanagra ^. It is an open question then to what strain of ethnic influence we are to ascribe this local devotion. But we have not found the cult dominant in the Dorian Megara, nor do we find it so in the other Megarian colonies ; we have merely traces of it at Chalkedon ", Selinous ^, and Byzantium ; but the foundation of these is not in any way connected with him. But we are familiar with the Boeotian ardour for the name and the fame of Herakles ; and it is more reasonable to suppose that his privileged position in this hybrid colony was due to the settlers from Boeotia. Fortunately we have a text, though of a late authority, directly confirming this view. Justin informs us that at a time when the Boeotians were suffering from a pestilence the Delphic oracle responded to their appeal by bidding them found a colony in the region of Pontus consecrated to Herakles ^ The only other Dorian colony closely associated with the tradition of Herakles was Herakleia Minoa on the south coast of Sicily. We are informed by Herodotus'" that the Spartan Dorieus of the royal Herakleid family was incited to colonize this region by an oracle that supported itself by the record of Herakles' original conquest of the country. As regards Herakleia in Magna Graecia, we have the name and the coin-types of the city, all bearing the figure of Herakles in various scenes and of various types, to attest the popular devotion of the hero. It passed for a colony of Tarentum, though the inhabitants of Thourioi took some part in the foundation. From what is told us concerning the * Paus. 5. 26. 5. I' Ibid. •^ Xenoph. Hell. i. 3. 7 ; cf. CoUitz, Dialect. Inschr. 3052*. •^ He is mentioned in a fifth-century inscription (C. /. G. Sic. It. 268) among the deities who brought victory to the Selinuntians, and a fifth- century coin-type of Selinous represents him wrestling with a wild bull : Head, Hist. Num.^ p. 168. « 16. 3. ' 5- 43 ; cf. Diod. Sic. 4. 23. CULT OF HERAKLES i33 origin of Tarentum we discern that tlie original colonists were by no means pure Dorian, though they came from Laconia, nor were their religious traditions. But we have reason for thinking that the cult of Herakles was fairly popular among them ; we hear of their colossal statue of him, and his figure in various forms appears on their coins of the fourth and third centuries^. Though the hero was not regarded as their leader and founder, or even their chief protector ^, yet the Tarentines of the fifth century, when Herakleia was founded, would be glad to affix a name to it that reminded them and others of their ancient connexion with the Herakleid kings of Sparta. At the Dorian city of Akragas in Sicily, the cult of Herakles was maintained with ardent devotion, if we may trust the oratorical account of Cicero *=. In his denunciation of Verres, he describes the temple near the forum of that city as a shrine of peculiar holiness and remarkable beauty ; and the statue so attractive to the populace^hat part of the face was worn away by constant kissing. (Doubtless it .was Herakles, the healer of disease, who was thus caressed, j We must pause before we interpret this as an ebullition of the true Dorian religious spirit. For in the long and briUiant series of Akragantine coins not once does the type of Herakles occur, a fairly certain sign that he did not count much for the public life of this State. Nor do the remaining Dorian States in Sicily, Syracuse, Gela, Kamarina, yield any impressive evidence of his pre- dominance in the imagination of the people. The great battle against the Athenians in the harbour of Syracuse was fought near his shrine, and he or his priests, according to Plutarch '^, gave tactical advice to his citizens at that great crisis ; and, perhaps as a token of gratitude, a head of Herakles '' " Plutarch, Fab. Max. 22 ; he was worshipped at Tarentum under the curious title 'EpiSafaras. Vide Evans, The 'Horseman ' of Tarentum, p. 47 ; cf. Head, Hist. Num.- pp. 58, 66 ; Macdonald, Greek Coins in the Hunterian Collection, pp. 80-81. '' The Tarentines were more devoted to Poseidon. Vide Cults, 4, p. 59; Evans, op. cit. p. 67. '' In Verr. 4. 43. 94. ** Vit. Nik. 24. 25. '* Head, Hist. Num.- p. 175. 134 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE appears for the first time on their coins after the victory ; and his name with the epithet ' mighty-hearted ' — Kparcpo- (f)povos — occurs on an inscription from their later theatr e "". But this is the least that we might expect from a Dorian State with the HuUeis tribe among its citizens. And all that can be reported about Kamarina, the Syracusan colony, and of Gela, the Rhodian, is that the type of Herakles is occasionally found among their coins ; but it was not one upon which the gifted numismatic artists of Sicily worked with enthusiasm or solicitude. This survey presents evidence whicj^, if not convincing, is sufficient for a probable induction. CHerakles was not pre- eminently the Dorian hero and rarely if ever the object of their enthusiastic devotion. He is not the leader of their colonies and earlier migrations ; therefore the occurrence of his name in ancient literature is never in itself an indica- tion of Dorian settlement^ He is only connected with them as the ancestor of their ahen kings and the one Dorian tribe, the Hulleis. Tixerefore, we may beli eve, his cult, generally heroicj g-ther than divine, was preserved in all the Dorian States. tho iig]i-jaQwh££e_^vQ]d£g IeiTthTi5ia5iTr"or pow erfnlly ^pen;g^ingjth^j)iibli c mind. — It-^nay-ha- vc bo o n stronge r in Sparta thajx^elsew here , owin g tp the_long_s urvival tj iere of the Her akleid monarc hy. We have found the cult weakest in the oldest Dorian settlements across the sea, in Crete, Rhodes, and the Dorian Chersonese. In the Dorian com- munities of Magna Graecia and Sicily the prestige of Sparta may have added some vitality to the cult. But the hero was never the banner-bearer or the mythic symbol of the Spartan or other Dorian armies. And that his name and personality had no special and obvious Dorian significance is revealed by the numismatic fact that the anti-Spartan confederacy in- stituted among certain Asiatic coast-towns after the naval victory of Konon — 394 b. c.-=-adopted as a coin-type of the alliance the figure of the infant-Herakles strangling the snakes. ( We have to accept him from very old times as an almost -C.I. G. 5369. CULT OF HERAKLES 135 Panhellenic hero ; and therefore the minute geographical survey of his cult and legend is not likely to have any great ethnologic value ; though in ridding us of the ' Dorian fallacy ' it is not valueless. We find it at least as prevalent in Arcadia as in Laconia. The fact that his statue at Tegea was set up in the building called ' the Common Hearth of the Arcadians ' "" — a kind of Pan-Arcadian Prutaneion — suggests the possibihty that he was regarded as the symbol of the race-fellowship of the Arcadians, though it would be difficult to explain why he should have come to fulfil this role ; possibly the personality of Auge at Tegea, the daughter of the Arcadian king Aleos, the priestess of Athena, who is made by Herakles the mother of the Arcadian-Mysian Telephos, may afford a clue. His vogue in Arcadia may have been a tradition of the ' Achaean ' period ; the folk-lore of that district retained the traditions of his attack on Elis, his campaign against Sparta, his pursuit of the hind of Artemis, all Peloponnesian pre-Dorian traditions, as also are the legends concerning the Stymphalian birds and his pursuit of the Erymanthian boar ; or as we find Boeotian influences rife in many Arcadian myths and cults, pointing to real tribal connexions linking the two countries '', it is open to us to suppose that the Herakles-cult in parts of Arcadia was another Boeotian inheritance. But we have nowhere any clear indication of this ; at Pheneos, indeed, we find the hero-cult of Iphiklos, the half-brother of Herakles S whom we may regard as a name of Boeotian genealogy ; and we may find in the same locality traces of a Boeotian- Minyan strain in the cults of Athena Tritonia and Poseidon '^. But the Minyans are the last people likely to have brought in Herakles. Also, the story prevalent at Pheneos that Herakles founded the temple of Apollo Pythios north of the city points to Elis *". The god of Delphoi and the hero are also linked together by a curious local legend that Herakles stole the tripod from Delphoi and brought it to Pheneos ; and this story needs some ^ Paus. 8. 53. 9. '■ Vide Cults, 4, p. 44- " Paus. 8. 14. 10. <> Id. 8. 14!^ 4 ; cf. CtUts, 4, p.^p. * Paus. 8. 15. 5. 136 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE r attention. The attempt of Herakles to carry off the tripod, his struggle with Apollo for its possession, the intervention of Zeus or Athena to separate and reconcile them, must have been a Delphic legend that was widespread in Greece, for it is a very common motive of archaic art ; but the only authors who refer to it are late, Plutarch ^, who gives us the local folk-lore of Pheneos without discussing the motive of the incident, Apollodoros ^, and Pausanias '' ; the latter narrates the Delphic version at some length and explains the circumstances ; the Pythian prophetess refused to prophesy for Herakles on account of the guilt that he had incurred by his treacherous murder of Iphitos ; whereupon Herakles seized the tripod to make off with it, but restored it when she reproached him and contrasted the -conduct of the Egyptian Herakles with the Tirynthian : the author ^adds that this story was a favourite theme of the Delphic poej^s. The latter part of it is manifestly late, the Egyptian HeraMes being a fiction of learned theory. The account of Apollodoros is partly but not wholly the same ; the hero goes to Delphoi to get cured from the madness with which he wa* punished for the murder of Iphitos ; the Pythia refuses to help him ; whereupon he makes off with the tripod, wishing to start an oracle for himself ; Apollo fights for the possession of it, ^ and Zeus separates them with a thunderbolt ; Herakles j restores the tripod and obtains an oracle bidding him go into ij slavery by way of atonement. What are we to make of the '. story in its simplest form, which was in wide vogue and had evidently captured the popular imagination ? It has been supposed by some to possess an ethnic-historical significance, to reflect some actual attempt on the part of the Dorians to seize upon and to administer the Delphic temple. But neither the Delphic version nor the legend of Pheneos accords with such a supposition, which is merely the ' Dorian fallacy ' over again. It is at least as probable that it reflects indirectly * De Ser. Num. Vind. p. 557 C. ^ Bibl. 2. 6. 2. •^ 10. 13. 8 : he mentions the myth as a theme of art in the Arcadian temple of Despoina (8. 37. i) and as part of the foundation-legend of the Laconian Guthion (3. 21. 8). CULT OF HERAKLES 137 some aggression on the part of Boeotia and that the same kind of violent action in time past was imputed to the favourite Boeotian hero '\ The story, then, would be easily localized, as at Pheneos, where there was a strong legend of the hero and a temple of Apollo Pythios ; the coincidence of the two could be most naturally explained by the folk-lore that ,, this was the place where Herakles brought away and set up 1 the tripod, for every shrine of Apollo Pythios was a derivative \ from Delphoi. A more peaceful form of the same story is told ~ about Koroibos of Argos ; he also approaches Delphoi to seek deliverance from the stain of bloodshed, and the Pythia bade him take away a tripod from the temple and find a new home and raise a new shrine to Apollo in the place where the tripod fell down : it fell in Megara, near the village Tripodiskoi ^. The significance of these legends is religious rather than ethnic-historic. They reflect Delphoi as a central shrine\ whither people who need purification from bloodshed resort \ for deliverance ; and therefore it is probable that they arose in the post-Homeric period when there are reasons for|) thinking that Delphoi assumed this role. Little or nothing is to be gleaned for the early ethnology of the cult by following its track across the sea in the Aegean islands and about the cities of the Asia Minor shores. Traces of it, faint or clear, are found in most of the Greek colonies, Ionian, Dorian, and Aeohc, both of the islands and the Asiatic coast and even in the Greek interior of Anatolia. As the lonians were devoted to him, Miletos must have received it as an ancient tradition — an inscription recently found there, that may be dated near to 400 b. c, gives us the law of his ritual " and Miletos transmitted it to her Euxine colonies, Kios of Bithynia and Kuzikos, whose coin-legends attest Herakles as their founder, and to Miletopolis '^ in the north of Mysia near Kuzikos. It wis probably Miletos that * The hymn to Apollo reflects in part a certain hostility between Boeotia and Delphoi. ^ Paus. i. 43. 7 ; cf. Cults, 4, p. 217. '■ Rehm, Das Delphinion in Milet, no. 1 32 . ^ Ath. Mitth. 1904. p. 301. 138 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE founded Herakleia on Latmos, the coins of which prove the devotion of this city to its divine godfather. But the only Ionic city, where the testimony proves a striking pre-eminence for his cult, was Eruthrai : apart from inscriptions and written records, which there will be occasion to examine later, we find the head of Herakles as a type of great frequency on the coins. We might discern in this the far-off influence of Boeotia, if we believed the assertion of Strabo-'' that Eruthrai was a colony from the Boeotian city of that name. But Pausanias '' maintains, and gives some interesting fact and legend to support his view, that the Herakles of Eruthrai was originally the god of Tyre, the Phoenician Melqart. And his relations with the Hellenic hero have yet to be considered. Glancing towards the west of the Mediterranean, we are struck wit^ one fact of some religious importance for ancient history jJ the remarkable prevalence of the Herakles-cult and legend in Magna Graecia in Italy as a whole, and along the Ligurian shores as far as Spain .j We have tested the question of the Dorian propagation of it in these regions, and have discovered but little of any real value for ethnology. His personality was at least as powerful in the Achaean cities ; for instance, at Kroton, where he was worshipped as otKio-TT/s, or founder '', as he had prophesied to the local hero Kroton the future prosperity of the city to be built on this site. We must in fact believe that the earliest Greek settlers of every stock that settled in Italy contributed to spread his fame and legend ; for thus only can we understand ' the statement of Aristotle ^ that there were memorials of him in several parts of Italy along the roads that the hero had traversed ; and of Dionysios of Halikarnassos ^ that it would be difficult to find any region of Italy where this god did not receive honour. More doubtful is another statement of Aristotle's ^ that a certain sacred road led from Italy ' as far / as the Keltic, the Kelto-Ligurian and the Iberian country ', I that this was called the ' Heraklean ' road, the' whole route " p. 404- " 7- S- S- " Head, Hist. Num.- p 100. '^ p. 838. « Antiq. Rom. i. 40. ' p. 837. CULT OF HERAKLES 139 being sacrosanct, and any injuries done to wayfarers being punished. We do not know from what source Aristotle has derived this apparently precise information ; he must be referring to the Pivieja.jaad running from Italy along the foot of the Maritime Alps towards Spain ; and it is interest- ing to know that this was put under the protection of Herakles. We must suppose that it was from Massilia that his cult and influence radiated ; though Massiliote history, in which Aristotlehimself was interested, does not allow us to believe that this city was ever strong enough to enforce a holy peace throughout this long route. There is one feature peculiar to the cult of Herakles in the western Mediterranean ; in certain localities, notably in Sicily and in Sardinia. „ it wa s closely linked with that of lolaos ^^, his nephew and faithful cOmrade-in-arms. This cult-association is only found elsewhere in Boeotia and in one locality of Attica, whither a Boeotian tradition had penetrated. Its head-quarters in Sicily was the originally Sikel stronghold of Agyrium ; but Diodoros assures us that lolaos received heroic honours in many of the Sicilian States ; and his sole figure represents such Hellenism as touched Sardinia. Now if the diffusion of the Herakles-cult was always the result of the migrations and settlements of some special Hellenic people, we might imagine that it was the Boeotians who propagated this cult of lolaos in con- junction with the greater hero-god. But Boeotia is not known to have contributed at all to the Hellenization of Sicily and Magna Graecia, nor is its name associated with the varied legend of Sardinia. In fact the cult of lolaos in these regions remains an ethnic puzzle ; and may be due to the accidental resemblance of local names, such as that of the Sardinian tribe called lolaeis by Strabo ^ and Iheis by Pau- sanias ^, or to Phoenician influences, whereby Herakles and his companion became identified with certain Semitic divinities. These alien influences remain to be considered, in order to complete the record of the world-career of Herakles. We find the myth and the personality penetrating many of " p. 225. ^ 10. 17. 7. 140 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE the non-Hellenic peoples with whom the Hellenes came into contact, and blending with the local mythology and cult ; and this is only a salient instance of a general rule of which we have endless examples as we pursue the track of Hellenic culture through the world. The fusion of the Hellenic colonists with the natives could be assisted by the propaga- tion of a legend that their much-travelled hero or some famous son of his had penetrated the land long ago, either as conqueror or benefactor. Or the vanity of some subject or inferior race might tempt them to connect themselves by some fictitious claim of descent with the greatest of the Hellenic heroes. Interesting examples of this are furnished by the countries l3nng just behind the coastline of Asia Minor. In Bithynia, the figure of Bormos, the local hero who was periodically bewailed, was interpreted by the early Greek colonists of that region as the young and beautiful Argonaut Hulas, who was beloved by Herakles, and who, as he roamed away from the Argo, was lost and searched for by the hero in vain. The strength of the Herakles-tradition is attested by the foundation-legend of the chief city of the district, ^ikaia, which attributed its origin to him ^. The Herakles-legend in Lydia presents certain difficult problems both for religion and ethnology. We have the authority of Herodotus^ for the tradition that the earliest royal dynasty of Lydia, which survived for more than five hundred years in uninterrupted succession from father to son, were Herakleids, descended from Herakles and a slave- girl, a daughter of lardanos^ We discern Greek bias in this version, and the interested policy of the Greek colonists ; but we must suppose that their story was supported by the fact that the old race of kings really claimed descent from some divinity or hero whom the Greeks were able to identify with their Herakles ; and it has been generally supposed on fair evidence that that was Sandan, a Hittite god, whose special home was Cilicia, but who is traceable elsewhere in Asia '•" Dio. Chrys. Or. 39 (Dind. 2, p. 87) ; Head, Hist. Num.^ ?• S16 ; other late coins of the city, however, mention Dionysos as the Kriarrjs, ibid. " I. 6. CULT OF HERAKLES 141 Minor ^. It is only later authorities who mix up Omphale with this genealogy, putting her in the place of the slave- girl ^. But apart from genealogy, the Omphale-legend has a special importance at least for later classic tradition. Modern writers have framed certain anthropological theories to explain it, some of which may be pronounced erroneous ; the theory, for instance, that the slavery of Herakles and the tyranny of Omphale point to a matrilinear sovereignty in early Lydia clashes with the direct evidence of Herodotus ; and the suggestion that the effeminacy of Herakles and his wearing of female attire in the service of the queen arose from some genuine form of sacerdotal ritual and ceremony in early Lydian religion must be regarded as sterile ; for this trait of effeminacy cannot be shown to have come into the legend earlier than the fourth century b. c. " The only matter of anthropological interest is the motive of the slavery ; Herakles, like Apollo, Ares, and Kadmos, volun- tarily undergoes slavery to atone for homicide ; and such legends point to a practice once prevalent in Greek, as it was in earlier Norse society, of paying the price of blood by submitting to a temporary servitude. The Omphale-legend has also the ethnologic value of attesting Thessalian or North- Greek influences on the early Greek colonization of Lydia. For Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ^ has succeeded in tracing the various heroic adventures of Herakles in the service of Omphale back to Thessaly or the neighbourhood of Trachis and Oita. On the other hand, the evidence for a Thessalian or Thesprotian Omphale, whom he thinks to have dis- covered, is most frail ; and the evolution and diffusion of the legend can be far better understood if we suppose this name to have been found by the early Greek settlers in Lydia attaching to a goddess or ancestress of the early royal dynasty. In Mysia the well-known myth of Telephos and Auge a Vide Professor Sayce's preface to Garstang, Land of the Hittites, and article on ' Sandas ', Roscher, Lexikon, 3. 2. 319. b Apollod. Bihl. 2. 6. 1-3 ; Diod. Sic. 4. 31. "= The evidence for this is clearly given in the article ' Omphale ', Roscher, Lexikon, 3. i, pp. 882 and 887. •' Here. Fur. 315. &c. 142 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE attached the natives to Arcadia, whose hero Telephos was the son of Herakles and Auge, the priestess of Athena Alea ; this genealogy was accepted by the Attic tragedians, no doubt from the Cypria, the earliest literary record of his name and story. The tradition was eagerly exploited by the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon in the third and second centuries, and was lovingly commemorated by the artists and sculptors who worked for them. Its antiquity in Mysia is proved by the indigenous heroic cult of Telephos ^ ; but the ethnic explana- tion of this is a difficult problem, for to surmise an Arcadian colony among the Greek settlements of the Mysian coast is against historical probability, which admits no Arcadian colonies. In our ignorance of the links or the carrying forces, the diffusion of mythic names and personalities in distant lands appears to us vague and unaccountable, like the drifting of thistledown. --" The most important of the foreign experiences of the Herakles-cult was its conjunction with the worship of T3nre. The Phoenician god Melqart became explicitly identified with him ^, as he never was with Melikertes, under the name of the Tyrian Herakles. Our earliest informant is Herodotus "", who visited Tyre in his zeal to discover the origin of Herakles, and found a temple dedicated to him there which the Phoenicians regarded as contemporary with the foundation of the city : they also showed him another shrine of the same god, called the temple of Herakles of Thasos, and they claimed that his cult in that island was entirely of their foundation ^. His worship at Eruthrai, of which the record » Paus. 5. 13. 3. '• Euseb. Praep. Ev. i. 10, p. 28 M(\Ka0po9, 6 Kat 'HpaKXTJs from Philo's version of Sanchuniathon ; cf . Hesych. s. v. MoXi«a- rbv 'HpaK\ea 'AfiaOovffioi. " 2. 44. ^ Friedlander in his 'Herakles' {Philologische Untersuch. 1907, p. 13), maintains that the earliest settlers of Thasos came from the Dorian Hexapolis, bringing Herakles with them, but his evidence is frail ; and we may prefer Herodotus' statement that the Phoenicians were the earliest settlers of Thasos ; they must have given predominance to the Melqart- cult in the island, and the Hellenic colonists from Paros must have identi- fied him with Herakles soon after their arrival in the seventh century (Clem. Strom. 1, p. 398 P.), for an inscription of the sixth century b.c. CULT OF HERAKLES I43 offers certain peculiar features that will be examined below, claimed to be of Tyrian origin^. At Delos an inscription of the first century b. c. ^ attests the presence of a religious society of merchants and skippers consecrated to the Tyrian Herakles, who is commended as the source of the greatest blessings to men and the founder of their parent-state which, although the president of their society had a Greek name, was evidently Tyre. The society called simply the Hera- kleidai at Rhodes " was probably devoted to the same god. Certain Tyrian Greeks in the third century B. c. united with some Phoenician merchants to set up a joint bilingual dedication to ' Herakles Archegetes ' and Baal-Melqart, in which an interesting divergence appears in the religious sentiment of the Semitic and Aryan communities ^. These Graeco-Phoenician religious societies of sea-merchants, named after this god, must have gone far afield, and his popularity lasted for many centuries : an inscription has even been found in Northumberland, proving their presence there in the last days of Paganism. The question confronts us at once why the Hellenes should have identified the chief god of Tyre with their Herakles ; and it has generally been evaded by archaeologists. At first sight, it seems hopeless to search for the reason. We know little of Melqart, except the name which means ' Lord — or King — of the City '. A great city-god, whose power held the State together, would not naturally and at once be equated with Herakles, but might be interpreted with more reason as Zeus or Apollo. If Melqart had been habitually represented as an archer- god, the Greeks who first came to know him would be even more incUned to identify him with Apollo than with Herakles, especially as the latter had in general no marked political character. But it seems clear that the Tyrian god, however {Bull. Corr. Hell. 1903, p. 392) shows that they regarded Herakles with Dionysos as the city-guardian, a (pv\aicds t^s n-oXecuy, a phrase which is almost a translation of Melqart, and the coinage of the island attests this pre- dominance of Herakles, who, however, is thoroughly Hellenized and identified with the son of Semele. * Paus. 7. 5. 5. ^ C. I. G. 2271. '= Collitz, Dialect. Inschr. 3774 (first century b. c). •J Vide my Greece and Babylon, p. 194. 144 ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE he may have been imagined, was not represented anthropo- morphically in his worship. His emblem at Tyre was a baetyl with the sun's rays surmounting it ^ ; and Sihus ItaHcus, in his description of the cult at Gadeira*", which had been propagated from Tyre, emphasizes the absence of any image of human shape. The representations of Melqart on Tyrian and Phoenician coins "", showing him with bow or club or lion-skin, are likely to have borrowed these attributes from the Hellenic art-tjrpe, and cannot be regarded as explaining the reason of the fusion of the Hellenic hero with the Semitic god. The reason must be believed to lie in some striking feature of the myth or the ritual of Melqart. Of his myth we know nothing that is certain ^ ; it will be interesting to examine his ritual later. We have a similar problem in regard to the identification of Herakles with the god Sandan or Sandas of Tarsos. How early the HeUenization of this city began is uncertain ; no doubt it had penetrated deeply before the period of St. Paul without obhterating vital elements of native religion. It brought with it an Argive tradition, the cult of Apollo the wolf -god ^, and the heroic names of Perseus and Herakles *". We have reason to regard Sandan as an old Hittite deity, whose cult was closely associated with the foundation of the city, and we know that the Hellenes identified him with their hero-god, Herakles s. It is not so difficult in this case, as in the case of Melqart, to suggest a reason ; for we have * Vide Evans, 'Mycenaean Pillar and Tree Worship', Hell. Journ. 1901, p. 149. !• 3. 30. " Vide Head, Hist. Num.- p. 799 : Melqart riding on a winged sea-horse over the sea holding bow, on coins of Tyre (? fourth century) of Gades, ibid. p. 3 ; Melqart-head with club on coins of Hippo Regius in Numidia, ibid. p. 886. '' He may have been imagined as one of the lion-slaying hero-deities of whom the prototype may be sought in Mesopotamia : vide Head, ibid, p. 801. *■ Vide Ctilts, 4, p. 122. f Dio. Chrys. Or. 33 (Dind. 2, pp. i, 15, 16) ; Ammianus Marcellinus, 14. 8. 3, attributes the foundation of Tarsos to either Perseus or ' a certain rich and noble man called Sandan ' . 8 Agathias, Hist. 2. 24 (Hist. Graec. Min. ed. Dind. 2, p. 221) ; lo. Lyd. De Magistr. 3. 64 ; for this reason Heracles was called the apxnfos, or founder of the city, by Dio. Chrysostom ; and the priest of Herakles was the chief religious functionary ( Cic. De Divin. i. 34, § 74. ^ Ind. 36. THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES 147 among the divine powers to whom the men of Selinous attributed their victory, probably over Segesta^. His warhke character seems indicated in a sacrificial inscription from Ionia, published by von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ordaining a sacrifice to Herakles in conjunction with 'Aper>;, or Valour, and Aphrodite Drpareia, the Asiatic goddess of armies ^. Also, for further evidence we have such titles, by which he was invoked, as Herakles Upoixaxos noticed above, Herakles 'Hyejuwi', the army-leader whose name, with that of Zeus Soter, was the watchword for the ten thousand Greeks in their battle against the Bithynians, and to whom Xeno- phon sacrificed "" ; 'Q-n-Ao^vAal^, the guardian of weapons, a title occurring on the imperial coinage of Smyrna^. We may suppose that the Macedonian epithet "Ap-qros was connected by derivation and meaning with the name of the war-god ". The curious title 'l-rrTrobh-qs , which was affixed to him at Thebes, might allude to the bridling or the taming of horses, and was at any rate connected with a legend of the Theban war against the Minyans of Orchomenos <". Finally, we have a number of epithets attached to him in different cult-centres, some occurring in general literature, such as KaWivLKos, ' the triumphant ' ; 'AvU-qTos, ' the in- vincible ' ; 'A\€$LKaKos, or "AAe^is s, or ' A-rraXXa^LKaKos ^ ' the averter of evil'; Swnyp, ' the saviour', which might obviously avail for deliverance from the perils of war. Especially the title KaWiviKos had both a literary and a hieratic value. It is the burden of the Olympian triumph-chant attributed to Archilochos : TTjyeWa KakkivLKC, Xottp' ava^ 'Hpa/cAees, TrivekXa KaAAiri«e, avTos re k 'lo'Aaos al)(fxriTa hvo. T^z^eAAa KaAAiViKe Xaip' ava^ 'HpaxAees- * C. /. G. Sic. It. 268, c. 450 B.C. •> Ahh. K. Preuss. Ak. Wiss. 1909, pp. 48-49. <= Anab. 6. 5. 25 ; cf. 4. 8. 25 ; 6. 2. 18. <• Head, Hist. Num.'' p. 594. " Hesych. s . v . " Ap-qro^ . ^ Pans. 9. 26. i : Hesych. s.v. 'InuoifTr}^ . K Aristid. i. 60 (Dind.) at Kos. «• Bull. Corr. Hell. 1882, p. 342. L 2 / 148 THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES According to Pindar^, the successful athlete and his friends sang this in default of a longer ode. Qlt celebrates I Herakles as the patron of war and athletic contests ; and the term KaWCviKos was used as a formal cult-appellative at i Eruthrai ^ and in Egypt "=. We knov^how deeply interfused were ethics and religion in Greece. j(As his cult lay such stress on his martial character we may conclude that it was stimulative of the moral virtue of courage, which the Greek ethical philosophers rank so high among the poHtical virtues!^. That he was the patron saint of the brave, and that cowaras appealed to him in vain, is the idea expressed by Polybius ^, who speaks contemp- tuously of the sacrifices offered to Herakles by Perseus after he had fled from battle : (^ the hero wa^s not likely to accept the cowardly offerings from a coward '. But, in spite of all this evidence, it is clear that the later generations of the Greek world, who were deeply devoted to Herakles, appealed to him less as the warrior-hero than as the divine and i nvincible helper in the other needs of life, as the t5rpical rTapao-rdr 77 sfthe ' good comrade ' and guardian- / angel in the other dangers that threaten mortality, the 1^ dangers of ghosts and disease^ "^When the warring days of the independent Greek States were ovefr, and when in the kingdoms of Alexander's successors, and still more under the Roman Empire, the individual and private citizen was no longer of necessity a soldier, and even his city might take no further part in war, it was inevitable that the cult of the old heroes of battle s hould look to other neec^ And even as the Macedonian heroic kings, Philip and Alexander, have now become in modern Macedonia names of magic power for protection from vampires, so these cult-appellatives of Herakles, KaAAiViKo? and 'AXe^tKo/cos, seem to have lost their old association with triumphs in war, and to have alluded specially to his efficacy in wardi ng off ghosts . /The quaint inscription was not infrequently written above the door of the Greek dwelling, ' Herakles of fair victory lives ' * O/. 9. I. >> Vide Cults, i, 'Zeus', R. 137 ". " Ibid. 4, ' Apollo', R. 4. <• 29. 6. THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES 149 here, let no evil enter ' *'' n it was the entrance of ghosts that was most dreaded. In an inscription of the third century B. c. found in Egypt, probably from Koptos '\ we find Herakles Kallinikos sharing in a dedication with Artemis ' Enodia ' and Leto of the fair children {€vt4kvw), and the association suggests that Herakles is appealed to under his familiar title on the occasion of a birth in the dedicator's family, when the evil influences of the unseen world were most to be dreaded. Similarly, his cult as 'ATTOTpoiraios, ' the averter of evil', at Ephesos, attested by Philostratos ^ is connected with a story of the destruction of a demon that caused plague ; and the same writer illustrates this by the legend that the hero purged the land of Elis of pestilence by draining off the noxious vapours <^. ^ Of the same significance is the title KrjpafxvvTris, ' the warder-off of Krjpes ', the fates of death and disease ', attached to Herakles, and illustrated quaintly and rather childishly by the representation on a fifth-century vase, on which the hero is depicted thrashing with his club a little ugly boy, Ker, a bacillus of death or plague ^ The same characteristic of the hero appears in a representation of like tone and sentiment on an Attic fiith;3ceritury vase, where he is seen chasing the meagre and repulsive figure of ' Geras ', the personification of old age ^. We must not be misled into supposing that this function of Herakles in regard to the shadowy world of death arises from any aboriginal view of him as a chthonian or dai- monistic personage. It is a perfectly natural outgrowth of his original heroic humanity ; and, as we have seen, the popular imagination concerning Philip and Alexander has fared along the same path. In the case of Herakles; the development of the idea that he was the terror and controller "■ Clem. Strom, p. 843 P. ; Diog. Laert. 6. 50 : the inscription 6 rov Atos KaWiviKOi 'HpaK\fji fvOdSe KaroiKt? firjSeu fiaira.' Kaic6v occurs on a house at Pompeii (Kaibel, Epigr. 1 1 38), the same formula shortened on a building in Thasos, Hell. Journ. 1909, p. 99 ; cf. p. 250. ^ Hell. Journ. 1901, pp. 290-291. " Vit. Apoll. Tyan. 4, p. 68. "1 Ibid. 8, p. 159. ^ Et Mag. s.v. Krjp (p. 511) ; cf. Lyk. Kass. 662. ^ Arch. Anz. 1895, p. 37. s Hell. Journ. 4, 1883, PI. 30 (rightly interpreted by Sir Cecil Smith), 150 THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES of the ghost-world may have been assisted by the popular myth, told of so many heroes in different countries, that he journeyed down to Hell and ' harrowed ' it at his will. The dexterous Athenians were able to connect this legend with their Eleusinian mysteries, and to gain prevalence for their theory that the hero was spiritually safeguarded by initiation in them against the perils of his descent. A s a warder-off o £-£viM»feences:, whether of ghosts or diseases, so often associated in the lower popular intelligence, he would naturally acquire the reputation^uL-aJtiealec a medica l powe r, akin in function to Apollo and Asklepios. It is not surprising, then, that the cult of Herakles Alexi- kakos in Attica, like that of Apollo under the same designa- tion, should be interpreted by the tradition of the great plague ^ ; and thamns shrine in the Boeotian town Huettos was a common resOTt of patients seeking for a curej) Partly from this growing recognition of his medical function, and especially from his interest in athletic hygiene, may have arisen his frequent(association with natural springs and hot baths yin Thermopmai ."^ for instance, and in Druopis ^. The authorities speak of this as a universal rule, probably over- stating the facts. In any case, to interpret this association, which we do not know to have been very ancient, as a survival of his aboriginal character as a nature-daimon, is to follow a false track. The local and delocahzed hero and saint often becomes connected with a holy spring in some capricious and incalculable manner. Achilles had his favourite stream, and it may be that Sigmund of the Volsunga-saga had his bath in our own country. These heroes are not therefore water-sprites to begin with, though they may have occasion- ally supplanted such beings. Therefore, even if we believed, as we cannot, that every hot spring or medicinal fountain in Greek lands was named after Herakles, that need not impair our belief in his aboriginally human character. * Schol. Arist. Ran. 504. ^ Paus. 9. 24. 3. " Aristides (i, p. 62, Dind.) tells us that the pleasantest of the natural baths are named after Herakles, also the ' fountain-sources of rivers '. Athenaeus (p. S14F, quoting Megakleides) raises the question why all natural hot springs are consecrated to Herakles. ^ Herod. 7. 176. «= Anton. Liber. 4 (Miiller, F. H. G., 4, p. 343). THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES This medicinal aspect of Herakles must have survived down to the end of Paganism, when many old Greek heroes were becoming converted into Christian saints ; for a humor- - ous epigram preserved in the Anthology makes a statue of Herakles pathetically deplore his enforced transformation into an image of St. Luke, which he evidently regards as a derogation of rank *, We can only explain the substitution from the popular belief that both the hero and the saint werej?hysicians . [As the military and civic life of the Greek communities waned, the chief significance of the ' Averter of Evil ' was likely to become pastoral and agriculturafTl and in- any community, if the peasant is to continue faithful to the worship of hero or saint, these unseen powers must be thought to help him with his flocks and crops ; the warrior can become the shepherd in the divine as in the human world. Therefore the Hellenized and Latinized peasant of Phrygia could appeal to the ' unconquerable ' Herakles, the epithet avLK-qros retaining the ring of the chivalrous epic of the past, ' in behalf of his oxen ' ^. And the record of the curious cult-epithets 'Ittoktovos " at Eruthrai and KopvoTrioov in the district of Oita*^ shows that She hero could fulfil the useful but unheroic tasks of slaying the worm in the vine and averting the locust from the field^ It was more in keeping with his mythologic achievements that he should ^efend the flocks from their grimmest enemy the wolf ; and this must have been a commonly accepted faith, for the epigrammatist Antipater, in the Anthology, makes a point of humour, declaring that the sacrifice necessary to persuade the hero to this service cost more than a visit of the wolves themselves. He speaks not as a peasant but as a city- wit who remembers the comic voracity of Herakles ^. Finally, we may explain the cult-epithet MtjKmv, which " Anth. Pal. ii. 269 : ' I, Herakles, the triumphant son of Zeus, am not really Luke, but they compel me.' ^ Inscription from Dorylaion, C. I. G. 3817. " Strab. p. 613. ^ Ibid. « 9. 72 ; cf. 9. 240, epigram on the ' Heraklean boar ' sent by the hero to save the child from the attack of a ram. ^ 152 THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES is attested both of Boeotia and Attica ^, as arising from the desire of the worshipper to place his flocks, possibly also his fruit-trees, under the guardianship of Herakles, rather than from any peculiar form gf, sacrifice, by which the lexicographers would explain itC Again, the hero was fond of wine, and we may suppose that vineyards might be some- times consecrated to him^j for a foolish story of Aelian's seems to show that he possessed a special vintage in an island of the Black Sea, probably off Herakleia Pontike ^. I The period at which these cults arose cannot be determined by the literary evidence ; but something may be gathered from the archaeological?] Already in the fifth century, a few [ monumenl^ begin to rScognize t his peacef ul function of the hero-god, and by placing the tornucogm, the ' horn of plenty ', in his hand attest his as sociation with_ tlie-jw^alth of the land. An Attic coin belonging to the earlier style of EHK^CBTTttiry art shows a figure of the Hermes-type, holding club and cornucopia, with the lion's muzzle on the head, and suggests an original of the severer fifth-century style ", Of equal interest is a votive-relief found at Thebes of good fifth-century sculpture representing Herakles peacefully receiving the horn of plenty from the hands of Hades- Plouton "^ ; the artist is either following some unrecorded tradition, or has devised a new artistic expression of a belief, that may recently have been coming into vogue, in the hefo's agrarian functions. (We should not be misled *" into interpreting this com- paratively late archaeologic evidence as if it revealed to us the primeval origin of Herakles as a daimonistic spirit of vegetation. \ 1^11 that it proves is that the normal and usual transformation of the hero or saint into agriculturist or shepherd happened earlier in his case than we might have •'' Pollux I. 30 ; Zenob. 5. 22 (Paroem. Grace . Gaisford, p. 345). " Nat. An. 6. 40. " Vide Furtwangler, Roscher, Lexikon, i, p. 2157. '' Roscher, ibid, i, p. 2187. ^ As Miss Harrison in Themis, p. 365 (assuming that the club of Herakles was originally a mere bough, which, if it were the fact, would prove nothing) ; cf. Cook, Hell. Journ. 1894, p. 115. THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES 153 expected ; .giid after all the fifth century was not very early in his careerj We can suppose that this idea of his interest in fertility was stimulated by the Attic myth, which was gaining currency in the fifth century, of his admission into the Eleusinian mysteries, also by his occasional association with Demeter in other localities, which has been already noticed and discussed. The Athenian-Eleusinian legend only expresses the eager- ness of the Athenians to settle him as full citizen in their land ; he becomes initiated as every native of Attica would desire to be. But in spite of all this, the hero never became one of the genuine chthonian powers, and his occasional association with these is rare and incidental •''. The lower realm had no hold on him ; his relations with the ghost- world are hostile. As the ' Saviour ' in general, invoked by the name of ScriTT/p at Thasos ^ and Miletos ", and as the giver of fertility and good luck, "he might occasionally have been regarded as the patron of trade and commerce, a partner with Hermes ' Agoraios ', the god of the market-place. But this aspect of him and the practice of dedicating a tithe of the profits to Herakles were only developed in Rome and Italy, and might ^be due there to the early influence of the Phoenician Melqart, his double ^. In Greece we have no record or hint of this, unless we must so interpret the recorded fact that the city of Sikuon dedicated a bronze statue of him in their market-place near to one of Hermes Agoraios "". His association with Hermes, which was very frequent in the Greek cities, was otherwise generally due to their common ^ Such a one was probably the daimon of Mount Laphustion in Boeotia, called Xapotp, the ' flashing-eyed ' one ; a recently found inscription makes it clear that Xapoip was the original possessor of the spot, and that Herakles, having partly supplanted him, was reconciled with him in the complex cult as 'O Xapoip 6 'HpaKKijs (vide Pappadikiin ^fcA. Delt .2, pp. 218-224 and p. 239), which Pausanias too concisely describes as Herakles Xapoip 9. 34. 5- ^ Head, Hist. Num.^ p. 266. " Rehm, vi, Milet. Bericht. 27. ^ Vide Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, p. 197. * Paus. 2. 9. 8. 154 THE FUNCTIONS OF HERAKLES interest in athletics and the ' palaistra ' ^. This is the sole point at which the cult of Herakles touches the higher civilization of Hellas ; and for this reason the Epheboi of Athens maintained the practice of drinking with Herakles '' in order to enter into communion with the god of strength and virility. He is called Uakaiixoiv , ' the wrestler ', by Lukophron, and a Boeotian inscription, if rightly restored, designates him by this title ''. As the Muses represented the mental culture of the community and Herakles the physical, the boys and youths of Chios offered a libation to these divini- ties in common after the conclusion of certain State-games '^ ; ^ and in the same way we may explain the presence of Herakles in company with the Nine on a relief in the National Museum at Athens ^ His higher social function does not range beyond his protection of the Epheboi and his care for their physical development. He is not concerned with the higher political life, nor does he inspire the counsels of the State ^j But his record reveals an evolution of ideas interesting for the history of religion ; and as for the Greek world he was the earliest and the salient example of the mortal achiev ing divinity through suffering and toil, his career could served ^ theme for the ethical teacher, and could quicken in the (average man the hope of a blessed immortality. Therefore, in the Hellenistic age, when this hope was become a passion and a faith, we begin to find the image of Herakles set as a symbol on the grave-relief s. ^ A relief in Boston of the fourth century b. c, representing the two deities standing on the steps of a shrine with the inscription 'Hpa/cAecs 'XKf^iKaKov suggests that their relations with the ghost-world might some- times bring them together, Arch. Anz. 1897, p. 73. •^ Athenae. p. 494 ; cf. Photius, s. v. OiviaaT-qpia. <= From Koroneia, C. I. G. Sept. i. 2874. ^ C. I. G. 2214. ^ Svoronos, Nat. Mus. 92. ' For instance, he is not an oracular deity whom States consulted in their need ; although, like other heroes, he might here and there possess an oracular shrine, where individuals might get information ; for instance, in his cave-shrine near Boura in Achaia, divination was practised by the cast of dice : Paus. 7. 25. 10 ; vide Halliday, Greek Divination, p. 212. 8 Vide Jahrb. d. d. Arch. Inst., 1905, pp. 78-79, 82-83. CHAPTER VI I THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES The sacrificial forms that distinguished the cult of the hero from that of the god have been considered above sufficiently for the present purpose "". Ordinarily, the ritual of Herakles falls under one or the other of these well-known types. As a most virile hero-god he preferred the blood - sacrific e of th ejn^le animal, especially the ox or bull, the swine and ram ; thegoat appears to have been distasteful to him as to all * heroes^ Occasionally, in a State sacrifice, as at Athens in the time of Hadrian ^, he might be satisfied with an offering of cocks, for the cock is a fighting bird. The pure cereal oblations, generally as frequent in Greek cults as the animal, are very rare in this *^ In a peculiar form of sacrifice which is recorded both of Athens and Boeotia, a fruit-offering to the god was justified by fashioning the apple into the likeness of an ox*^. In fact Lucian in a humiorous phrase expresses the character of his ritual, ' the god is an eater of beef, and does not rejoice in smokeless offerings ' *=. There is no evidence clearly revealing any sacramental idea in his sacrifice, except the record already noted of the ceremony in which the youths of Athens drank with him when they cut off their long hair ; this is a simple form of ordinary fellowship, and implies nothing mystic ; just as when the votary of a private cult at Kos received Herakles ^ Vide pp. 95-96. ^ C. I. A. s- 77 ' the divine personage called Ouos here linked with him suggests Anatolian influences ; we find a Zeiis Oeios and a Otios ''A77€A.os in late Asia Minor inscriptions ; vide Bull. Corr. Hell. 1 891, p. 419 : Le Bas-Waddington, no. 515. <= Sacrifice of cakes to Herakles prescribed by inscription found on the Akropolis (third century B.C.), C. I. A. 2. 1665. ^ Zenob. 5. 22; Pollux i. 30. « Erotes. 4. 156 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES at a yearly banquet called a ^evLa-fxos, he was supposed to feast with the god ^. The only noticeable feature in the animal sacrifices recorded of Herakles occurs in a record of the ritual at Lindos in Rhodes. The victim was an ox or two oxen, which were taken from the plough, to satisfy the voracious god ; and Apollodoros tells us '' that they were immolated with curses ; Lactantius goes so far as to say that the whole of the service was celebrated ' with maledictions and exe- crations ' ", and that if any one spoke ' a good word ' or word of good omen, it was considered a violation of the propriety of the ceremony. As usual, an ' aetiological ' story was invented to explain the mysterious ritual : it was said that Herakles had landed with the young Hullos at Thermudrai, the Rhodian port, and being hungry had asked a countryman to sell him one of his oxen that were yoked to his plough ; on the countryman refusing, the hero took it by force from the yoke and devoured it, the rustic standing near and helplessly cursing him ; Herakles was so delighted with the curses which seasoned his repast that he instituted a permanent ox-sacrifice in this place to himself, making the aggrieved rustic his priest, and ordaining as a law of the ritual that the sacrifice should always be accompanied by purses. Philostratos ^ gives the name of the rustic as Theiodamas, which connects this Lindian ritual-myth with a similar folk-legend of Lokris, which gives the reason of Herakles' campaign against the Leleges, but which has no connexion with any ritual. The Lindian rite has remained a puzzle both for ancients and moderns. Various examples of ritual-cursing in Greece have been collected ; the employment of ala-xpoXoyio , obscene or abusive speaking between men and women for ceremonious purposes, usually vegetative ; the abuse and invective hurled at the Eleusinian mystai, when they crossed the bridge of the Kephissos, a prophylactic rite to ward off bad luck, just as was the cursing of the Roman general * Paton and Hicks, Inscr. of Kos, no. 36. ^ 2. s- 10. ■= Div. Inst. I, 21. d iffiag. 2. 24. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 157 during his triumph and of the Roman magistrates ; the cursing of the scapegoat or the ' pharmakoi ', so as to charge them with all the ills and the sins of the people ; the oc- casional cursing of plants to make them grow, a magical ebullition of will working by threats ; finally, the solemn and periodic commination services of the Greek States against those who transgressed certain moral and social laws, of which the famous inscription of Teos and the so- called BovCvyLOL apaC are examples -''. But none of these types throw any direct light on this strange service of Lindos. Unless the aetiological legends are wholly illusory, it is obvious that the Lindian worshippers were not cursing each other or any hypothetical lawbreakers, but were cursing the hero-god. They could not be cursing him as a scapegoat ; for of all powers in the heroic divine world, Herakles would be the most unfit to fulfil that role. The dying and decayed god, even Dionysos*", might be thrown out with curses, to make room for his fresher counterpart ; but in this feast Herakles is no waning ' year-daimon ', but most robust and merry with meat. Again, we hear of peoples of a low religious sense visiting even their high gods, but more often their saints and inferior powers, with curses and threats, and in various ways mal- * Schol. Soph. Ant. 255, Clem. Alex. p. 503 P ; Athenae. p. 238, from Diphilos. The altar at Lindos was called BovCvyov according to Lactantius, and the name would be appropriate to the offering of the yoked oxen, which indicate the hero as the protector of agriculture, BovCvjtjs being one of his recorded titles (Suid. s.v.). But his cult-name in the ritual was probably BovOoivas, ' the Ox-feaster', and the phrase fiovCvyioL dpai had no connexion with the Lindian cursing. Suid.s.f. BovOos connects BovOoivas with the Lindian rite. " For curses in Dionysiac ritual, vide Cults, S, pp. 104, 21 1-212. Another doubtful proof is the passage in Ovid's Ibis 499 : Lydia se scopulis ut virgo misit ab altis • dixerat invicto quod mala verba deo. There is a t;. ^ ' Lindia ' which Ellis prefers ; and most of the Scholiasts, including G. (the best), explain it as referring to the Lindian rite of Herakles ; but one of them, quoting Gallus, connects it with a story of Lydian maidens who, when drunk, abuse Dionysos and hurl themselves from rocks. The passage can have no logical connexion with the Lindian rite, but has a true Dionysiac flavour ; and Dionysos is frequently styled dv'iKrjTos by Nonnus. 158 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES treating their images, if they have refused their help and failed them in time of need ; for every known method of working on their fellows men have been apt to try upon their gods. But on the whole such rites are only exceptional, resorted to when milder and more refined methods have failed. [Herakles alone, at Lindos, was never given a chance, never approached with more honorific treatment, but con- stantly and regularly cursed ; and he liked it and gave blessings in return, seeming thereby to deserve his later canonization as a Christian saink' There is nothing like this elsewhere in the whole of Greek ritual. It is one thing to"x;urse a plant to make it grow, another to curse a hero-god habitually in his solemn yearly feast, believing in him all the time as a benefactor. It may be natural to people in a certain stage of culture to curse when they want to bless, as a quaint way of averting the evil eye. But after Herakles had entered upon his apotheosis and his blessed life, who could suppose it necessary to avert from him the evil eye ? It is a question whether comparative religion can supply us with any exact parallel. Professor Westermarck, in an interesting paper ^ on ' L'Ar or the transference of conditional curses in Morocco ', examines a peculiar sacrificial rite whereby a conditional curse may be transferred to a dead saint in case he failed to fulfil the demand of the petitioner ; and he would explain in this way the working of the sacri- ficial blood-covenant between the Hebrews and their God. Even if he is right in this latter theory, which is not certain, this would afford no enlightening parallel to the Lindian rite. The only example which seems, if the reports are correct, to be really parallel, is cited by Sir James Frazer ^, the cere- monious and annual cursing of the goddess Baghavati in her » In Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, 1907, pp. 372-374. ^ G.B. I. 280. He quotes three authors as authorities: W. Logan, Malabar, i, p. 167 ; E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7, p. 287 ; L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, The Cochin Tribes and Castes, i, p. 238 ; but the last two have evidently taken their account verbatim from a common source, probably Logan, for their phraseology is almost identical. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 159 temple of Cranganore, in the native State of Cochin, by the pilgrims who come to obtain immunity from disease ; but none of the authorities quoted attempt to throw any light on the reason or origin of the practice. The only serious attempt in recent years to explain the Lindian problem has been made by Van Gelder in his Geschichte der Rhodier ^ : he supposes that this ceremo- nious cursing marks the antagonism between the blood- sacrifice demanded by Herakles and a former bloodless ritual of cereal oblations offered to an older deity whom Herakles displaced ; as a way of apologizing to the plough-ox for the heinous act of shedding its blood, the priest and the worshippers curse the god for derr^anding so cruel a ritual as if the guilt was his, not theirs. vThe theory iny)lies that the pre-Hellenic ritual of Rhodes was bloodless, j But we have strong reasons for believing in a close connexion between pre-Hellenic Rhodes and the Minoan culture of Crete. And the scenes depicted on the Praisos sarcophagus, a work of the later ' Minoan ' period, prove that the sacri- ficial ritual of that age was by no means bloodless ; they show us the ox falling under the stroke, the blood drawn from it being poured on the altar with no sign of compunc- tion. Yet we have an undoubted example in an old Hellenic ritual of compunction and a sense of guilt evoked by the sacrificial slaughter of the ox, namely, the ' Bouphonia ' at Athens in the cult of Zeus Polieus, the theme of much ancient and modern discussion ; but in this and in the similar example of the sacrifice of the Dionysiac bull-calf at Tenedos, that sense is expressed in forms and acts that though naive and childlike are yet decorous and even solemn ; there is no thought or hmt of blaming or cursing the god. On the other hand, th^Lindian record suggests nothing solemn or decorous, but merry blasphemy of a ribald and vulgar type, which Herakles was supposed to enjoy\ We may venture to say that no Greek of any known p()riod * p. 348 : in the main his theory had been anticipated in an older treatise byHeffter, Gotterdienst auf Rhodos , i. 3. Sir JamesFrazer, op. cit., accepts the view that the cursing shows remorse for the slain animal. i6o THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES would have been capable of this vulgarity in the temple- worship of any high deity. Probably the Lindians were dealing with Herakles the hero rather than with Herakles the god, and they could treat him en bon camarade. We gather that the festival fell about the ploughing season ; and this may have marked the beginning of the New Year in Rhodes and have been there, as it has often been elsewhere, an occasion for an All Fools' licence and a general subversion of decorum. But the data at hand are too scanty to allow us to hope for a sure and convincing explanation. And looking at the ample record of other Greek ritual, we must regard the Lindian as an eccentric freak. Another noteworthy record of ritual is Plutarch's account of a Coan religious custom in the cult of Herakles. In the Quaestiones Graecae ^ the question is asked why the priest of ^Herakles at Antimacheia, one of the cities of Kos, should officiate at the periodical sacrificein female attire, wearing a mitra, the female head-dress ? \^\ie ' aetiological ' legend given to explain it is that when the hero landed in this island on returning from his expedition against Troy, he was engaged in battle by the Meropes, its original inhabitants, and was so hard pressed that he fled for refuge into the house of a Thracian woman, where he lay concealed in female attire^ It was in memory of this fact that the priest ever henceforth maintained that custom, and that every bride- groom also at the time of marriage dressed himself as a woman. The legend is not hen trovato, for it does not explain all the facts ; and it introduces the mysterious Thracian woman, of whom Plutarch's account of the actual ritual takes no notice at all. What has a Thracian woman to do with Kos and an old tradition about Herakles ? And this is not the only place where she troubles the student of Heraklean worship. Pausanias^ recounts a curious story concerning the introduction of the cult of Herakles into the Ionic Eruthrai : the god arrived from Tyre on a raft which stuck on a rock ; the image was highly desired and competed for by the Chians as well as by the men of Eruthrai ; it was '^ S8. p. 304 C-D. " 7. 5. 5. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES i6i revealed through a dream to the latter that they would prevail if the women of the city would cut off their hair to twist into a tow-line for dragging the raft off ; out of vanity they refused ; but the Thracian slave-women who were in the city and some Thracian free-women consented to offer their hair ; and the rope made of it had the desired miracu- lous power of drawing in the image to the city ; hence for ever afterwards no other women but Thracian were admitted into his temple at Eruthrai. Pausanias adds that the Erythraeans preserved this hair-rope down to his owp, time as a relic, and he speaks as if he was an eyewitness. ^ Again we are puzzled about these Thracian womeiv^who had^this exceptional privilege in the cult of Herakles. /And we may suspect that they had some privilege in his worship at Anti- macheia, for otherwise it is difficult to understand how the tradition came to prevail that a Thracian woman had ren- dered him special service. Now we neither know nor can we easily imagine any ethnic reasons connected with the earliest history of Kos or Eruthrai that would explain such a privilege being granted as a birthright ; nor for this pur- pose can we make anything of any tradition concerning Herakles' relations with Thrace. Where we find in Greek temple-law certain privileges or disabilities in the matter of admission to the worship or of its administration, these generally concern special families resident in the community ; as regards aliens, they were sometimes specially excluded by statute ; or if a special privilege was explicitly given them, it would be granted by State-decree on account of some service rendered to the State or of some special affinity with the deity, of which they might be able to maintain a tradition. But from none of these points of view can we understand why Thracian women should be privileged either at Eruthrai or in Kos. Nor can we believe that either place was a favourite haunt of free Thracians of either sex. In despair of a rational explanation, some may be tempted to accept as a pis alter the suggestion, put forward with some confidence by von Wilamowitz-Mcellendorff =*, that '■ Here. Fur. i, pp. 279, 319 ; cf. Tiimpel, Philologus, 1892, p. 607. 2460 M i62 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES in these cult records an original Tpaxis, the land of the Trachinians, has been corrupted into ©paxt? or Thrace, and that the privileges said to belong to the Thracian were really intended for Trachinian women, Trachis being a land closely associated with Herakles and also with Omphale, who was originally Thessalian before she was transplanted to Lydia. The Omphale problem does not arise here, for neither at Kos nor Eruthrai is there any trace of her figure or myth. But his ' Trachinian ' theory is neither credible nor useful for our present difficulty ; there is little or no resemblance in sound between the Greek words for a Trachi- nian woman and a Thracian woman ; if such a confusion had arisen in the one place, it is astonishing that it should have also occurred in the other ; but, finally, if there were clear proof that the women were really Trachinian, not Thracian, we should be just as perplexed, and we should wonder why Trachinian women should be privileged, and whether it was likely that a sufficient number of Trachinian women should be ever resident in Kos or Eruthrai to make it worth while to establish such a rule. And we should note that Pausanias, in his record of the Erythraean ritual, refers predominantly to the Thracian slave-women, the free being only mentioned incidentally. This last detail may give us a hitherto neglected clue to the discovery of the truth that underlies these records. They may be based on the mere fact that slaves in general, including women, were allowed access to the shrines of Herakles at Eruthrai and Kos, while free-women were excluded. The general exclusion of women is to be noted in the worship of Herakles ; a sufficient proof of it is the proverb preserved by the Paroemiographi, -'' a woman does not frequent the shrine of Herakles ' ^. This was explained in reference to his painful reminiscence of Omphale ; but the cause lay deeper than in any fanciful myth ;/' it lay rather in the old religious feeling that the * Paroem. (Gaisford), p. 130 : they were excluded also in the Phoenician rites at Gades (Sil. It. 3. 21), and generally in Italy (Macrob. i. 12. 28 ' mulieres in Italia sacro Herculis non licet interesse ; ' of. Plut. Qiiaest. Rom. 60). THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES presence of women impairs the warrior's energy, and that it would therefore be detrimental in a hero's shrine which served to consecrate heroic valour ; for this reason, as we have noted, they were excluded from the shrine of Agamemnon ; and for this reason, as we may believe rather than for any myth, was Herakles called Miaoywos, ' woman- hater ', in Phokis, and ^is priest was pledged to severe chastity during the tenure of his oihce ^J) even the story quoted by Aelian from Mnaseas (of dubious credit) ^, that the sacred hens kept in the precincts of the joint shrines of Herakles and Hebe never ventured into the hero's abode is not so foolish from the point of view of old Greek feeling as it sounds. It was therefore noted as something exceptional that at Eruthrai and — according to our hypothesis — at Kos slave- women were admitted ; we may believe that they were admitted under the benefit of a rule that slaves generally were privileged to enter. Our trouble has arisen, according again to this hypothesis, that in the reports that came to Pausanias and Plutarch the servile status was expressed by the ethnic name Thracian, used with no ethnic pre- cision, but genericallv f or slave, as we know that it not infrequently was *=. ^he dedication to Herakles of their hair by the slaves of Eruthrai, which Pausanias seems to corroborate as an eyewitness and which he associates with the miraculous circumstances of the god's arrival, might have been a ritual custom parallel to the rite at Troizen of the dedication of the girls' hair to Hippolutos, a mode of establishing personal communion with the hero or deit^ But if this explanation of the ' Thracian ' problem at Eruthrai and Kos is correct, we are still left to conjecture the reason of this special privilege possessed by slaves in his * Plut. de Pyth. Or. p. 404 A : this shows more than any other cult- title the cleavage between mjrth and religion in Greece ; for in the legend of his earthly career Herakles was the reverse of a woman-hater. t" Nat. An. 17. 46. *= Suidas (p. 1910) s.V. OpaTra- OpaKiuf) 5ov\r] . . . Ae'-yerat «ai Kotvus SovXri : the frequent use of ' Geta ' as a proper name for a slave in the younger Attic comedy is another illustration. M 2 v^ THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES worship there^ Where the same fact is recorded of other Greek cults(we rightly suppose that the slaves represent the original possessors or importers of the culty and the story of the tow-rope might be interpreted to mean that a foreign cult had actually been brought in by slaves. But this is hard to reconcile with the Er3^hraean tradition that it was imported from Phoenicia. The men of Tyre were great traders in slaves, but slaves themselves were rarely of Tyrian origin. However, the Tyrian origin of the Erjrthraean Herakles is at least disputable ; the raft that the idol stood upon might incline us to believe in it, for we find a representation of Herakles reposing on a raft on certain scarabs with such Phoenician adjuncts as the sun and the crescent-moon^; but the cult-image of Eruthrai, showing Herakles stiffly erect holding lance and bow, appears on later coins of the city ^, and reveals nothing Egyptian or Phoenician — as Pausanias imagined — either in style or attributes, but only the archaic style of Greece. The accounts of the foundation of Eruthrai are confused and conflicting. We have no trustworthy evidence of Phoenician influences there ; and it is prudent not to base upon them any hypothesis for explaining the ritual with which we are concerned. It is conceivable that the privileges of the slaves might have arisen under the influence of the tradition, prevalent especially in Asia Minor, that Herakles himself endured slavery. That a myth should engender a cult-usage was not so improbable as some scholars suppose ; we have clear examples of it ; and the suggestion that has just been made can be supported by a curious parallel in the Attic cults, namely a rule concerning the v66oL or bastards in Attica, that they should be attached * Vide Frazer, Pausanias, 4, pp. 127-128; Furtwangler in Roscher'.s Lexikon, i, p. 2137, explains the raft as suggested by the Hellenic myth of Herakles traversing the sea in a cup ; but the cup never, and the raft nowhere except at Eruthrai, appears as a cult-emblem ; on the other hand, we cannot trace it to Tyre : the Tyrian coin (vide supra, p. 144) showing Melqart riding over the sea on a winged sea-horse is pictorial and fanciful and is no evidence for the question of a cult-image. '^ Roscher, ibid. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES by some kind of religious initiation to Herakles in his shnrie of Kunosarges ^ ; for which we cannot suggest any other explanation than that they were thus put under the pro- tection of one who was himself in some sense a rJ^o? by tradition. The other striking feature in the Coan ritual described by Plutarch offers less difficulty to modern anthropological criticism, namely the wearing of female dress by the officiating priest. This phenomenon has been noted in the rites of various primitive peoples ^ both ancient and modern , and various explanations are applicable according to the circumstances of each case. Here Plutarch himself directs us to a true understanding ; for he adds the additional fact that in the marriages of Kos the bridegrooms were in the habit of dressing themselves as brides ". There is abundant testimony of this custom of the interchange of garments by the two sexes at weddings '^ ; and the motive appears to be the desire to evade by this ruse the unseen daimonic influences that may be threatening at this crisis of life. It is natural then to suppose that the priest of Herakles at Kos dressed himself thus because he was playing a divine part in a service which included a le/ao? yajuos, or holy marriage of the hero-god, who would naturally conform to the island-fashion in such a ceremony, the bride no doubt representing Hebe "", for we have some vague evidence that the Coans united him with her in a ritual of marriage ^ There is other evidence that the ritual of Herakles, unlike that of the ordinary hero, included here and there a holy marriage, whereby the hero-god was provided with " Photiuss. v.Kvvoaapyrjs] cf . Dio. Chrys. (i, p. 259 Dind.), Or. 15, p.445- ^' Vide my article in Arch. Religionswiss. 1904, pp. 88-90. " It is possible that lo. Lydus, De Mens. 4. 46, is another witness to the same custom — his words ' in the mysteries of Herakles they dress men in women's clothes ' are vague in their reference : it is not clear that they refer to the Roman rites that he has been describing before : he is perhaps drawing from Plutarch's account of Kos. ^ Vide Frazer, G. B.^ 6, pp. 259-261. *" I made this suggestion in the Arch. f. Religionswiss. 1904, P- 9° ; but I was wrong there in interpreting the inscription in Paton and Hicks, no. 36, as referring to a Upos ydfxos. ' Cornutus, C. 31. 1 > i66 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES a bride. At Thespiai he was served by a priestess who was constrained to remain a virgin till death ^ ; and where a virgin priestess is found consecrated to a god, the natural interpretation is that which regards her as the deity's bride, who must not be sullied by mortal intercourse. The local tradition of this Thespian shrine explained the institution of the virgin priestess by connecting it with the myth of the daughters of Thestios, fifty in number, with whom Herakles had intercourse. We may believe that the myth itself arose from the long continued consecration of virgin- brides from a particular family, of which Thestios was eponymous ancestor. Again, in an inscription of the Attic Mesogeioi, referring to the hero-cults of Herakles and his favourite Diomos, we read the name of an official Kopayooyos, ' the escorter of the girl ' ^ ; it is difficult to evade the conclusion that a girl was / solemnly escorted in the annual procession to be consecrated /as the hero's bride. To complete this survey of the Greek ritual of Herakles, it is desirable, in view of an important question that will arise, to compare it with what can be discovered concerning the non-Hellenic rites of his Semitic and Anatolian counter- parts, the Tyrian Herakles or Melqart and the Cilician Sandan. Our fullest literary record is a detailed description in the poem of Silius Italicus "= of the service in the temple of Herakles in the Phoenician colony of Gades or Gadeira. In accordance v ^th old Semitic custom , the shrine was without an image ; the priesthood went barefoot, wearing linen garments, with head shaved, and were vowed to chastity ; no coloured raiment was to be worn before the altar ; swine were tabooed in the holy precincts, and no woman was allowed t^ enter. A perpetual fire was main- tained on the altar. iSome of these ritual-rules, the taboo, on swine , the aniconic service, are characteristic o f_bemitic religion"; the others are found occasionally in Greek cults and need not be regarded as of specially Semitic origin. The Hellenic Herakles approved of swine-sacrifice ; and '* Paus. 9. 27. 6. " C. I. A. 2. 603. " Punic. 3. 21. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 167 nowhere, as far as we are informed, was a perpetual fire'T" maintained in his shrines ; which means that no Hellenic / State exalted him, as the Phoenicians exalted Melqart, to! the position of divine guardian of the perpetuity of the city's life. -^ But there was one feature of great significance, discernible with more or less of clearness in the ritual of Melqart and Sandan, that — we have reason to believe — left a deep impress upon the Hellenic tradition of the hero-god, namely, ^he death and resurrection of the deity and especially his burning on the pyre ^.'^ The facts need a more critical scrutiny than they have generally received. We have at least sufficient authority for the view that in some form the death and resurrection of Melqart was enacted in Phoenician ritual. Bishop Clemens '' speaks of ' the sepulchre of Hercules at Tyre, where he was burned with fire ' ; and we cannot suppose that the latter phrase refers to any heroic myth, but rather to the ritual of a god, whose effigy was burned on a pyre. This doubtful evidence is somewhat corroborated by a strange story given by Pausanias " concerning a native of Magnesia on the Hermos called Kleon, who being in Gadeira with many others was ordered by command of Herakles to leave the island for a time ; and on returning thither found the colossal figure of a man with marine attributes burning on the shore and reported to have been set on fire by the thunder of the god. This is naturally interpreted as pointing to a ritual in which the Phoenician sea-god Melqart was periodically burned in effigy, strangers being excluded from the mystery ^. There is another piece of evidence, a statement by Pomponius Mela ^ that the shrine at Gades owed its sanctity to its possession of the bones of Herakles, which suggests that the temple service •' Vide Frazer, G. B? 5, pp. 1 17-126. '■ Recog. 10. 24. ' 10. 4. 6. ^ e.g. by E. J. Frazer, loc. cit. ; cf. Commentary on Pausanias ad loc. Was it in reference to this ritual that Herakles was called -ntvKiw (? the torch- bearer) in the Iberian city of Abdera, which was devoted to the Tyrian god (Hofer's attempts to explain the term in Roscher's Lexikon, s. v. are not satisfactory) ; cf. Lyk. Kass. 662, and Schol. ibid. ; Et. Mag. p. 511 s. v. i68 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES enacted the death of the god. Such ritual-death would be naturally followed by a resurrection of the undying power. And a record of considerable interest is preserved by Josephus ^ from Menandros of Ephesos — that Hiram of Tyre, the contemporary of Solomon, instituted the ceremony of ' the awakening of Herakles ' [17 tov 'Hpa/cAeouy eyepo-ts] in the month of Peritios, which is identified with our January. The same verb-phrase expressing ' awakening ' is used for ,the resurrection of Dionysos in Phrygia ^, and is there ^ correlative to a phrase expressing the peaceful slumber of the god in winter. We might therefore suppose that the eyc/30-ts of Herakles at Tyre was the ritual counterpart to a peaceful temporary death or falling asleep of the god rather than a violent fiery death on the pyre ; and we may imagine some ceremony in which the image laid out peace- fully in slumber was suddenly restored to life, marking the new-risen god, as was enacted in the cults of Adonis and Aphrodite in Cyprus, f^so, the Phoenician legend preserved by Athenaeus '^ that Herakles was slain by Typhon in Libya and restored by smelling a quail, might be taken to indicate that the tradition of his death on the pyre was not univer- sally prevalent in Phoenicia. ^It may not have been universal, but the evidence we have gleaned is sufficient to incline us to the belief that the worship of the Tyrian Herakles or Melqart included a periodic burning on the pyre, followed by a resurrection or ascension, which could without any real inconsistency be designated an tyepcn^ or awakening'. The evidence of a similar ritual in the worship at Tarsos and elsewhere of Sandan, who was identified with Herakles no less perfectly than Melqart was, remains to be examined. It was first set forth and developed in an interesting paper by K. O. Miiller ^ : who called attention to a series of coins of Tarsos, autonomous and Roman Imperial, presenting the type of an Oriental figure armed with bow and quiver and sometimes holding an axe, " Antiq. 8. 5. 3, § 146. ^ Vide Cults, 5, p. 285, R. 35''. ■^ p. 392 D (from Eudoxos of Knidos). •^ Sandan und Sardanapal : Kleine Schriften, 2, p. 100. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 169 standing on the back of a fantastic animal apparently a horned lion ; this group is enclosed within the triangle of a pyramidal structure surmounted by an eagle and sup- ported beneath by a high cubical base ; this latter sub- structure is identified by the writer with the ' pyra ' men- tioned by Dio Chrysostom in his address to the men of Tarsos, ' the very beautiful pyre which you prepare for Herakles your founder ' ^ ; and the whole scene is explained as the ceremonious burning of the god on the pyre and his ascension to heaven in the form of an eagle. Modern scholars who have dealt with the subject have on the whole accepted Miiller's interpretation. But criticism ought first to emphasize the fact that none of the coins clearly represents a pyre at all, for on none of them are flames indicated ; secondly, that Dion's words have been too hastily assumed to prove that the worshippers of Tarsos did actually burn their God on a pyre ; for modern writers who have used this passage as evidence appear/ curiously unaware that the pyre could belong to a simple Hellenic ritual, being used in the cult of many heroes, nevei for the purpose of burning their effigies thereon but merely^ for burnt-offerings and having therefore no connexion with any belief in their death and resurrection. Nevertheless, Miiller's interpretation of the coin-type may be regarded as at least highly probable ; for it receives strong indirect confirmation from a passage in Herodian '' in which he describes the ceremonies with which the apotheosis of the Roman Emperors was carried out : the waxen effigy was placed on a couch and arranged within a wooden building that had somewhat the pyramidical structure ; the whole was set on fire and from the top story an eagle was released that carried the soul heavenward. The resemblance is striking to the representation on the Tarsi an coins, and suggests the influence of the Sandan-ritual. This is all the real evidence ; for the myths about the burning of Croesus and Sardanapalus are too vague to be ■^ Or. 33 (Dind. 2, p. 16) ; Herakles as founder here represents Sandan ; cf. Amm. Marc. 14. 8. 3. " Hist. 4. 2. I70 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES used and admit of more than one construction ^ ; nor can we be sure that Sardanapalus was a disguised god. The study of this Tyrian and CiUcian ritual bears on one of the most interesting and difficult problems in the history of the Hellenic Herakles, namely the legend of his fier}' death and ascension on Mount Oita. The story, as it has been handed down to us, has the sharp intensity and moral pathos of ligh tragedy and a marked epic character in the long sequeice of effects and in the fatal interaction of will, passion, ar d destiny. The death of Nessos and his guileful dying gift \p Deianeira, her innocent jealousy of her reckless and unfaithful hero-husband, his secret passion for lole and vengeailce on the men of Oichalia who had wronged him and whom he had wronged, the present of the poisoned shirt sent by his loving and faithful wife which at the moment of his triumph smites him with a long and intolerable agony, his heroic self-immolation on the pyre and his ascension from the fiery flames to the heaven that he had earned — no greater story has come down to us from the creative genius of Greece or from any generation of the older world. CThp J rq. rMniai. of SophoklpR presents it as a tragedy, not quite with such mastery as we might have hoped. We know that this poet was not the first that had handled the great theme ^, and we may beheve that it had already been presented in some epic version, perhaps in part in the .^^m^/^i^L-oi-^eisaftdxQS of Rhodes or wholly in the ^Cupture-cf Oichaliajby Kreophulos of Samos. It would have served as the natural con^LiisioiT'of'^theTiLttei' poem; and as Sophokles "drew most of his pidf from it, it is natural to suppose that he derived the tragic ending from the same source, (iDut no account and no fragment of the Samian epic indicates that it included the fiery death on Mount Oita. What immediately concerns us is the question whether this Oetaean legend with which Sophokles has familiarized '■^ Sir James Frazer bases partly on them a fanciful hypothesis of tha periodical burning of the priest-god, G. J5.^ 5, p. 172, 3cc. '• The theme had already been handled, not very powerfully, by Bacchyhdes, Ode 16. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 171 us is of genuine Hellenic origin, or whether, as most modern writers are of opinion "", it is a reflex projected across the sea of the Tyrian or Cilician ritual, a sacred drama giving birth to a great secular and heroic myth. T^ere are strong difficulties in the way of the former view. In the first place, it is evident tliat the legend of the fiery death and ascension was not known to the older Greek world and, when known, was not accepted as canonical in the great period of Greek literature. \ The oldest Greek version of the apotheosis of|[^ Herakles may have connected this with his winning thelj immortal apples of the Hesperides. Neither the Homeric 1\ nor the Hesiodic poems betray the slightest allusion to his death on the pyre ; and in fact a passage in the Theogony ^ seems to be inspired by a quite different tradition — ' happ}- is Herakles, who, having wrought a mighty deed among the immortal gods, now dwells (in heaven) without pain and ageless for ever '. What is this ' mighty deed ' ? Pindar, the faithful pupil of Hesiod, supplies us with an answer in the first Nemean ode ", which closes with the prophecy of Teiresias that after Herakles had aided the gods decisively in their battle against the giants, he should attain ever- lasting repose and bliss and the hand of Hebe as his reward. This doubtless was the ' great deed ' to which Hesiod ! \ alludesTand this^may be taken as the Boeotian and'tEe \\ earlier prevalent Hellenic tradition. If, then, there was an early native tradition, clinging to the neighbourhood of Oita, of the fiery death and ascension of the hero, we have to consider how it became prevalent. It was unknown or unnoticed by the Bqeotian_2oets, who frofiT thteiFlriear neighbourhood might have been expected to be informed of it. What had escaped them was not likely to have been known to Peisandros of Rhodes or Kreophulos of Samos, who would have more chance of being acquainted with the ritual of the god of Tyre or Tarsos than with the local folk-lore of Trachis. Again we must consider, assuming it was a genuine and native tradition of Oita, how it could " K. O. Miiller, op. cit., does not try to come to a decision. ^ 11. 954-955. ' 11. 60-71. 172 THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES have arisen. It is obviously in this case out of the question to conjecture any foundation for the legend in any historic fact. Nor is it such as the local raconteur or epic poet would be likely to invent ' de nihilo ' ; for dehberately to burn oneself alive on a funeral pyre was not in accord with Greek temperament either in historic or — as far as any legend can guide us — in prehistoric times ; the Greek world was doubtless astonished when Hamilkar in despair resorted to this mode of suicide. We could only explain how such an action came to be imputed to Herakles if there was some old-established ritual which could engender such a myth as an explanation of itself, as a Upos Ao'yos, to use the technical phrase ; for instance, if the effigy of Herakles were periodically burnt on a pyre in the locality of Mount Oita. But there is no real hint or trace of this in any ancient author. Too much weight has been attached to a sentence in the Erotes of Lucian "", ' the pyre is about to be kindled for the god ; the spectacle is not unpleasing, reminding the spectators of his sufferings on Oita ' ; the scene of the dialogue is a festival of Herakles, but there is no indication of place — it might be Tarsos or even Tyre. And the phrase does not necessarily mean that an effigy was burned on the pyre ; for an ordinary flaming ' pyre ' with offerings, such as was dedicated to the heroes fallen ^at PlataeaJ', and was a known adjunct of Hellenic hero- [cult, would suggest to a later writer, familiar with the Trachiniai of Sophokles, that it was being kindled in memory of his fiery passion on Oita. /^In fact, all that we know of hero-ritual in Greece is against the belief that the effigy of Herakles could ever have beerL periodically burned on a pyre as a genuine Hellenic rite^ We are driven, then, to the other alternative that the mysterious and unique legend of Oita is an exotic importation from an alien creed. We may suppose that it was transplanted and settled on this neighbourhood some time after the body of the Hesiodic poems was completed. We cannot be sure by what means ^ c. 54. " Vide Plut. Vit. Arist. 21 ; cf. Class. Quart. 1910. p. 188. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES 173 qi^ through whom it was brought over. It is uncertain if it was known to Archilochos, who narrated the story of Nessos but perhaps without reference to the poisoned shirt. It is very doubtful if the Thessahan-Trachinian colonists of the Troad and Lydia could have become cognizant of the Tyrian rite, although the scene represented on the coin of Tarsos is reported ^ to have been found on a late coin of the Lydian Philadelphia ; nor can we imagine what motive they would have had for attaching to Oita the story that was a misunderstanding of the rite. It is a more probable conjecture that the agenc}^ was some famous epic work such as the Capture of Oichalia by Kreophulos of Samos. As an Eastern and a travelled Hellene he might well have been familiar with the rites of Tyre and Tarsos ; he might have interpreted the pyre-ritual into a thrilling and dramatic story of the death of the god, and by an audacious stroke have succeeded in attaching it for ever to the tradition of the Hellenic hero ; and as his epic probably represented the capture of Oichalia as the last achievement of Heraklcs, he might naturally choose to make the neighbouring moun- tain Oita the scene of the final agony. It would not be strange if so remarkable a poem engendered a fictitious folk-lore, that is, a folk-lore of literary origin, among the people of that region ; so that they came to call a place on the mountain ' the Pyre ' ^ and informed Herodotus " that one of the mountain-streams miraculously issued forth to cool the burning torments of the hero. It would be hazardous to take these for glimpses of a genuine auto- chthonous tradition. As was said above, there is no evidence that the people of this region maintained any actual ritual of burning the effigy on a pyre. If the view here taken is correct, we have a striking example of the bent and transforming power of the Greek genius. A hieratic motive is taken from Oriental religion and interpreted, not for the purpose of any high religious dogma concerning the death and ascension of the divine » Pellerin, Recueil des Medailles, 2, PI. 64, No. 68 (Mionnet. 4. loi). ^ Livy 36. 3. c y ig8. THE RITUAL OF HERAKLES man, but for the purpose of a secular-romantic and passion- moving human tragedy. The later moralizing writers who preached on the career of Herakles base no mystical or inspiring appeal on his fiery trial at the end ; the sermon of Dio Chrysostom entitled ' Nessos ' is the most fatuous- feeble of its type. There is evidence that the apotheosis of Herakles afforded some hope to later individuals touching the destiny of their own souls ; but this hope, such as it was, was derived, not from any ritual, but from the tradition of his life and works. CHAPTER VIII THE DIOSKOUROI The study of these twin-personalities of cult presents more perplexing problems than perhaps any other chapter of Greek rehgion. The attempt to track out the original source and character of any of the leading mythic or religious figures of Greece is rarely easy, but in this case the con- scientious and critical inquirer will find it particularly baffling. And yet here, if anywhere, the comparative method appeared to give us a sure clue and to lead to a convincing conclusion. The inevitable questions, who originally were the Hellenic Dioskouroi and whence did they arise, seemed to be answered conclusively by the discovery of personages identical or similar in other Aryan nations, Sanskrit, Lettish, Teutonic. And the view first put forth by Myriantheus ^ that the Dioskouroi were the equivalent of the Vedic Asvins has been accepted by most scholars and is still the ' orthodox ' view. The equation is sup- ported by the similarity of title : the Hellenic figures are ' Sons of God ' and the Asvins are also called ' Divasnapata ', * sons of Dyaus or Sky ' ; also the name Asvins shows their connexion with horses and the Dioskouroi are ' riders of white horses ', Aeu/coTTwAot ; both pairs agree in respect of many of their functions, and both in the essential fact of their twinship. And that we are here on the trace of some religious experience common to the Indo-European peoples and evolving a rehgious product that was preserved by some at least of the leading races is a belief that has been con- firmed by Mannhardt's interesting [discovery in fragments of Lettish-Lithuanian folk-poetry '', of the heroic-divine pair called the Dewa-Deli or Dewo-Sunelei, ' God's sons ', * AQvins Oder Arische Dioskuren, 1876. ^ Die Lettischen Sonnenmythen, in Zeil. fiir Ethn. 7, p. 76. 176 THE DIOSKOUROI who use the horses of the moon and woo the daughter of the sun and whom he interprets as the morning and evening star. This evidence of Indo-European divine twins is further corroborated by the statement of Tacitus ^ concerning the Teutonic tribe of the NahanarvaH, who worshipped deities called Alcis, a pair of youthful brethren whom the historian identifies with Castor and Pollux.^ To this we may add a statement by Timaios^ that, 'the Celts living by the ocean worshipped the Dioskouroi ' ; and this may be a genuine record of a divine pair of Celtic Twin-Brethren. 'Therefore there seems prima facie a reasonableness in the theory that the Dioskouroi of Greece belong to an aboriginal tradition inherited from the period preceding the dispersal of the peoples known as Indo-European ,_ And if we accept this, we must for the purposes of the history of Greek hero- cult regard their god-head as the original fact and their merely heroic status, which as will be shown attaches -to them in their legend and in much of their cult, as a later degeneracy. But the theory is by no means universally accepted, and it certainly needs critical revision, especially in view of the interesting study by Dr. Rendel Harris of the ' cult of the Heavenly Twins '. We need not be moved by the extreme scepticism which would absolutely deny gods to the Indo-European period ; for that scepticism arose from the erroneous and gratuitous assumption that ' Gods ' are a very late product of human civilization and that the peoples of that period had not yet been able to evolve them or adopt them. But that period in the world's history is not very remote, and the stage of culture at which gods are evolved is at least a very primitive one. Modern anthropological and other discoveries have taught us to be more cautious in our scepticism ; at the same time the slowly prevailing scientific spirit of comparative religion is teaching us to be more critical in our positive behefs. Nothing is more difficult to prove than the identity of the gods of different peoples, unless we can point to identity of * Germania, 43. ^ Diod. Sic. 4. 56. THE DIOSKOUROI 177 name, combined with a high degree of similarity in sphere f miction, and myth. Can the theory about the Dioskouroi with which we have started be submitted to these tests and stand the scrutiny ? Vedic and many classical scholars have been struck with the remarkable similarity of the functions attributed to the Asvins and their Hellenic counterparts. (_This argument moves us the less as we come to realize that all popular divine powers who have a long career amidst progressive peoples come to exercise much the same functions ; for the peoples desire much the same things from their unseen guardians ; the Virgin Mary may come to be a proteatress of the vineyard and cornfield, like Dionysos and Kore, a helper in child-birth and of those in peril on the sea, like Artemis and the Samothracian deities. Nor is there any function so peculiar to the Asvins and the Dioskouroi 'as to convince us of community of origin. The former, as their ndme shows, are connected with horses ; but they drive them in chariots, while the Greek pair come to be represented generally in art as riders. Moreover, if it is true, as some authorities maintain, that the horse was not yet tamed in the Indo-European period, this horsemanship of the Vedic and Hellenic twins cannot be an aboriginal trait, j And the quaint theory of certain writers that the Dioskouroi were aboriginally horses rests on very faint evidence which is both late and has been misunderstood ^. _But the chief function of the Greek Twin-Brethren came to be the salva- tion of mariners in peril ; this could not be aboriginal, but is provedly acquired in the early historic period, and is only faintly reflected in the legend of the Asvins '\ putting function aside, can we discover any identity of myth that might convince us of the common origin of these personahties ? It has often been maintained that there is a certain stereotyped myth attaching to the Vedic, Lettish, and Hellenic figures that must have descended from the primitive period before the dispersion, the sons of God wed or woo the daughter of the Sun, and the Dioskouroi rescue * Vide infra, pp. 214-215, ^ Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, p. 52. 2460 ^ N 178 THE DIOSKOUROI their sister Helena and carry off the Leukippides.' ^But_ when the myths are more carefully examined any real j)arallelism that might prove a common origin disappears. l_Jn the story of the Asvins, the daughter of the Sun, Surya, chooses them both for her mates and rides in their chariot ; there is no dramatic wooing and no saga. In the Lettish myth, as presented by the somewhat confused folk-songs that Mannhardt dealt with, the God's sons who woo the Sun's daughter use the horses of the Moon, and these latter are spoken of in one verse as the Morning and Evening Stars, while in another the Evening Star is said to be her lover. There is slightly more action here, and both the Vedic and the Lettish myths have an obviously celestial, a solar-astral, character. Neither of the two myths concerning the Hellenic Dioskouroi, neither that which narrates the rape of thechild Helen by Theseus and her rescue by the Dioskouroi, who invade Attica and discover her at Aphidna in the absence of Theseus, nor that which with much variety of detail describes the capture of the brides, the Leukippides, by the Dioskouroi and their consequent conflict with Idas and Lunkeus, bears any real resemblance to the Vedic or the Lettish. Taken as they are presented to us, they reveal no celestial, solar, or astral significance. The Helen-story is probably of later origin than the rape of the Leukip- pides, but it is likely that both have grown up on Hellenic soili^J. Again, if we were wholly certain what the Asvins and the Lettish sons of God — who, we must remember, are never called Twins — originally stood for in the earliest beliefs of the peoples, we might compare that with the earliest concep- tion of the Dioskouroi ; and, if we found agreement, our belief in the community of origin might be strengthened. But unfortunately there is much diversity of opinion among » The first literary authority for the story is Alkman (Paus. i. 41. 4) ; but it was known independently to the carvers of the Amyclean throne and the chest of Kupselos (Paus. 3. 18. 5 and 5. 19. 3), therefore it was widely known in the seventh century ; the captivity of Aithra in Troy as Helen's handmaid seems to imply the story, and this was known to Homer (//. 3. 144). THE DIOSKOUROI 179 Sanskrit and Oriental scholars as to the original nature of the Asvins, though all the modern interpreters connect them in some way with the phenomena of the sky. Even in regard to the Lettish figures the evidence which Mannhardt presents is, as we have seen, somewhat confusing, though he considers that it proves them to be the Morning and Evening Stars. Still less agreement is there in respect of theDioskouroi. They have been interpreted by various modern scholars as Sun and Moon, Day and Night, Morning and Evening Stars, the Constellation of the Twins, as celestial swan-men crossed with a strain of horses, and finally as personifications of the male sexual organs ^. The last-mentioned theory, if it, may be dignified by such a name, implies that the Dioskouroi were developed within the Hellenic area. Others, like Winckler ^ and Gruppe S would derive them from the culture of the Euphrates valley, a view suggested by the ' mirage oriental ' and the late evidence of twin-worship at Edessa. Such discord in the interpretation provokes a sadly humor- ous feeling, and illustrates how unauthoritative is that branch of comparative mythology which concerns itself with the discovery of origins. cAnd the interpretation has been further entangled by the view that commends itself to some leading scholars that the Hellenic Dioskouroi ^had originally nothing to do with Kastor and PoludeukesJ in that case, nothing that is told us of the latter pair can enlighten us with any certaint}' as to the former, and we are confronted with a double instead of a single problem. Among modern treatises by far the most hopeful and helpful is the monograph by Dr. Rendel Harris, galled ' The Cult of the Heavenly Twins ', in which he ^traces their worship in various parts of the world to the primeval awe which the birth of twins has ever been wont to cause in men of the lower culture, a feeling which, among some of the African tribes, for instance, leads to their being put to death — often with the mother— among others to their being '■" Vide Kaibel, Gott. Gel. Nachr. igoi, p. 511 : followed by v. Prott, Ath. Mitth. 1904, p. 16. '' Ex Orienie lux, i. i, p. 28. •= Mythologische Literalur, 1898-1905, pp. 57, 564. N 2 i8o THE DIOSKOUROI worshipped as beings of supernormal nature. And he rightly seizes on the crucial evidence, suppHed by Sir James Frazer "" from a trustworthy source, that among the Baronga twins are called ' the children of the sky ', a name that is partly explained by the very prevalent belief that, when the portentous birth of twins occurs, one of them at least must have been generated by a spirit. Dr. Harris may well be right in his intuition that this fact affords us the clue, and this superstition the initial impulse, to the widespread belief in divine or semi-divine twins ; but he does not appear to draw what is the obvious inference that twin-worship of human beings might hence have arisen spontaneously amidst different peoples ; for instance, he still regards the Lettish and Hellenic twins as a tradition from a common Indo-European sourc^^ In the midst of this perplexity and confusion of doctrine we are justified in following at first the less ambitious course /of surveying the purely Hellenic evidence and of endeavour- ing to interpret it within the limits of the Hellenic peri od. \ The record is partly literary, partly archaeological, and should be viewed in chronological sequence, though we must always bear in mind that a later record may present an earlier concept. p_ The earliest are theiJ;wo well-known passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey : the first occurs in the scene where Helen on the walls of Troy is describing and naming the Achaean leaders to Priam '' : ' " But two captains of the host I cannot see, Kastor, the tamer of horses, and Poludeukes, good at the fist-play, my own very brethren, whom one and the same mother bore for me." ... So she spake — but they were already buried beneath the life-giving " earth, in Lakedaimon there in their own dear native soil.' The passage is a masterpiece of secular pathetic poetry. Whatever else the poet knew about the Twin- Brethren, he presents them here purely as human heroes, with some slight differentiation of character, ■■" G. B.^ I, p. 267. ' " //. 3. 236. •^ Some recent scholars interpret <{>vai^oo9 as spelt-producing, comparing ^(iSaipos : vide Boisacq, Etym. Did. s. v. (tiai. THE DIOSKOUROI i8i who have departed from this earth according to the ordinary law of mortaUty ; he reveals their names and their country Laconia, but nothing about their status after death nor about any worship of them, and nothing concerning their origin save that they were the sons of Leda, probably twin- sons, and the brothers of Helen. More enlightening are the equally famous lines in the Nekuia of the Odyssey ^ : CAnd Leda I saw, the spouse of Tundareos, who bore to Tundareos two sons of mighty heart, Kastor,..the tamer of horses and Poludeukes good at the fist-play} i both of whom being still alive lie 'neath the life-giving earthT"who have this honour from Zeus, albeit in the nether world, they pass from death to life and life to death alternate days, and enjoy equal honours with the Gods.'\ This passage, though not incon- sistent with the former, reveals much more ; the brethren are presented as in origin mortal heroes of the family of Tundareos, who are worshipped after their death and who enjoy the singular privilege, while still in the grave, of living one day and dying again the next. Either the poet has not succeeded in finding words that are consistent or, in the second part of his phrase, by death he means merely habitation below the earth, and by Hfe the return to the upper world. But the words reveal the fact that the brethren were being worshipped now as heroes at least ; they could, but prima facie need not, be interpreted as pointing to their worship as actual gods^'\ Only, how can we explain the mysterious behef in their daily alternation between death and life ? The stars will not help us ; for there is nothing in the starry heavens to suggest thisT^ If they were being worshipped merely as heroes, and the poet wished to express this, he could not have better expressed it in poetical speech than by the words rov^i a/K^w ^cooi/s Kar^^a (jyvrri^oos ata — that is an exact description of the popular belief, concerning those who were worshipped as ijpcois, who were not spirits but glorified departed men. .The only useful explanation that has "11. 298. ^ liixfjv Sf A*Ao7xa(7H' Jffa Otoicriv loses its precise value, because in Homeric diction even living men are said ' to be honoured as a god among the people '; the phrase is conventional. i82 THE DIOSKOUROI been offered =" of the unique idea of their alternation between death and Ufe is that it arose from the dual character of their worship, partly chthonian and heroic, partly celestial and divine. Such an interpretation would only be likely to arise in a locality where they were worshipped sometimes as heroes, sometimes as gods ; we have some evidence that this was actually the case in Laconia, and it would be con- firmed by the tradition of the deep friendship between the twins, whereby was suggested the beautiful legend that the immortal Poludeukes voluntarily surrendered a portion of his immortality so as to remain inseparable from the mortal Kastorj^ legend of which Homer may or may not have been aware. We may finally note that in the Homeric poems there is no hint of their divine parentage nor of the hieratic name ' Dioskouroi ' . For the Hesiodic view of the Twin-Brethren the chief evidence is the Berlin papyrus with the fragment of the Eoiai '^ ; this portion of the lost poem deals mainly with the wooing and the marriage of Helen, and twice mentions Kastor and Poludeukes, characterizing them as mortal heroes of the family of Tundareos, almost in the same terms as Homer, But the Scholiast on Pindar "" declares that, according to Hesiod, Zeus was the father of both the Twins ; yet this is no proof that the Boeotian poet was familiar with their name ' Dioskouroi ' or aware of their divine cult. The evidence from the Homeric H5mins, which belong mainly to the same period as the Hesiodic, is fuller and more interesting, showing an expansion of their cult and their characteristics. In the shorter invocation ^, they are hailed by name, Kastor and Poludeukes, as Tundaridai, the sons of Tundareos ; and yet by an apparent contradiction, which, as will be shown, can be explained away, they are said to be both the offspring of Zeus, the fruit of his secret intercourse with Leda, and brought forth by her beneath the summit of Taiigetos, a phrase which implies their twinship : both are described as ' riders of swift horses '. The longer » Nillson, Griechische Feste, pp. 417-418. ^ Frag. 94 Rzach. <= Nem. 10. 150 (Frag. 91 Rzach). "^ H. 17. THE DIOSKOUROI 183 invocation, of sufficient compass to be called a hymn "", repeats all these features, but for the first time adds the phrase Atos Kovpoi, apparently merely as a description, not as a proper name ; they are still named Kastor and Poludeukes, and their true family name is Tundaridai ; they are ' riders of swift horses ', but their functions have grown in scope : they are ^Icorj/pes, by which name they were endeared to the later generations, the ' Saviours of men upon the earth and of swift-faring ships, when the winter storms are whirling down over the pitiless sea ' ; if in the hour of peril the sailors invoke ' the Sons of God ' with an offering of white lambs, they will still the storm and bring them salvation, ' speeding through the upper air with burnished wings ', Here, in spite of their human-heroic family name ^ Twoapibm, which is retained as the traditional hieratic name in Spartan and other cults, they appear to have already acquired a celestial or Olympian character ; they fly down from the aether, and white lambs are offered to them, which in the Iliad ^ are mentioned as a sacrifice proper to Helios, and which belong to them as gods rather than as heroes. Never- theless, nothing in this passage suggests any association of them with the lights of heaven, ^ But it raises the question as to the origin of their maritime functions. We cannot connect these with any aboriginal tradition about them ; and we can only surmise that they acquired them as being the tutelary heroes of a State devoted to maritime commerce and expansion : this may have been Argos. It is possible also that the legend of their participa- tion in the voyage of the Argo was inspired partly by this view of their character and also promoted its general acceptance. In the post-Homeric poem called the Kv-npta there first appears the distinction between them famihar to the later mythographers, namely that Kastor was mortal and Polu- deukes immortal, the one being the son of Tundareos, the other of Zeus ; and this is the theory of their origin that » H. 33. " 3- 103. i84 THE DIOSKOUROI Pindar presents in the tenth Nemean ode. But Terpandros ^, who may be thought to represent the common behef of Sparta, invokes them as ' Sons of Zeus and Leda, noblest Saviours '. In fact, there was no orthodox agreement in antiquity on this point, and it may be possible to find a reason for this conflict of view, as will be shown later. As regards the twinship of the two brothers there is practical agreement in antiquity ^, and we must regard this as an aboriginal trait, with which any theory about them must reckon. Their cult was doubtless diffusing itself and the range of their functions expanding in the seventh century, as the fragments of the Homeric H3nTins reveal ; nevertheless, the lyric of Alkman ", who must be supposed to voice the popular Laconian belief, could still speak of them as denizens of the soil of Lakedaimon, as buried heroes Uving beneath the earth of Therapnai, And this is on the whole the view presented of them by Pindai], whose tenth Nemean is the golden version of the myth of their combat with Idas and Lunkeus, of the death of Kastor and of the generous deter- mination of Poludeukes, who refuses the perpetual joys of Ol5nTipos, which his immortal Father offers him, in order to share his immqrtahty with Kastor and take on half his mortality '^. Nowhere does this poet regard them as gods, but always as heroes, whose spear counted for Sparta as the might of Perseus did for Argos and of lolaos for Thebes ''. He does not notice their interest in seafarers, but lays stress on their knightly character, attaching to them the epithet XevKOTTciiXoL, 'riders of white horses ' ^, which has been supposed to reveal their original nature as celestial beings. ■^ Frag. 3 Bergk. '' That Theocritus chooses to call Kastor the younger does not prove that he disbelieves in the twinship (Id. 22. 175) ; and it may only have been a caprice of the artist that suggested their representation on the chest of Kupselos, the one as bearded, the other beardless (Pans. 5. 19. 3). ' Frag. 5. 'i The same idea is expressed in Pyth. ji. 62, where he calls both of them viol OeSjv, though he maintained the mortal paternity of Kastor. ^ Isth. 4. 33. ' Pyth. 1. 126 ; cf. Eur. Iph. Aitl. 1154 Aios TrafSf . . . 'i-mroiat ^xapimipovrf. THE DIOSKOUROI 185 LSd the Attic dramatists, Euripides alone reveals an interest in the Twin- Brethren. A passage in the first scene of his Helene ^ speaks somewhat hesitatingly : ' Are the sons of Tundareos alive or not ? They are dead and yet not dead — report is diverse — which is the prevailing story ? Men say that they are gods, fashioned like unto stars.' The poet is evidently influenced here by the old tradition of their blended mortality and immortality, which he tries to recon- cile with some divine connexion with the stars. Later in the play ^, he speaks with more conviction and stronger inspira- tion : ' Ye sons of Tundareos, who dwell in the regions of heaven beneath the whirling orbits of the stars '. And again in his Elektra '^ the Twins are hailed as ' the good Sons of God ' who dwell in the gleaming aether among the stars, having honour as saviours of men in the billows of the main '. In a passage in the closing scene of the Orestes ^ he imagines them as celestial beings, 'enthroned in the folds of aether' with their sister Helen, who, like them, becomes after her Assumption the saviour of mariners. But his most striking utterance concerning them, suggesting real religious feeling, are the words put into their mouth at the close of the Elektra, where they proclaim themselves as saviours, who rejoice in delivering the holy and righteous man from his troubles .J In the Euripidean conception of them, what interests us most is his apparent belief in their stellar character, which is indeed presented with much vagueness and without any definite identification with particular planets. The earlier period has left us no attestation of this, and it is doubtful whether in the fifth century there can be found any other evidence for it save the words of Euripides ; though the golden stars dedicated by Lysander at Delphoi " to commemo- rate his victory at Aigospotamoi have been interpreted as symbols of the Dioskouroi who were supposed to have aided him *". * U. 137-140. "^1.1499. <^ 1.990. '' 11. 1636-1637. *■ Cic. De Dm«. 1 . 75. ' The PourtalSs vase, showing the initiation of the Dioskouroi, displays one of them with a stair by his head, and this may belong to the latter part of the fifth century : vide Culls, 3, p. 246, PI. 19. i86 THE DIOSKOUROI It is only the literature of the later learned period that emphasizes their astral character '', the later writers at last explicitly identify them with the constellation known as 'the Twins ', or even with the morning and evening stars ; and the Scholiast on Lukophron preserves jthe curious legend, which he attributes to 'some historians '/that Zeus, when begetting them, approached Leda in the form of a star^; This inter- pretation of them was not confined tc}'i['he learned world, but caught the popular imagination also ; for the popular art from the fourth century onward, on many coins and other monuments y^ displays as their commonest badge two stars above their heads or above their c^ps, or in other close association with them ",__ > -J Another important fact in their later history is their occasional identification with the Kabeiroi of Samothrace, which probably came to be a prevalent idea in and after the third century b. C^ We cannot explain this by any resem- blance in aspect or personality between the Megaloi Theoi, ' the Great Gods ' of Samothrace, and the Hellenic Twin- Brethren : the former were chthonian daimones, generally imagined — so far as they were personaUzed at all — as an elder and a younger deity ''. Nor can we explain it by any identity or similarity of sound in the titles usually attached to the two divine groups : in Argos, Athens, Boeotia, and elsewhere, the Dioskouroi were commonly called "Ai'a/cres-, ' Lords ', a title nowhere attested of the Kabeiroi *' ; for the latter the orthodox and recognized designation was ' the Great Gods ', and if the Dioskouroi could be proved to have ever or commonly enjoyed this proud appellative in their own right, we should see in this the explanation of their fusion with the other pair. But this cannot be proved, and in view of the Laconian myth and the religious view of * Schol. Lukophr. 510. '>• 1. 88. '^ Vide Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Aeolis ', PI. 34. 12. ^ It is to be noted that Herodotus, who was interested in the Kabeiroi, never connects them with the Dioskouroi ; cf. 2. 43, 3. 37. ■■ Vide my article ' Kabeiroi ' in Hastings, Encycl. Relig. Eth. ' The passage in Clemens, Protr. p. 16 01 Upfts ol raivht, otis avatcTortXi. ara% . . . KaXovai refers to the Korybantes, not to the Kabeiroi of Samothrace. THE DIOSKOUROI 187 them which prevailed throughout Greece, a title of divinity so august seems in no way appropriate to these twin-heroes of Laconia. Certain inscriptions suggest that it was from Samothrace and the Kabeiroi that the term ' Great Gods ' came to be attached to the Dioskouroi ; and where we find them specially worshipped under this name in Greek communities, as at Kephalai in Attica, or by individuals, we may explain the fact by the influence of Samothrace, which was powerful in the last three centuries b. c. It is not necessary to labour the difficulty, for the most probable explanation is simple enough. Except that botli were properly pairs, there was no real congruity between the Laconian Twins and the shadowy ' numina ' of Samo- thrace, in respect of name, myth, or imagined personality. But the later Greeks who fell under the spell of the latter pair needed them in that dangerous part of the Aegean, and therefore adopted them as pre-eminently ' the Saviours ' from the dangers of the sea. Now their own Dioskouroi had long fulfilled this function and were also a pair ; a rapproche- ment, therefore, was inevitable, and all the easier because the average Gteek was quite ignorant who and what the Kabeiroi essentially and originally were. The later cult- evidence of this fusion is clear and fairly frequent. In Delos a shrine was consecrated to the Kabeiroi in Hellenistic times, and their priest was designated ^loa-Kovpiav Ka^^Lpcav ^. The adjacent island of Suros shows us coins with youthful figures of the Twin-Brethren, of the soft Hellenistic type, sur- mounted with stars and leaning on spears, but entitled Qe&v Ka^dpoov ^. The old undefined ' numina ' of Samo- thrace are thus completely transformed and Hellenized, borrowing from the Laconian heroes their spears, their stars, their youthful beauty, and probably their name, ' Saviours '. On the other hand, the Dioskouroi derive nothing from the Kabeiroi except the new and higher title 0eot Meydkot — given them in the public cults at Kleitor in Arcadia ", at Kephalai in Attica '^, and in many private dedications — and ^ C. I. G. 2296. •> Head, Hist. Num.^ p. 492. " Paus. 8. 21. 4; cf. Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Peloponn.'.-p. 179. •^ Paus. i. 31. i. i88 THE DIOSKOUROI perhaps a certain tendency, proved by evidence from a few sites, to combine with the Mother of the Gods or with Demeter ^. More doubtfully, in the confusion of divine personalities that marks the later ages of Paganism, the Hellenic Twins might be blended or associated with such alien figures as the Korubantes or the Cretan Kouretes. It was possible for Pausanias'' to doubt whether three diminutive figures of bronze, wearing the characteristic caps, the ' piloi ' of the Dioskouroi, standing on the promontory of Brasiai in South Laconia, represented the Dioskouroi or the Korubantes. And, again, it was doubted whether the ' boy-kings ', "Avukt^s Tiaibes, worshipped with mystery-rites at the Locrian Amphissa, were Dioskouroi or Korubantes, or, as ' those who think they know more than other people were inclined to maintain ', the Kabeiroi ". As regards any ground or motive for these other identifications, little enough can be mentioned. The Kouretes were occasionally imagined as warlike and armed ; so were the Dioskomoi ; independent legends attributed to both the invention of the war-dance called the Tivppixn ', the Korubantes were represented as wearing a particular kind of hat^ — Kvp^aaia — that closely resembled the tuXol of the Dioskouroi, and all these were youthful personages. But there was no real affinity in respect of myth or religious idea and no excuse for confusing the Laconian twin-brethren with the Cretan Kouretes or Phrygian Korubantes, indefinite daimon-troups, vague in number ^ and lacking individual personality, attached to the orgiastic rites of the Great Mother of Anatolia. However, as it happened inevitably that the Dioskouroi ^ At Tomi yceurly sacrifice Mr]Tpl Ofwv ual Aioaitopois (to commemorate the salvation of the city from Carian sea-robbers), Arch. Epigr. Mitth. 14 (1891), 22, no. 50, 1. 35. Dioskouro with Demeter on a terra-cotta throne, from Cyprus, Rev. Arch. 1873, p. 40. On a pre-imperial coin of Amisos we see a cornucopia between the caps of the Dioskouroi with stars, Macdonald, Coins of the Hunterian Collection, 2, p. 221. ^ 3. 24. 5. '■ 10. 38. 7. ^ Greek art might for its own convenience represent the Kouretes and the Korubantes in groups of two or three ; but generally they remained a vague plurality. THE DIOSKOUROI 189 were dra^m near to the deities of Samothrace, and the deepest obscurity surrounded these, it was to be expected that the clearness and brightness of the former should be somewhat blurred. Yet the learned classical world remained on the whole clear in its conviction that neither Samothrace nor Phrygia nor Crete had any real connexion with the ' Tundaridai ' Twins of Laconia. And it is hopeless to suppose that such late and slight blendings and confusions will contribute any evidence as to the ultimate origins of these. The art-evidence can be even a clearer witness than the literature as to the popular conception of ideal personalitiesTn Their earliest monument belongs to the aniconic period of fetichism. At the beginning of his treatise De Fraterno Amore ^, Plutarch makes the interesting statement that 1 the Spartans call their ancient dedications — a(f)i,bpvnaTa — to the Dioskouroi by the name of boKava : ' these are two wooden posts, set up parallel one to another, united by two cross-pieces of wood ; and the inseparable unity in the structure of this "^anathema " seems proper to the fraternal love of the deities.-- There are at least three reliefs from [ Sparta that certainly show us these boKava, or wooden ' beams ', in clear cult-connexion with the Dioskouroi ; the earliest ^ is of the fifth century B.C., and only presents the two up- rights, but with snakes rearing up them ; on another the Twins are seen with their spears on each side of the boKava, which seem resting on a large amphora " ; while on the relief at Verona, dedicated with an inscription by a certain Argenidas, of the second century B.C., the boKava are seen on a cliff above the harbour where his ship is brought to shore, and they are designated by the special term 'Avclkhov — ' the shrine of the Anakes ', a term that had become familiar in Greece for the house of the Twin-Brethren), and from one of them a snake emerges, stretching itself forward to partake of the food-offerings stored in the two large amphorai which are placed in front of the human figures of the Dioskouroi * p. 478 A. '' Tod-Wace, Sparta Cat. no. 588. "^ Ann. Brit. Sch. 1906-1907, 13, p. 214. igo THE DIOSKOUROI on the left ^. The snakes alone would suggest that a chthonian significance attached to the boKava, as emblems of buried heroes ; and the ancient lexicographers in their confused and corrupt notes on the word, endeavouring to interpret it as some kind of tomb, corroborate this ^. - That such a structure could have ever fulfilled any practical architectural function seems impossible y We can best interpret the few ancient records if we suppose them to have been fetich-objects erected on the raised mound that passed for the tomb of the buried hero-twins at Ther- apnai. The whole would be called the ' Anakeion ', as the Verona-relief suggests, and as a fixed cult-type might be preserved wherever the cult of the twins migrated — for instance, at Tarentum ^. Regarding them thus, we need not scornfully reject, as some writers would, I Plutarch's ethical interpretation of the cross-pieces. In the earliest aniconic ' agalmata ' we see the nascent anthropomorphism struggling to express itself. One pillar would be the shrine and emblem of a single god or hero : two parallel ones would be required for a pair, and the desire to express their loving twinship would be naively but naturally satisfied by the traverses uniting them. The value of this earliest art-record is that it attests the concep- tion of them at once as loving twins and as buried heroes.^ The later art was occupied with their forms until it developed them as an ideal of youthful beauty and chivalry — the most conspicuous example of this being the representation on the Talos- vase " ; and though they are usually mounted or shown in * op. cit. 356; Roscher, i, p. 1171 ; J. Harrison, Themis, p. 305, fig. 84. '' Hesych. hoicavrjv e-qicTji', Et. Mag. doKava- rdcpoi rivts iv AaKfSatnovicy ■napa to Zi^aaQai ras [leg. tovs] TvrSap/Sas, (pavraaiav ix^^f^^^ P^g. ixovra] Ta Vide op. cit. Abbild. 2, 1-3, p. 89 : terra-cotta fragments from Taren- tum showing vases on buicmm ; cf. p. 23, rehef with Dioskouroi riding by SuKava and two amphorai. « Furtwangler-Reichhold, Griechischc Vasenmalerei, v, Taf. 38-39. THE DIOSKOUROI 191 connexion with horses, as riders or more rarelj^ as charioteers, yet the traditional characterization of the one as the boxer and of the other as the cavaher, which descends from Homer, was occasionally preserved ^. Their most usual distinctive marks are the egg-shaped hats called ttiAoi, and the two stars set above or in front of their heads. But neither of these appears before the latter part of the fourth century ^ ; therefore, to endeavour to use these as evidence of their aboriginal character seems futile "", unless we can believe that the later artist by some inspiration rediscovered a primeval secret that had been lost for centuries, or that he was expressing certain aspects of them that had always been preserved in local cult but obscured in earlier literature and art. It is the cult-evidence that now remains to be noticed ; for this bears directly on the question of the origin of these Twins as well as on the prevalent popular view of them. -Our starting-place is Laconia ; for this, according to the generally accepted tradition, was their original home. This is attested by Homer, and the Homeric evidence agrees with the local genealogical mythology in proving that their personalities belong to the pre-Dorian Hellenic period. Although Messenian jealousy might try to contest the Laconian claim ^, it is championed and strengthened by Hesiod, Alkman, Pindar, and the later poets. Some of these further assert that Therapnai, close to Sparta across the river, was their special habitation, where after the close of their human Hfe they maintained their ambiguous existence alternating between shadow and light. There is no sufhcienl •' Vide Plut. Vit. Tib. Gracch. 2. ^ Perhaps the earUest example of the star is the gold stater ol Tarentum, struck in the latter part of the fourth century b. c, pubhshed by Evans, Horseman of Tarentum, p. 98. •= The mKoi and Sokwu have actually been taken as evidence of their daimonistic and phalUc origin. The ttIXoi were occasionally worn by other heroes, e.g. Theseus and Tudeus ; and the helmets worn by the Lacedae- monians are so described. Furtwangler's suggestion that the Dioskouroi borrowed them from the Kabeiroi is futile (Roscher, i, p. 1172) ; we do not know that the latter wore them. <• e. g. Paus. 3. 26. 3. 192 THE DIOSKOUROI reason for doubting ^ that some kind of shrine was conse- crated to them in Therapnai, though it is only mentioned by late authorities ^. On the road that led from Sparta to Therapnai stood the building called the (poLjdaLov, and within its precincts the Dioskouroi possessed a shrine *". In the city itself, not far from the ApoVos, or ' running-ground ', they shared a temple with the Charites ^. In the market an altar was erected to them under the title 'Aixl3o'6ktoL, as to those who with Zeus and Athena inspired the counsels of the State ^. Near the beginning of the running course stood statues of the Twins bearing the name 'A^er?]ptot, the ' starters of the race ' *". These are the only public cult- monuments of the Brethren in conjoint worship. CBut we find also that Poludeukes enjoyed a separate temple or ' hieron ' on the road leading from Sparta to Therapnai ^ and that a spring was named after him in the latter township ; while Kastor in his turn had his separate shrine in Sparta erected above his supposed grave-mound, or ixvrjfxa^. To argue from this, as Bethe ' does, that their twinship was not the aboriginal fact and that they were first imagined as wholly independent personages, is rash and injudicious ; no duality or trinity is inseparable in Greek religion, Kore could be worshipped apart from Demeter, Nike from Athena, though essentially they were two in one. And in the rare cases where we hear of Poludeukes alone or Kastor alone, we cannot be sure that the local record has been fully reported ; for instance, we find the name UvKai Kaa-ropibes, ' the Gates of Kastor ', at Guthion in South Laconia J, and we might conclude that the hero figured alone in the local legend, but the coins of Guthion show us both Twdns, as usual, inseparable. Are these records sufficient to fix exactly their divine status in Sparta or to throw any light on their origin ? They suggest at first that they were generally worshipped * As Wide does, Lakonische Kulte, p. 315. '' Steph. Byz. s.v. efpairvai ; Schol. Pind. Isthm. i. 31. " Paus. 3. 20. I. <* Id. 3. 14. 6. « Id. 3. 13. 6. ^ Id. 3. 14. 7. * Id. 3. 20. I. ^ Id. 3. 13. I. ' Pauly-Wissowa, 5, p. 1090. ^ Paus. 3. 21. 9 ; Gardner, Num. Comm. Paus. p. 62, PI. O, 4. THE DIOSKOUROI 193 as 0eot, or gods, rather than as heroes ; for the only clear evidence of heroic cult is the sepulchral shrine in the city dedicated to Kastor alone, where it is possible that chthonian offerings were poured down into a nether chamber according to the ritual called emyto-juo's. But though in legend his mortality is more dogmatically insisted on, both in Sparta and elsewhere, the two brothers are united in worship, and it is not likely that two separate rituals, the one Olympian and the other chthonian, would continue to be maintained. Yet, as has been mentioned above, there must have been at one time a double ritual, one heroic, the other divine, to account for the rise of the legend of their alternating life. The only official Laconian document that definitely desig- nates them as 0eoi is an inscription of the early Roman Empire commemorating a dedication to the Dioskouroi, ' the Saviour-Gods ' ^. The fashionable Lacedaemonian oath vol Tb) (Tio) may mean ' by the two gods ' or ' by the two goddesses ', and the common interpretation of it as referring ' to the Twin-Brethren ' rests on slight authority ^, and is in itself improbable. Even if we were sure that this view of them as ©eoi were generally prevalent at Sparta, this would throw no light on their origin ; for it was not uncommon for the mortal hero to be raised to the status of a god "" ; and throughout all periods the Lacedaemonians appear to have held the opinion that the divinity of the Twins was a later and secondary event.' Pausanias records the contemporary story that their apotheosis occurred forty years after their^ combat with Idas and Lunkeus '^ ; and as in the earliest literature their divinity is not recognized, so the late Spartan oracle quoted by Eusebios " still classes the Dioskouroi with Menelaos and the other heroes, of whom the due reverence ensures the^ prosperity of the State. * C. I. G. 1261. b Only the Scholiast on Aristoph. Lysistr. 8i ; there are many examples of this Laconian oath in Greek literature, but none that throws any light on it. " This happened in the case of Theseus and Lukourgos. '' 3. 13. i. « Praep. Ev. 5. 28 : from the collection of Oinomaos, the Cynic philo- sopher of the second century a.d. 2460 O 194 THE DIOSKOUROI And however closely their ritual may have been assimilated to that of the Olympians, we have reason to think that the popular imagination always invested them in Laconia with the more endearing traits of the human-heroic type. The evidence offered by the report about the hoKava, points, as we have seen, to this ; and some of the earliest monuments that have come down to us, chiefly of private dedication, point to it also. A relief in the Spartan Museum of the sixth century B.C. presents the figures of the Twins confront- ing each other, holding two spears and standing before two amphorai, and above them in the gable of the relief are carved two serpents, lying horizontally and heraldically opposed, with their mouths touching a large egg that occupies the middle of the gable. In the account of the monument given in the Bulletin ^ this is explained as the egg of Leda ; the authors of the Catalogue of Spartan Sculpture are doubtful about it. If this were the certain explanation, we might regard this early Spartan relief as by far the earliest evidence of the legend that the Twins themselves were born from that egg, else it would be hard to understand why Leda's egg should be here so prominently exhibited above them. But none of the older literature or art shows any clear cognizance of that legend of their birth ^, and the Laconian local tradi- tions of their birth in the island of Pephnos or on Taiigetos seem to ignore it all together ^ The first authority for the legend of the egg-birth of the Dioskouroi is the Schohast on Lukophron ^. It is hard, therefore, to beheve in the mytho- logic explanation of this feature in the Spartan relief. With more probabihty we may derive it from heroic ritual ; the egg is one of the offerings to the departed hero whose incarna- » Bull. Corr. Hell. 23, p. 599 ; Tod-Wace, no. 575. '' We can only infer doubtfully that it was known to Ibukos, if what he says of the egg-birth of the MoUonides is derived from the Dioskouroi- myth ; vide infra, p. 208. '^' Pans. 3. 26. 2. ^ 1. 88 : the passage in Lukophron's poem, 506, where the pecuUar shape of their hats is alluded to as the half of an egg, does not prove that he was aware of the legend, though Lucian may have had it in his mind in a some- what similar phrase, Oewv Aia\. 26. Wedo not know why or when a mysterious egg was suspended from the roof of the shrine of the Leukippidai at Sparta, Paus. 3. 16. I ; it was explained to the traveller of course as Leda's egg. THE DIOSKOUROI 195 tion is the snake ; and it is noteworthy that on another Spartan rehef an object Hke an egg is seen in the mouth of a snake ^. The serpents feeding on the egg, if this is the true interpre- tation, reveal the Dioskouroi as chthonian heroes ; we have seen the snakes as frequent accompaniments of the boK-ava, the oldest Laconian symbol of the Twins, and on an imperial coin of Guthion a snake rises from a low altar, on each side of which stand the armed Twins '\ Another feature commonly found on monuments of the Dioskouroi is the two amphorai, sometimes in connexion with the bomva, more often with the snakes ; the reliefs and coinage of Laconia and the terra-cotta reliefs of Tarentum give abundant illustration''. The interpretation of them has been disputed ; but the associations in which they occur suggest that they are connected with the human-heroic life of the Twins, and were supposed to contain the wine that was offered at the hero-feast ^. They may also convey an allusion to the grave ; for they bear a close resemblance to the vases called Xovrpo^opoi carved on Attic grave-slabs. Again, when we look at the functions fulfilled by the Twins for the public and the private life in Laconia, the aspect of them as human heroes emerges more clearly. They were co-partners indeed with Zeus and Athena in guiding the counsels of the State ; but the buried hero or ancestor could be supposed to do this, for we have a record of a Delphic oracle that was interpreted by the Megarians as bidding them summon the spirits of the dead to their counsels ^. (^The Laconian Twins took the deepest interest in the ^ Tod-Wace, no. 355. ^ Gardner, op. cit. p. 62, PI. O, 4. "^ e. g. relief of Argenidas, Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 305, fig. 84 ; on second-century coins of Lakedaimon — amphora between the piloi of the Dioskouroi, serpent sometimes twisted round it, Head, Hist. Num." p. 435 : terra-cotta rehefs of Tarentum, Rom. Mitth. 1900, pp. 3-61, ' Dioskuren In Tarent ' (Petersen). "J This is Petersen's explanation of the amphorai on the Tarentine terra-cottas (op. cit.). Miss Harrison's theory about them as magical receptacles of a navanepixia is fanciful and baseless (op. cit.). « Paus. 3. 13. 6. O 2 196 THE DIOSKOUROI reigning kings, who themselves were of twin descent ; and originally when both kings went together on the campaign the Dioskouroi accompanied them, whether in unseen presence or immanent in the images borne by the host. When the rule was changed and one king stayed at home, one of th^-T^wins stayed with him, the other went with the war-leader^. ; This familiar and friendly association with the chiefs of^TFTe State suggests the hero rather than the Qeos ; we are reminded of the Aiakidai who accompanied the Aeginetans to Salamis and of Aias Oileus, for whom the Locrians always left a place in their ranks. « As regards their function as presidents of the athletic contests, in Greece this was generally attached indifferently to divinities and to heroes ; and in fact the quality of their activity does not often serve to differentiate the one class of beings from the other ; deity or mortal hero could acquire the appealing title of Scottjp, Saviour in a general sense, though it is only attested of heroes of the highest grade, such as Asklepios, Herakles, and the Twins. / More definite conclusion can be drawn from the patro- nymic ' Tundaridai '. The evidence of Homer and Hesiod is sufficient to prove that this was their oldest appellative in Laconia ; and it is doubtful when the divine name Ato'o-Kopoi arose in the land of their nativity. The public inscriptions that contain this name are all late ; and when the careful Pausanias tells us of ' an altar of the Dioskouroi ', ' a shrine of the Dioskouroi', while we may assume that this was their official name in that cult-place, we are given no evidence at all as to the date of it. The earliest example is an interesting private dedication in the Museum of Sparta of the early part of the fifth century inscribed as an offering to the Dioskouroi by a certain Pleistiades, who was ' careful to avoid the wrath of the twin-sons of Tundareos ' ^. As the Twins are here carved holding a wreath, we may con- jecture that Pleistiades was nervous about their wrath, because he had been cheating or otherwise misbehaving in the games. * Herod. 5. 75. " Cauer, Delect.^ 8 ; Tod-Wace, Sculpture, &c., no. ^47. THE DIOSKOUROI 197 Yet we may reasonably suppose that the title was in vogue in Laconia at a much earlier date ; for it is found in an ancient inscription of Thera of a writing so archaic as to suggest the eighth century b. c. "", and we are justified in believing that that island which early received an important influx of population from Laconia, bringing with it the wor- ship of Apollo KarnHos, received also the cult of the Dios- kouroi from the same source. Still the worshipful name TwbapibaL for the Twins remained popular and beloved in Sparta and elsewhere in Laconia''. The typical Spartan woman in Aristophanes' comedy invoked ' the god who lives in Amuklai ', Apollo, ' the Queen of the Brazen House', Athena, and in a more intimate and loving style ' the good Tundaridai who play by Eurotas' stream ' " ; and the name maintained itself both officially and privately by the side of their other title down to the latest times, A woman could receive the name of Tun- dares "^ ; and one of the priests under the early Roman Empire could claim to be descended from the Dioskouroi, probably on account of some far-off genealogical connexion with the old house of Tundareos ^. Another official title proved by a late inscription was ' the priest Of the Leukippides and the Timdaridai ' ^. Now the importance of this name, which as far as we can see was their earliest in Laconia, is considerable for our present inquiry ; for it is wholly a human, not a divine, name, belonging to the pre-Dorian or Achaean royal house of Sparta. Yet some scholars have been misled by the concurrence of the two titles ' Sons of God ' and ' Sons of Tundareos ' into the thoughtless belief that therefore Tundareos must also be a god — in fact, another form of Zeus, his name being interpretable as ' the Hammerer '. But if that etymology » c. I. G. Ins. 3. 359. ^ Le Bas-Foucart, Inscr. 162 f . : KaWiKparr^s twSapiSats ; cf. Ath. Mitth. 5. 231 : MtvavSpos apixoaTTjp TivSapiSaii (from Kuthera). " Lysistr. 1298-1301. •i Le Bas-Foucart, Imcr. 163^ {Ann. dell' Inst. 1861, Tav. d'Agg. D., Ath. Mitth. 2. 385). - C. I. G. 1340 ; cf. Eph. Arch. 1892, p. 23. ' Cauer, Delect.'^ 36. V 198 THE DIOSKOUROl were correct (it is only very doubtful), we might reflect that while Hephaistos and Thor were gods and ' Hammerers ', Charles Martel was a ' Hammerer ' and at the same time a mortal ; and that ' Hammerer ' is a quite suitable name for personages of both species. Also, we are beginning to understand that people under the influence of a certain superstition could feel no inconsistency in describing the same remarkable Twins as ' the sons of Zeus ' and in the same breath ' the sons of Tundareos ', meaning by Tundareos a royal mortal father. Neither in name, legend, or status is there any touch of divinity discoverable in Tundareos, nor did he receive even the lower honour of a hero-cult, so far as there is any record ; which may surprise us, considering his opportunities. We are being driven more and more strongly to the conclusion that the aboriginal status of the Twins in Laconia was human, and that they were regarded as a remarkable pair of royal lineage, believed to have borne the human names of Kastor and Poludeukes, of heroic potentiaUties and in no way connected with Lettish or JV^dic sons of the Morning or Evening Star. The local myths about them have also a purely human- heroic character ; there is nothing discoverably astral but something obviously human in their legends of cattle- raiding and bride-capture. Also, for some unknown reason they sack the city of Las in South Laconia "", a type of story told of no god but of many heroes. Pausanias has preserved a pleasant Spartan tale ^, how that the Twin-Brethren visited Sparta on one " Strab. 8, p. 364 : we are not sure if the story was an independent tradition or arose merely from an easy but false interpretation of the name AaTTs'/iffaf, which we know, on the authority of Sophokles, Frag. 869, was attached to the Twins, and which Didymos explained as ' the ravagers of Las ' (Hesych. s.v.). Dr. Rendel Harris's etymological conjecture that \avipaai,p= stonemasons is not easy to prove or refute ; but the importance he assigns to their function as architects, as something essential to their character, rests on no Greek evidence. Amphion and Zethos may have magically built the walls of Thebes ; any hero may build a city ; there is no record that the Laconian Twins built any. " 3- 16. 2-3. THE DIOSKOUROI 199 occasion from Kurene and desired to stay in the house which they inhabited there when they were among men, and in the very room that they loved best of old. The owner, who was their host, thinking them to be ordinary guests, made them free of the rest of the house but reserved the room, as it was set apart for his maiden-daughter ; but in the morning the girl and her belongings had dis- appeared and in her place were the two images of the Dioskouroi and a table with silphion upon it. Such stories have a familiar home-touch, and are appropriate to the earthly hero rather than to the Olympian. And as other human heroes in Greece were often believed to have dedicated shrines or statues to divinities, a local legend of Las ascribed the dedication of a temple of Athena Asia by Kastor and Poludeukes ^ ; the title was derived from the name of the neighbouring mountain, but was associated with Kolchis and the heroic adventure of the Argo in which the Twins participated. But the interpretation of the figures of ancient mytho- logies is sometimes influenced by a principle that we may express as noscitur a sociis : the significance of a person- age may be revealed by the significance of his associates. If his wife or kindred or closest connexions are obviously superhuman or divine, it may seem likely that he himself was of the same nature. Now when we come to criticize the value of this principle we find it in the highest degree hazardous and unconvincing. Many of the genealogies of the leading Greek families, as of the early Teutonic, connect them with some divinity ; but this does not compel or allow us to apotheosize all the members or to deny their human character. In these, as in all mythologies, the human and divine are intermingled. Because Peleus marries a sea- goddess he is not therefore a faded god or to be regarded as ever anything more than a personage of the heroic saga of Thessaly. The theory that sees a faded god in Achilles is not made more plausible because he was the son of a goddess. To take a Celtic example, the explanation of " Paus. 3. 24. 7. 200 THE DIOSKOUROI Guinevere as a ' white-spectre ', a mythologic figure of the other world ^, does not explain away the human reality of Arthur, which is now generally accepted. Nevertheless, if we found that the family-circle with which the Laconian Twins were most closely and essentially connected was obviously divine, we should be somewhat the more incHned to the theory of their own original divinity. It is worth, therefore, giving some critical attention to this point. We have seen that those who assume the divinity of Tundareos are merely assuming an antiquated hypothesis in entire lack of evidence. Nor is there any clearer sign of the divinity of Leda. Neither by name, myth, or cult is she to be connected with Leto. If we were sure that her name was identical with the Lydian ' Lada ', meaning ' Lady ', this would be a fact of curious ethnic value, and would favour the purely human interpretation of her. The only semi-divine myth concerning her is her amour with Zeus, and if this is supposed to prove her a divinity a similar proof would resolve into a goddess the historical Olympias, mother of Alexander. Nor again would the miraculous birth from the egg give us any evidence ; purely human heroes are often supposed to be born in a miraculous way, and again, as we have seen, this birth of the Dioskouroi seems to belong to a quite late version of their story. Finally we mark that there is no hint or trace anywhere of any cult of Leda, and that her genealogy is entirely human, belonging partly to Aetolian, partly to Laconian tradition. Somewhat more important is their association with the Leukippides and with Helen. The former are their brides, whom they win by capture, and the latter is their sister, whom they gallantly rescue from captivity. And unlike Leda these three female personalities were actual figures of cult^ The questions and the scrutiny of the evidence about them are too complex to be handled here and will be reserved for a separate section. But the cult connexion of the Dioskouroi with these brides and with Helen is not found to be intimate or very extensive — in regard to the * Hastings, Encycl. Relig. Eth. 2, p. 3. THE DIOSKOUROI 201 Leukippides it is not known outside Laconia — nor can it be proved to be original. In any case the question at issue between the original divinity and the heroic manhood of the Laconian Twins is not to be settled by any evidence, convincing or unconvincing, concerning the original divinity of their brides or their reputed sister. But if we believe that the Leukippides, as their names 4>ot^7j and ' Wdeipa certainl}^ at first sight suggest, were clearly recognized as celestial beings of light, the view which occa- sionally was taken in the later period that the Dioskouroi had some astral associations, may have been prompted by their marriage-story. The evidence so far presented certainly supports the interpretation of the Laconian twins as figures of the human- heroic sphere, belonging to the traditions and genealogies of Achaean royalty, who came to be heroized and in some degree apotheosized by later generations and who are not recognizable as faded celestial light-gods of the Indo- European period. But before this interpretation could be accepted of the Greek Dioskouroi in general, the Dioskouroi- cults and legends of other localities mus{ be examined. For it has been supposed that some of these at least have nothing to do with Kastor and Poludeukes ; and it is conceivable that they might reveal some survival or reminiscence of the supposed aboriginal Indo-European Twins. A complete list of these cults in the Greek world is not very large, and many of them reveal nothing to us at all — we have often merely a simple dedication ' to the Dioskouroi ', and no indication of their personahty and nature. But wherever there is any such revelation, even the slightest glimpse, it is always seen that the Dioskouroi of the local cult are none other than the Laconian ' Sons of God ', Kastor and Poludeukes ; and though some writers on the subject are of a different opinion "", my own conclusion is that the Dioskouroi of the whole of Greece are simply these heroes of Laconia, whose cult spread far and wide^ in comparatively late times owing to Lacedaemonian * Vide especially Bathe in Pauly-Wissowa, 5, p. 1090. 202 THE DIOSKOUROI colonization, power, and influence ; that, in fact, though other communities such as Messenia, EHs, and Thebes may have had their own legendary remarkable twins,, who might have become ' Dioskouroi ' in their own right, they failed to achieve this, and failed to establish themselves in real popular cult. From Argolis the evidence is fairly ample and clear ; the Dioskouroi of this territory are none other than the Laconian Twins, and the Argive tradition and conception of them agrees wholly with the Laconian. In the tenth Nemean Pindar puts on record what we may believe to be the local legend of Argos, that Kastor and Poludeukes came as strangers to the Argohd and were hospitably received by a certain Pamphaes ; the fact that the name of this prehistoric personage, who belongs no doubt to Argive tradition, is compounded of the root meaning 'light', is of no more significance than the occurrence in the historic period of names like Phaidros, Aitherios, and others ^ ; it does not tempt us to believe that the Twins came hither as starry or celestial ' Lights '. They came as heroes and were entertained with the hospitable ritual called ^ivia ^, as in other places to which their cult travelled ; and they also brought with them to their shrine which was the chief centre of their worship in the city their Laconian-Messenian brides and children ". Kastor was believed to be fully human, and down to the time of Plutarch the Argives showed his tomb,calling him by the curious title of /xtfapxayeray, which may be interpreted as ' connected with the founders of our race ' and might have arisen from the marriage-connexion of Agamemnon with the family of Leda and Tundareos '^ ; that the Argives should have thus ventured to make Kastor in some degree their early ancestor agrees with the fact revealed by two inscriptions of the Roman Imperial period * It is a common error of current mythologic theory to assign to pre- historic names a deeper and more illuminating significance than we do to the historic. b Pind. Nem. lo. 91. ■^ Paus. 2. 22. 5. Statues by the Cretan sculptors of the sLxth century, Dipoinos and SkulUs. >> Plut. p. 296 E {Quaest. Graec. 23). THE DIOSKOUROI 203 that priestly families of Argos even in so late a day boasted to descend ' from Perseus and the Dioskouroi ' "". We have noted the same fact in the later Spartan records. Plutarch in the passage cited adds the interesting state- ment that the Argives regarded Poludeukes as ' one of the Olympians ' ; therefore, the same view of the divided nature of the Twins found in the Spartan tradition belongs also to the Argive. As far as we can judge from the evidence, the Argive was also aware that their divine status was not their aboriginal privilege, but a later achievement. The Scholiast oniPindar'' declares that Diomedes was apotheosized at the same time with — or in company with — the Dios- kouroi : he may have preserved a local Argive tradition ; but if, as the context rather uncertainly suggests, he is quoting from Ibukos, the lyric poet of Rhegium in the sixth century, the statement would probably be a cult-echo from Magna Graecia, where all these three enjoyed divine honours. The tomb of Kastor, which Plutarch mentions, may have been honoured with heroic-chthonian ritual : but in their joint worship in their shrine in Argos '', as in their shrine outside the city where they were styled the ' Dioskouroi Anaktes ' '', we may suppose that they were worshipped as 0eot, that is, with Olympian rites ; and in an inscription of the Roman period *= they are associated with Asklepios and called ' the gods in the Anakeion '. Their old family-name Tvvbaptbai has not yet been found in any Argive record. It seems as if their popular name in this community was "AmxTTj? or"AyaK€s, the ' kings '. The inscrip- tion just quoted, mentioning their shrine as the 'Anakeion ', ' the house of the kings ', may be giving either the special cult-name of their temple within the city, which Pausanias merely designates ' the temple of the Dioskouroi', or may refer to their shrine some miles away, to which the traveller expressly attaches the title ' of the Kings Dioskouroi '. And the archaic inscriptions of Argos *", commemorating ^ C. I. G. 112^, 1340. '' Nem. lo. 12. " Paus. 2. 22. 5. '' Id. 2. 36. 6. *■ C. I. G. 1028. ' C. I G. Pel. I, no. 561 ; f]avai{aiv dvidrjKf, cf. 564. Bronze wheel in the British Museum rol favaicoi rtn'i, ibid. 566. 204 THE DIOSKOUROI as early as the sixth century the dedications of successful athletes ' to the Anakes ', suggest that it belonged to the earliest period of their local cult. It is well to consider the prevalence and the implications of this title. We do not find it attested elsewhere in the Peloponnese, unless we can regard the relief of Argenidas as an undoubted monument of Spartan cult. The title enjoyed great vogue in Attica, where it obviously designates the heroic Twins of Laconia "". Elsewhere we find a shrine called 'AvaKeiov at Elateia, and there are strong reasons for thinking that the name alludes to the same personages '' ; while a doubt must arise concerning the personality of the ' boy-kings ', the 7rat8es "Avukt^s, of the Locrian Amphissa ''. Now the existence of this title in certain localities of the Dioskouroi-cult has been used as a support to the theory that the Dioskouroi were originally vague indefinite powers or daimones, without personal distinctness, called vaguely "AvaKTes or tw deo) and not yet identified with any individual heroes such as Kastor and Poludeukes. But, as we have seen, the designation of rw 0e Paus. 1, 41. 4 ; vide supra, p. 178. ' Xen. Hell. 6. 3. 6. J Vide Cults, 3, PI. 19. THE DIOSKOUROI 211 of their invasion is embroidered later with further details : the humanity and mercifulness of their behaviour in Attica won them divine honours ; and Menestheus, out of gratitude for their gift of the kingdom to him, ' was the first to call them kings and saviours ' "". The prevalence of the name "AvaKTes and its implication have been noted. ^ -These legends have at least this value, that they mark the 1 Attic consciousness that this cult was an alien importation, and that the Attic Dioskouroi were the Spartan Tyndarids, Attica making no claim in behalf of any divine Twins of her own. She dedicated a temple to them which Pausanias calls ancient, which was adorned with paintings by Polugnotos and Mikon representing their marriage with the Leukippidcs and their voyage on the Argo'\\ In the State-ritual they were treated as distinguished strangers ; on an Attic lekythos of the fifth century we see them galloping through the air towards a table that is imagined as spread with offerings ", This might allude to the fact that the State set apart a table for them in the Prutaneion, where other distinguished strangers and citizens were often privileged guests, spreading it with victual of the archaic diet, such as cheese, olives, and leeks "^ ; but in their temple, which was called officially the Anakeion, greater consideration was shown for their athletic needs, provision was made for a meat-diet, and a company of TrapdaiToi, or public boon- companions, was assigned them^. Attic polytheism may have been as wasteful in its ritual as Jewish monotheism ; but we must admit its greater social amenity. , We cannot date the entrance of the Dioskouroi into Attica ; but nothing suggests great antiquity. We have records of it in one or two of the demes, but it was only prominent in Kephalai, which may have been near the coast, not far from Brauron •". As they were there designated ' the Great Gods ' we may suppose the later influence of the Samothracian, ^ Ael. Var. Hist. 4. 5 ; cf. Plut. Vit. Thes. 33. ^ i. 18. i. <= Daremberg et Saglio, Diciionnaire, 2, p. 256. •* Athenae. p. 137 F. « Id. p. 235 B : quoting inscription in the Anakeion, ? from Philochoros. f Paus. I. 31. I. P 2 212 THE DIOSKOUROI Although Attic tradition and the name "AvaKTcs preserved a vivid recollection of their human heroic origin, yet the ordinary votary probably regarded them as fully divine. They are called Qeoi in an inscription of Delos of the Roman period ^ ; and they possess all the majesty of godhead on a striking monument, probably Attic, of private cult, showing them seated in stately robes and receiving the adoration of a family advancing with upUfted hands, a copy of some original of the Parthenon period ^. Doubtless, the art of Attica contributed to the creation of their ideal type, just as the extended influence of Attica contributed to the diffusion of their cult. The question of our immediate search, whether the Dioskouroi-cults in Greece are mere reflections from Laconia or whether some of them may have been independent deposits of a common pre-ethnic tradition or separate products of a common superstition, becomes a burning one when we handle the evidence from Thebes, that has given rise to somewhat bizarre theories. It has been said that Thebes or Boeotia had its own Dioskouroi, and the writers who have maintained this seem to hold the orthodox belief in the Indo-European Twin ' Sons of God ' who might have settled in various parts of Greece and attached to themselves here and there different individual names. ' In Boeotia Amphion and Zethos were the true Dioskouroi ' — this is a thesis upon the maintenance of which the theory just referred to greatly depends. It must therefore be closely examined. In the Homeric period they were known as heroic Twins, the founders and fortifiers of seven-gated Thebes, both being sons of Zeus by Antiope. Later, in a poem by Asios, of which Pausanias preserves a fragment, only one of the twins, probably Amphion, is ascribed to Zeus, the other to a mortal father,] as happened in the case of the other heroic twins of "early Hellas, Herakles and Iphikles, Kastor and Poludeukes. In their legend and personality » C. I.G 3296. '■ Bull. Com. Arch. 1887, Tav. 5 : Daremberg et Saglio, 2, p. 259, fig- 2443- THE DIOSKOUROI 213 (^Jhe Theban pair in no way resemble the Laconian, and no one has regarded them as their doubles. Nor were they ever called ' Sons of God ', so far as we know, before the Euripidean drama. In the earlier literature, both their career and their personaHty are entirely human-heroic ; none of the legends concerning them bears any resemblance to any genuine nature-myth, and none ascribes any divine or abnormal action or power to either of them, save that Amphion was so skilled a musician that his lyre could move stones, a trajt characteristic of the art-imagination of the early Greek ^. 7 Amphion and Zethos are early names belonging to the legend- cycle of Huriai, and enter Theban genealogy as those of an alien dynasty that interrupted the Cadmeian. Neverthe- less, the theory has been proclaimed that these are in the last resort nature-divinities of the astral sphere, however com- pletely disguised as human heroes ; but the only evidence of this, apart from a passage in Euripides, was derived from the names of their kinsmen, Nukteus, Lukos, Antiope, Epopeus, Orion, all of which have been interpreted by recent scholars as names of celestial beings of light and darkness. But, not to mention the precariousness of each one of these interpretations '', we have noted that the prin- ciple noscihir a sociis is often a snare in mythologic theoriz- ing. The real support of the astral or celestial or at least non-human interpretation of Amphion and Zethos is solely some daring lines of Euripides, which evidently influenced certain ancient scholars and have been much exploited by certain modern. In the prologue to the Herakles Maino- menos *', wherein the early dynasties of Thebes are recounted, we find the phrase ' before Amphion and Zethos, the white- horsed scions of Zeus — rw Aeu/co7r Paeans, 9. 44. "= The Boeotian oath vd tw Oiw (Arist. Ach. 905) cannot plausibly be explained as referring either to the Dioskouroi or Zethos and Amphion. THE DIOSKOUROI 217 influenced by him ^. He may have even deceived the Emperor Tiberius, who according to Malalas ^ erected two columns before the temple of Dionysos at Antioch in honour of ' the Dioskouroi, the sons of Antiope '. We may only believe in them as genuine figures of earlier cult when some authentic Boeotian record reveals them. In the light of our present knowledge, the few inscriptional records from other centres in Boeotia, Thespiai'', Orcho- menos ^, and Tanagra '', referring to dedications' to the ' Dioskoroi ', must be interpreted as cult-monuments of the Laconian Twins. And some slight positive evidence of this is given by an inscription of the Roman period found at Kreousis, the port of Thespiai ^ a dedication ' to the Dios- kouroi and the city ' by one who had held the office of harbour-master. He gives thanks to the Dioskouroi for his maritime command because the Laconian Twins, they and no others, had long been worshipped as the saviours of sailors. We recognize them again in Lokris and in parts of Phokis. They are seen in characteristic attitudes charging with spears on horseback on coins of Lokris s. But some doubt attaches to the worship of the "AvaKves Traibes, the ' boy-kings ', at the Locrian Amphissa, about whom Pausanias ^ tells us that their worship was accompanied with a ritual of initiation, and that opinion was divided as to the personality of these divine beings, some declaring that they were the Dioskouroi, others the Kouretes, others — who thought that they knew more than their neighbours — maintaining that they were the Kabeiroi. One must suppose that they were worshipped as Twins, as otherwise they could not have been identified with the Dioskouroi. The title "Avukt^s may have been borrowed from the Laconian heroes ; but it is not natural that these should have been called ' boys ', nor do we ever hear of a mystery-cult being consecrated to them. We may suspect that the personages of the Amphissian cult were * S. V. AiooKovpoi' 01 'E\«V7;s dSf\ p. 234, 1 7. •= C. /. G. Sept. 1792 (fifth century B. c). ^ Ibid. 2875. " Ibid. 554 (fourth century B. c). ' Ibid. 1826. B Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Central Greece', p. 10 (Early Empire). '' lo. 28. 7. 2i8 THE DIOSKOUROI local twin ' heroes ', recorded in the ancient genealogies, who were supposed to have died in boyhood. As regards Phokis, we have inscriptional evidence from Huampolis and Elateia attesting an 'AvuKeiov in these two cities ; the inscription from Huampolis is dated about 200 B.C. and merely mentions the name ^ ; that from Elateia ^ is of the fifth century and is a fragment of a hieratic law, in which we find the rule that women were not admitted to the shrine. We have other examples of this in the cult of warlike or athletic heroes, the weakness of women being supposed to impair the specific virtue of the holy place ; and this rule agrees with the traditional character of Kastor and Polu- deukes. And the personaHty of the tenants of the Anakeion at Elateia is further proved by an inscription of the fourth century •= recording the fact that ' the city in consequence of a vow dedicated these [statues of the] semi-divine saviours to Poseidon '. This exactly describes the Tyndarids, who were saviours at sea and thus in close relation with Poseidon, and who, even when their cult travelled far away from their home, often retained their human-heroic status, lower than actual divinity. That this was their general character in Phokis is further shown by what Pausanias tells ^ us of the altars in the agora at Charadra, ' of those called heroes, whom some say are the Dioskouroi but others native heroes ' ; the doubt could not have arisen if the Dioskouroi had come as 0eot. Their cult was evidently diffused sporadically through the communities of northern and north-western Greece, Delphoi, Korkura, Kephallenia, Thessaly. The records usually give nothing but the bare name Dioskouroi. But an inscription, that may be from Kephallenia, has considerable interest both for its antiquity, being not much later than 600 b. c, and for its content ^. It is engraved on a bronze diskos, which speaks as follows ' Eusoida(s) dedicated me, the bronze wherewith he vanquished the high-hearted Kephallenes, to the sons of great Zeus '. It is only doubtfully reported to have been » C. I. G. Sept. 3. 87. b Ibid. 9. i. 129. <= Ibid. 3. 130. <> 10. 33. 6. « C. /. G. Sept. 9. I. 649. THE DIOSKOUROI 219 found in Kephallenia ; but it evidently refers to local games of the island, and it is not likely that the victor would have come from remote regions to this obscure athletic contest. Therefore we may at least regard it as a monument of the Dioskouroi cult on the western coast. It is valuable both for the history of literature and for religion ; for the phrases have been inspired by the Homeric Ships' Cata- logue "^ and by one of the ' Homeric Hymns ' ^. The passage in the latter poem shows us, as has been noted, that the term Aid? Kovpoi was not yet a fixed personal name in the seventh century B.C., but was a descriptive and separable phrase of the Tyndarids only recently and gradually coming into vogue. This is just its form and significance on our inscrip- tion. It is evident also that we are not dealing here with the cult of shadowy astral daimones, survivals in Northern Greece from an Indo-European past, but with athlete-heroes, patrons of the games, and supernatural Twins, 'sons of the great Zeus'. These can be no other than the Tyndarids, whose fame has already spread as far north from Laconia in this early period. We may take the same view therefore of the other Dioskouroi- cults in this region, of which nothing but the name is recorded. Their cult penetrated Thessaly and Macedonia, but at what period we have no exact evidence ; the earliest testi- mony is the hymn composed for Skopas by Simonides, in which he glorified the Dioskouroi, who in gratitude saved his life when they destroyed Skopas and his household. The few monuments of this region and of Macedonia and Thrace that reveal them with any characteristic features are inspired always by the traditional ideal of the Laconian Twins. An interesting relief from Larissa '^ of the second century \ B.C. shows the rising sun in the upper field, the Twins ) galloping through the air beneath, and beneath them a Victory holding a, crown to two worshippers, one of whom n, raises his hand in prayer ; by them stands a couch and a \ table with cakes. This is the usual ritual for the enter- tainment of the Dioskouroi who come from afar ; the rising sun may allude to their celestial character, but the Victory * //. 2. 631. '' 33, 9. " Heuzey, Macedoine, PI. 25. i. 220 THE DIOSKOUROI and the crown point to some athletic contest in which the worshipper has triumphed or prays for triumph. Also the influence of the Kabeiroi cult is seen in the inscribed dedica- tion ' to the Great Gods '. It has been noted that their assimilation to the Kabeiroi did not modify their traditional character, though it may have enhanced the sense of their divinity. A mutilated relief from Stoboi, a Paeonian city in Macedonia, contained the figures of the Dioskouroi on horseback with the usual oval hats, and between them a goddess standing with nimbus and torch ; not without reason Heuzey interprets her as Demeter and equates her with the goddess of the Samothracian mysteries "". The presence of the Dioskouroi in the regions and cities of the Black Sea is attested with fair frequency, though the evidence is not abundant. An interesting question arises concerning its origin. One of the earliest proofs of it is that curious coin-type of Istros, c. 300 b. c, if Head's inter- pretation is correct) showing two young male heads, touching each other, but the one on the right inverted downwards, an interesting art-symbolism of the dual nature, celestial and chthonian, of Poludeukes and Kastor I?, Perhaps slightly earlier than this coin is a bronze vase found in a grave on the site of the Dorian city of the Cherso- nese in the Crimea, bearing an inscription ' a prize from the games of the Anaktes ' ; the letters suggest the fourth century B. c. " But the cult probably reached these regions at a much earlier date. For the city of Dioskorias, which bears their name, north of Kolchis, was said to be a colony founded by Miletos, and it is not likely that she could pursue her coloniza- tion of the Euxine after her overthrow in the Ionic revolt. The Laconian Twins, then, are beginning to be known in these waters at least as early as the sixth century b. c. Was it in consequence of their already established cult in the Bosporos and the Euxine that they were brought into * Rev. Arch. 1873 (26), p. 41. *• Head, Hist. Num.^ p. 235 (Macdonald, op. cit. vol. i, PI. 27. 12) : in his later edition, p. 274, Head prefers to explain them as the rising and setting sun. <= Arch. Anz. 1901, p. 57, THE DIOSKOUROI 221 the heroic legend of the Argo ^, or was their participation in the Argonautic adventure a stimulus to their Euxine cults ? And when did they enter the Argonautic story ? Pindar is our first witness, who places the Twin-Brethren among the heroes who obey Jason's call ^ ; but he may have drawn from earlier sources, Hesiod or Eumelos. We know that Miletos, the chief colonizer of the Black Sea, included a Minyan stock that would be concerned with the Argo-story. The above-posited questions cannot be answered with precision, but they suggest the reciprocal influence of cult and myth, which appears occasionally in Apollonius' Argonautica'^ , where he mentions Kastor and Poludeukes. Also the influence of the Kabeiroi-cult may have radiated up into the Euxine, and have stimulated that of the Dioskouroi ^ ; at Olbia, for instance, we find evidence of both. There is nothing of special interest to detain us in the Dioskouroi cults of Asia Minor and its coast. The evidence is mainly of the Roman period, the earliest being the fourth- century coins of the Troad and Lesbos "". In the Greek cities there is nothing recorded or found to suggest that any other personality than the Tyndarids lurked behind the title Dioskouroi. Whether they came in from the islands — Thera possessed them very early, probably also Melos and Rhodes — or whether they spread from some centre such as Miletos, cannot be determined. The general fame of Sparta must have counted much, and in the region of Pisidia and Milyas we have evidence both of Lacedaemonian colonization and of the wide diffusion of the cults of the Tyndarids and Helen '. If we survey the Dioskouroi-cults established in the western Mediterranean, we find frequent and clear traces of the lively tradition that associates them with Laconia and * Cf. Appian, Mithrad. loi kv AioaKovpois xetfta^ojv, ijv Ttva noXiv ol KoAxot avfj^o\ov TjyovvTat rrjs AtoffKovpaiv avv 'Apyovavrai? eniSTjuiai. *> Pyth. 4. 304. ' 2. 806 and 4. 651. '' A marble tablet with a fragmentary inscription, the two oval hats and half a star (third or second century b. c), also an inscription mentioning a priest of ' the Samothracian gods ' (second century b. c.) : Hell. Journ 1903. PP- 43-44- " Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Troas', p. 40. ' Vide Perdrizet, Attn. Brit. Sch. 1896-1897, p. 162. 222 THE DIOSKOUROI the house of Tundareos. Pindar gives us some evidence, and we are told more exphcitly by his Schohast ^ that Kurene was specially devoted to their cult. We have record of the Laconian origin of this State, and the various stories about Phormion of Kroton or of Sparta illustrate the close associa- tion between the Cyrenaean worship and the latter city ^. In Sicily the Twins were worshipped in the Dorian colonies, Akragas, Syrakuse, Selinous, and Tundaris ; the coins of the non-Dorian Katana attest their cult there also. And they are remembered as the heroes of the house of Tundareos. Tundaris was named after Helen, and on its fourth-century coins we see the mounted Dioskouroi with the inscription IjMTTJpes, ' Saviours ' ". The men of Selinous enumerate ' the Tyndarids ' among their deities of victory '^. When Pindar wishes to honour Akragas he ' vows that his song is pleasing to the hospitable sons of Tundareos and to Helen of the fair tresses ', and he praises Theron its lord for spreading more tables in honour of the Tyndarids than any other man ^ The popularity of the cult at Tarentum is fully attested by the terra-cottas that have been mentioned above ; they illustrate also the function of the Twins as patrons of athletic contests and the close connexion of the Tarentine with the Laconian cult. No community of Magna Graecia had been more blessed by the Twins than the cit}^ of the Lokroi, who had won the great battle on the Sagra against the men of Kroton through their miraculous aid ; hence the busts of the Dioskouroi with pilei and stars appear on their coins, and down to the days of Strabo their altars were still standing on the Sagra to ^cCommemorate the victory ^ It was from Sparta that the ! Tyndarids had come to take part in the fight s. From South '^ • ^ Pyth. 5. 6. ^ Vide supra, p. 199. Suidas, s. v. ^opixia.'v (from Theopompos), gives a different story. Phormion of Kroton had been wounded in battle and was ordered by an oracle to go to Sparta, where he was cured by a mysteri- ous youth with a spear-shaving ; he was then miraculously transported back to Kroton, where, when celebrating the Theoxenia, he was invited by the Dioskouroi to visit Battos and Kurene. " Head, Hist. Num? p. 190. ^ C. I. G. Sic. It. 268. ■= 01. 3. i. 39-40- f Brit. Mus. Cat. 'Italy', p. 369 ; Strab. p. 261. e Justin, 20. c. 2. THE DIOSKOUROI 223 Italy the legend travelled early to Rome and was woven into the tradition of the battle by Lake Regillus, Rome, in adopt- ing the cult, adopted with shght change the old heroic names of Laconian genealogy, and her influence has made them familiar under the forms ' Castor and Pollux ' even to the modern world. That influence may also account for many of the later cults that we find in the provincial cities ot-the Roman Empire. The remote Massilia, whether she adopted the Twins from Rome or inherited them as part of her Greek tradition, remembered even in later times that their true ^,JiDme -was Amnklai ; a grave-inscription found there speaks of them as ' the Amyclean Gods, the Saviours of those v/ho sail the sea ' ^. In this survey, which for the question we are interested in need not be followed farther, an attempt has been made to present and appreciate all the evidence available. And admitting that it is incomplete, as the evidence about the origin of any Greek cult must be, we may still draw certain definite conclusions, v (a) There are no Dioskouroi in the whole Greek world except Kastor and Poludeukes ; there are no Messenian Twins or Theban Twins who rose to the dignity of Dioskouroi and competed with the Laconian. {b) There are no traces at all in Greece or the Greek world of any pre-ethnic daimones that might have come down from the Indo-European period, bringing with them the unindivi- dualized names of ' Sons of God '. (c) The primary fact given us are the names and figures of certain Laconian heroes called Kastor and Poludeukes belonging to the ancient genealogies of the Achaean royal houses and specially to Amuklai ; they show no trace of being ' faded gods ' — still less, in the earliest period, of any astral nature — for the purposes of a scientific classification they must be ranked as human-heroic personalities (whether real or fictitious is an unanswerable question) ; their original family name is ' Tundarides ', and Tundareos was their human father, and only in a later stage of their career do they acquire the name ' Sons of God ', that deceptive title which has entangled * C. /. G. Sic. It. 2461 (late Imperial). 224 THE DIOSKOUROI so many, even Dr. Rendel Harris, in unnecessary Indo- European hypothesis. Not only is there no evidence that the appellative Aioa-Kovpoi was aboriginal or even very ancient among the Greeks, but there is no early evidence that the various mythic twins were regarded as sky-children or habitually worshipped. Herakles and Iphikles are twins'; the latter was not remarkable and was scarcely heroized ^, the former was worshipped, but not as a twin^ Amphion and Zethos and the Molionides were remark- able twins, but received no genuine popular worship, nor ever among the people the title Atoa-Kovpoi.. What we can discern in the old genealogies of these mythic twins is the trace of the superstition that of the children of so strange a birth one at least must have been begotten by a god or a spirit, although they are both born in a mortal family and bear the traditional family name.- Therefore it was entirely in accord with primitive feeling and belief that Homer should regardthe Molionides as ' AKTopCcove ,' sons of Aktor',and yet as sons of Poseidon in reality ; that the Aloades should be regarded as the sons of the mortal Aloeus and also of Poseidon ; that Asios should attribute the one of the two Theban Twins to Zeus, the other to King Epopeus, just as Hesiod distinguished between the twin-sons of Alkmene ^. /But we have more evidence from the later period than from the earlier of the tendency to regard twins as sky- children, the superstition to which we owe the name ALoa-Kovpoi^ As far as we can say from the evidence this name was not attached in the earliest period to the Laconian Twins ; but once attached, it doubtless assisted the diffusion of their cult, to which a vivid and impressive heroic tradition con- cerning them must also have contributed. They held the monopoly of the title, though Ibukos may have tried to transfer it tt) the Molionides, and Euripides with slightly more success to Amphion and Zethos. What is singular is that the superstition seems to have » AtPheneos in Arcadia (Paus. 8. 14. 10) he enjoyed 'heroic' offerings. ^ Scut. 48. THE DIOSKOUROl 225 survived and perhaps increased in strength in the later historic period ; for there is some unnoted evidence that ordinary twin-children might be assimilated to the Dios- kouroi and thus given a semi-sacral character. A number of terra-cottas have been found at Kuzikos, Olympia, and Thebes, representing twin-children embracing each other, wearing the hats characteristic of the Dioskouroi and seated on couches. In a monograph entitled Dioscurenartige Gottheiten, published many years ago by Marx ^, these were explained as nameless child twin-gods, on the ground that it was unlikely that all these monuments in these different places represented the real Dioskouroi. This incredulity is reasonable, and is further fortified by the consideration that there is no known reason why these latter should be so frequently represented as children ; for their legend and art-type invariably present them as heroic-athletic young men. But his interpretation of those terra-cottas as children twin-gods or daimones is baseless. We know nothing of such, and there is no suggestion offered to explain how or why they were created. A more reasonable inter- pretation may be offered : these terra-cottas were manu- factured not as monuments of public cult, but to be dedicated by parents who had twins born in their family, and who wished to put them under the protection of the great Twin- Brethren by assimilating them to those. The same explana- tion may be offered of the representation on a Berlin gem of severe fifth-century style ^, published by Furtwangler, showing two young boys crouching and playing with knucklebones, and inscribed ' Dioskoroi '. It was not normal for fifth-century artists to represent deities or heroes as children playing childish games. But such a gem would serve as an agreeable present to parents who had twin-boys in their family, and it might express and gratify the half- superstitious feeling about them. , To this may be added another curious piece of evidence : a mutilated inscription found at Akrai in Sicily contains the words KaXkiyeviav Kacrr . . , and is convincingly restored as / * Ath. Mitth. 1885. '' Figured in Roscher's Lexikon, i, p. 1174. 2460 Q 226 THE DIOSKOUROl KaWcyevLav KdtrTopa koI Uo\vb(VKr]v *. Here we have the heroic T^vins of Laconia brought into strange combination with the goddess of ' beautiful birth ', a child-birth goddess whom we know of from other sources. What have Kastor and Poludeukes to do wdth child-birth ? Less than any deities and as little as any other warlike hero ''. The old epic hero, if his cult survived to the later ages, was likel^^ enough to settle down to the harmless function of the healer ; and there is some evidence that Kastor and Poludeukes occasionally did so — at Constantinople in the latter days of Paganism they healed by incubation " until their practice was taken over by two Christian saints. But they were the least likely of all divine personages to be invoked by a woman in travail. The explanation of the mysterious inscription is not far to seek : the lady had given birth to goodly twins and therefore, while expressing her gratitude to Kalligeneia, invoked Kastor and Poludeukes to adopt them. We have also two significant examples from recorded history, bearing on the ' sacral ' feeling concerning twins. The sons of Xenophon, Gnillos and Dio- doros, 'were called Dioskouroi ', we may believe, on account of their striking appearance as well as of their twin-ship ^. It is noteworthy also that Antony gave divine names only to the twin-children born to him from Kleopatra "^ and to none of the others, callingthe male twin Alexandros-Helios, the female Kleopatra-Selene ; he regards them as sky-children, but on ac- count of the difference of sex he could not call them Dioskouroi . It would be of value for our judgement on the whole question if we could find the same superstition about twins, leading to similar results in religion, among the other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean culture. Was it a tradition of * C. I. G. It. Sic. 205 ; the lettering suggests a late epoch ; the inscrip- tion is now lost. " Tod-Wace (op. cit. pp. 117-118) regard Helen as originally a birth- goddess, but consider the association of the Dioskouroi with her as acci- dental, due to their confusion with two birth-daimones who are seen assisting her on a Spartan reUef (no. 364) ; but of that confusion there is no evidence. ■= Vide Rendel Harris, Cult of the Heavenly Twins, p. 53 (quoting from Acta of Kosmas and Damian) ; cf. Deubner, De Incubatione (1900), p. 77. ■* Diog. Laert. 2. 6. 8. " Plut. Vit. Ant. 36. THE DIOSKOUROI 227 ancient Africa as we find it rife in the modern continent ? I can only quote one slight piece of evidence from the old Egyptian religion, on the authority of M. Naville ^ : a pair of deities, Shu and Tefnut, deities first brought forth by the Creator, were called ' the Twins ', and were sometimes regarded as male and female. Influences from Egypt were always liable to radiate upon Crete ; and the fact just mentioned might give us a clue to the enigmatical statement of a late Greek author ^ that ' the followers of Epimenides had a myth that the Dioskouroi were one male and one female ' — a view of them wholly un-Hellenic. Whether the problem of their origin has been solved or not the study of the Dioskouroi-myth and cult is valuable for the story of Hellenism, not for the slight material help they offered to their worshippers in the matter of navigation, athletics "", and occasionally medicine, such service as other ' heroes ' habitually rendered, but for two reasons that concern higher religion and ethics. As they were the conspicuous examples of the mortal attaining a blessed immortality, their person- alities came to support the later faith in a blessedness attain- able by the individual soul after death ; hence their frequent presence on Roman sarcophagi. The dead might therefore occasionally be committed to their care '^. The most out- spoken expression of this faith is the well-known epigram,® partly cited above, found on a grave at Marseilles, now in the Museum of Aix, in which the dead man proclaims himself as ' God's friend, no longer mortal, the peer in age of the young gods of Amuklai, the saviours of mariners ' ; he concludes by distinguishing two groups of departed spirits, ' the one com- pany hover about this earth, the other join in the dance of the heavenly constellations ; of which host I am, having * Old Egyptian Faith, p. 120. '' lo. Lyd. De Mevs. 4. 13. ■= This interest of theirs remained to the end of Paganism ; both in Byzantium and in Imperial Rome their statues stood by the Grand Circus ; vide Albert, &tude sur le Culte de Castor et Pollux, p. 86. '' Inscription found on tomb in Thessaly, ^wnvpos napfuv'tojuo^ AioiKovpois, Bull. Corr. Hell. 1902, p. 388 (? second century b. c). " C.I.G. Sic. It. 2461 (Kaibel. -E^i^f. 650 ; ]a.cohs, Anth. Pal. Append, no. 219) ; ? circ. a. d. 250. Q 2 228 THE DIOSKOUROI won a god for my guide '. He probably means that he has been admitted to the starry regions, having been guided there by the Twins, whose astral associations he has in mind and to whom he is assimilated. At this time, when Orientalism was rapidly obscuring the polytheism of Greece, it is interest- ing to mark these old Hellenic personalities still clearly conceived and potent in the Hellenic city. Again, the myth of Kastor and Poludeukes expresses and ennobles the sentiment of friendship, an emotional moral ideal that was passionately cherished by the Hellene and that entered as a unique element into the highest ethical system of Greece. The m5^h of the self-surrender of Poludeukes, his abandonment of the crown of perfect immortality for the sake of his brother's fellowship, shines out in the m}i;hology of the world, .'and for moral sweetness is comparable to the best of the Buddhist-legends. It has had the advantage also of attracting the genius of Pindar, who consecrated to it one of his golden moments of inspiration. -, And the Twins, as ideal friends, might acquire the function of supervising the mutual moral obligations of friendship. Theognis ^ invokes them when he pledges his own truth : ' Kastor and Polu- deukes, who dwell in holy Lakedaimon by the fair-flowdng stream of Eurotas, if ever I plot evil against my friend, may it fall on my own head.' Their only public cult as a rule was the ritual known as the ^f:via, a free festival to which the Dioskouroi were invited and at which they were also hosts, entertaining the Gods and the citizens, while in reality it might often happen that the rich citizen feasted the poorer ^, thus realizing the old civic ideal of socialism and fellowship. So deep was the impression of these ideal figures upon tTie" soul of pre-Christian paganism that they were able in some measure to survive its downfall. » 1. 1087. •^ Schol. Pind. 01. 3 ad init. Oi Aioanovpoi . . . ('(/>' kavTwv lirfvorjaav navrjyvptv &(o^fvia, napa to SoKtlv tot€ ^evi^dv Toiis Oeovs . . . Qfo^tvicuv eopral -nap ''EW-qaiv ovTus emrtKovvTai Kara rivas dipifffifvas r)Hipas, ws avrwv twv Oewv (TnSrjtiovvTOJi' rati rroXiai : the genial and private character of the xenia is well shown in Bacchyl. Frag. 28 (Athenae. 500 a-b BaKxv^i^rj's . . . ■noioifj.fvos rbv \6yov irpds Tovs AtooKopovs, KaKwv avTovs inl ^fvia) ; at Paros the priest who ofl&ciated at the Theoxenia in the sacrifice to the Dioskouroi offered to feast all the people at his own expense, /. G. 12. 5. 129, z. 55. CHAPTER IX THE LEUKIPPIDESi« The students of mythology have frequent need of the caution that the significance or status of a mythic personality is not necessarily determined by that of his parents or spouse. A mortal king may marry a goddess or may be the son of a deity. But the interpretation of the Leukippides, the brides of the Dioskouroi, forms a natural sequel to the preceding chapter ; for the nature of the former, which is supposed to be transparently celestial and ' luminous ', has assisted in shaping a similar theory concerning the latter. The names Leukippides, Apharidai, Tundaridai are de- rived from or woven into m3d:hic genealogies of the Achaean period ; and it is often impossible to separate the local strain of Messenia from the Laconian. Thus the Leukippides belong specially to Sparta by cult, but according to the main tradition — in spite of a doubtful passage in Stephanos — their family origin is Messenia ; and the oldest legend regards their union with the Dioskouroi as a marriage by capture from an alien land. Their name must be interpreted as 'the daughters of Leukippos '. On the other hand, the author of the Kupria, our oldest authority who speaks of them, asserted that they were the daughters of Apollo. But the name ' Leukippides ' is considerably older than that poem and is irreconcilable with his statement unless we choose to be- lieve that Leukippos is Apollo. However, there is no founda- tion for this belief, which did not impose itself on the later world ; and it is sufficiently accounted for by the personal name ^oilBr] attached to one of the brides, which naturally suggested an association with Phoibos-Apollo. They are presented, then, in the popular tradition under the name Leukippides, with the personal names, also popular and ancient, of Phoibe and Hilaeira, as the daughters 230 THE LEUKIPPIDES of a Messenian-Laconian princely house, wedded to the Spartan Twins by the primitive form of marriage by capture. The legend that their rape was the occasion of the con- flict between the Twins and Idas and Lunkeus must not be assumed to be aboriginal ; and evidence for it is compara- tively late, and, so far as we can trace, the earliest assigned motive for that conflict was a cattle-raid. Genealogical evidence has its value, but the facts of cult are generally of more interest and authority. Though the later Messenia cherished their memory, it was only in Sparta that an actual cult is attested. Pausanias found in Sparta, near a shrine of Aphrodite which was haunted by the tradi- tion of Tundareos, a temple of Phoibe and Hilaeira, where the rites were administered by maidens who like ' the goddesses ' bore the name ' Leukippides '. According to Hesuchius they were also called the ' colts of the Leukip- pides ', and a certain bronze contrivance on which the priestesses were borne in a procession was called by a name (Ti-toAta), which alluded to this curious designation of them. We can most naturally interpret these facts — the necessity of virginity in the priestesses, their identity of name with the goddesses, their being carried in procession through the streets — if we suppose the periodical rite of a Upbs ydfxos, a holy marriage, in which the priestesses personating the goddesses were solemnly married to the Twin-Brethren. It maybe that only on this occasion they were called 'Leukip- pides ', their usual name being ' colts ' or young attendants of the goddesses. That this shrine was of considerable antiquity may be concluded from Pausanias' words concerning the archaic type of the idols that represented the goddesses. And so far as we can discern they were worshipped as goddesses, not as heroines with simple heroic rites. A late Spartan inscription of the age of Marcus Aurelius contains the name of a priest who administered the joint worship of ' the Leukippides and the Tundaridai '. Distinct from this temple in Sparta was a sacred building called the ^oi^aiov, which Pausanias indicates as outside the THE LEUKIPPIDES 231 city not far from Therapnai ; and the natural interpretation of the name is ' the house of Phoibe '. Can we gather from these meagre cult-facts and from the personal names attaching to them anything concerning the origin and primary character of the Leukippides ? Did they arise in the human or the divine sphere ? Are they mere female appendages to the Dioskouroi, or had they once an ideal existence independent of those ? These are old problems to which no one has found, perhaps no one can find, a satisfactory answer. A new and original explanation of them has been casually thrown out by Dr. Rendel Harris^, who maintains that they were merely a pair of sacred female twins, older at Sparta than the Dioskouroi, worshipped as celestial beings because of their twinship under the impulse of the primeval superstition. The theory has no roots in fact, for there is no evidence that they belong to an older stratum of cult or myth than the Dioskouroi, and, what is of more importance, no evidence at all that they were ever imagined as twins. The two are only mentioned as a pair in the status of the Twin-Brethren's brides. The conventional theory about them rests solely on their names, which are supposed to be of transparent signifi- cance. The ' Leukippides ' are the daughters of him ' who drives white horses ', evidently a solar being : one of them is 4)oi/377, ' the Bright ', the other Hilaeira, ' the Radiant ' or ' the Cheerful ', obviously star-maidens who marry star- twins, all of the Indo-European astral-solar family. These assumptions are very easy ; but when we investigate them closely, they melt away. The term A^vKi-mto^ is never applied to Helios or Selene or to any known solar being of Greek mythology : it is attached to Persephone ^, to the historic Thebans, and to a very large number of mythic mortals, in whom no unbiased view can discover anything solar. The name floats vaguely about the Greek heroic genealogies ; some real and probably many more imaginary people were ^ Cult of the Heavenly Twins, p. 44. ^ Pind. 01. 6. 160 ; it may allude here to her resurrection, when she returns driving white horses like the KivKorraiKoi jy/jtpa of Sophokles. 232 THE LEUKIPPIDES called Leukippos ; and the name need not be supposed to have had at any time an inner mythologic significance, but may have come into vogue as a distinguished heroic name, driving white horses being a mark of a superior person ; the German ex-Kaiser was said to affect them. As regards the name, 'lAaeipa, if this was its original form and meant the ' cheerful one ', any human girl in an old epic or genealogic table might be given such a name ; but we are not sure that this was its original form, for the Scholiast on Pindar^ and Stephanos ^ give it as 'EAdetpa, and on a fifth- century vase *= the names of the brides whom Kastor and Poludeukes are carrying off are inscribed Eriphule and Elera. The question about ft>oL^r] is more complex. I have else- where pointed out that the probably original sense of the name is the ' pure ' one '^ ; and that there is some evidence of a once prevalent cult of an independent goddess 4>oi/3rj, from whose name words such as 0oi/3a?, 0ot/3aco, ^ot/3^rpta, ^oi/3?;r&)p were all directly or indirectly derived, all indicating religious ecstasy or purification which was an essential condition of it. Such may have been the goddess to whom the lake ^l>otj3aia near Troizen^ and the house called the ^ol^oXov near Therapnai were consecrated. In this house the Epheboi sacrificed a dog to the war-god in a nightly ceremony before their mimic battle. Such rites do not suggest a solar andradiant being, but rather a chthonian,to whom nightly rites of purification would be appropriate ; and the Epheboi would naturally come to ' the Phoibaion ', if the sense of ' purification ' attached to that word, and if the Spartans retained the old feeling that purification was requisite before a battle. There is one more text in Pausanias which bears some- what on the religious conception of the Leukippides and somewhat corroborates our impression of -the chthonic character of *ot/3Tj. In his account of Sparta *" he mentions a shrine of Dionysos 'of the Column' — KoKoivarai — and near it * Nem. lo. 112. >• s. v.''A(pi5va. " Furtwangler and Reichhold, op. cit. Taf, 8,9. ^ Cults, 4, p. 141. " Paus. 2. 30. 7 ; it is there, however, associated with Artemis. ' 3- 13- 7- THE LEUKIPPIDES 233 a sanctuary of the missionary hero ' who guided Dionysos to Sparta', that is to say, who introduced his-worship; he then adds that the women-ministrants of Dionysos and the priestesses called ' the Leukippides ' offered sacrifice to this hero before they performed the periodic sacrifice to the god. We may naturally wonder why powers of celestial radiance or their ministers should be associated with the cult of a buried hero and a chthonian god. It would be only natural if some chthonian trait lingered in the tradition of these goddesses. It is believable that the ^oi^alov in Therapnai, the home of a half-forgotten goddess, perhaps the goddess dimly revealed in the verses of Hesiod and Aeschylus, suggested the name ■ Phoibe ' for one of their wives, because it was near to the original habitation of the Dioskouroi ; and Elera or Eleaira or Hilaeira may have been a name borrowed for the other from old Messenian-Laconian tradition, whether of a sup- posed mortal or a supposed goddess is impossible to decide. We see, then, that we have far scantier materials for forming a judgement concerning the Leukippides than concerning the Dioskouroi. And we must renounce any hope of gaining light upon the latter from our knowledge of the nature or origin of the former. As so often happens in the study of Greek mythology, the evidence of these rehgious names eludes us. CHAPTER X THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS Among the many interesting chapters in the record of Greek rehgion, the history of the physician hero-god x\skle- pios, especially in the latter days before the establishment of Christianity, is of salient interest ; so many different aspects of Greek religious practice and feeling are reflected in it, and so serious is its import for the history of the medical science of Europe. Starting from very humble beginnings, it came to over- shadow the whole of the later Graeco-Roman world ; and when at last vanquished by Christianity it left its impress on the vanquisher. It belongs to this section of our inquiry because according to the accepted Greek tradition Asklepios was of mortal origin in respect of his mother Koronis, and he himself suffered death : he is therefore prima facie one of the type that we may call the heroic-di\'ine, one who like Herakles becomes after death a supernatural being, to be clothed at last with the attributes of full divinity. For the evidence of the later historic period leaves us in no doubt that Asklepios was worshipped as a full-blown ^eo's-. But for the complete history and understanding of his cult we must try to penetrate to his original character. If we were satisfied with the testimony of the Homeric poems, our earliest authority, the quest need go no farther. Asklepios is mentioned in the Ships' Catalogue as the father of the hero-physicians, Machaon and Podaleirios "", who accompany the Achaean army and who lead the men of the Thessahan Trikka and other inhabitants of that region ; and in another passage '' Machaon is designated as ' the son of Asklepios the blameless healer '. Slight as these references are, they are sufficient to reveal that, in the view of these poems and of the tradition that " 11. 2. 729. '^ 4. 194- THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 235 the author received, Asklepios was a human physician of ancient fame associated with the region of Trikka ; for if Homer knew of him as a deity, we cannot imagine why he should degrade him. Hesiod, our next Hterary authority in order of time, evidently dealt with the whole story of the birth of Asklepios, his semi-divine parentage, the intrigue of his mother Koronis, the daughter of Phleguas, with Ischus the Arcadian, and with the subsequent death of Askle2iiis^.jiihora^us destroyed with a thunderbolt' fortTTe sin of raising the dead to life "". Part of the story may be regarded as a Thessalian tradition, for Hesiod evidently placed the scene of the birth in Thessaly, and a fragmentary Homeric hymn suggests that his version had gained prevalence in the seventh century ^. The Hesiodic legend of the birth and the death is accepted in the main and developed by Pindar in his third Pythian ; and it implies the humanity and mortality of Asklepios. Nevertheless, that Asklepios was aboriginally a god and his humanity merely a mythologic by-product is undoubtedly a tenable belief, which has been maintained by most modern scholars since the beginning of the scientific investigation of Greek mythology ; and the various interpretations of his divinity reflect the passing fashions of mythic speculation that have prevailed in the last and still prevail in the present generation, some writers explaining him as originally a god of the air, others of the storm or the lightning, others of- the sun. None of these meteorologic theories are worth present consideration. If we must frame a theory of origin, there are only two that in the light of the whole evidence from literature and cult appear reasonable. The one is that to which most scholars who have recently written on the subject adhere — namely, that Asklepios was originally an earth-deity or earth-daimon, established early at Trikka and specially '■'■ Frag. Rzach. 123, 124 ; cf. Frag. 122. It is interesting to note here the germ of a higher thought, worthy of the Hellenic scientihc spirit, that the divine powers are concerned with the maintenance of the normal order rather than with miracles ; the same thought is half-expressed in the Homeric episode of the horses of Achilles that speak with human voice. " No. 16. 2-6 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS belonging to the Phleguai-Lapith and to the Minyan stocks ; and that, hke other earth-deities, he sent up oracles through dreams, especially for the cure of diseases, and was con- sulted by means of the process called incubation, in which the consultant slept on the sacred ground with his ear to the earth, so as to receive a healing dream from below. That human myths should have arisen about him, and that Homer and other poets should have regarded him as a man, was no abnormal occurrence ; Homer's interpretation of Semele and Ino, indubitable goddesses, but for Homer human heroines, is another example. The other theory, which has fewer adherents, but which certainly ought to be reckoned with, explains Asklepios as a real man, dimly remembered as a mighty physician, who received heroic honours after his death and who gradually, like a few other heroes, acquired full divinity. It has been the fashion to scoff at such theories, and to discredit them with the name of the foolish Euhemeros. But it is only in ignorance of modern anthropology and comparative religion that one can any longer scoff. Egyptian religion supplies us with an exact parallel in the case of Im-hotep, a real court-physician who became an undoubted god. Modern examples could also be quoted ^ ; but later Greece itself affords us sufficient illustration. The real human origin of the rjpiDs larpos, of which we have proof from the fourth and third centuries at Athens -'^\ need not be doubted, though in the inscriptions the ' hero ' is exalted with the title deos ; and such local cults of medical heroes might have been found in many parts of Greece. We hear of Amunos at Athens '^^, Ore^nios at Eleusis '^^^, of Aristo- machos at Marathon and Rhamnous '^^, of Polemokrates in the Thureatis -^^, all medical heroes with no myth attaching to them and of indefinite age : and the two latter names could not possibly be attached to functional daimones or to gods, but only to real men, nor are any of them proved to '' St. Peter, once a very real man, becomes at last a non-human god of the early days of creation in a Rumanian story : Gaster, Roumanian Bird and Beast Stories, p. 79 (Folk-Lore Society, 1915). THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 237 be epic fictions. We maj/ infer the same tentatively of Machaon ■--" and Podaleirios '■^^^, the two hero-physicians in the Homeric epic, both sons of Asklepios and in the Ships' Catalogue associated with the men of Trikka. We cannot suppose these personalities to be mere poetic fictions, for the poet would not have invented names such as Machaon and Podaleirios of imaginary physicians -"^ ; still less reason- able is the view that they were degraded health-deities. The poet was aware of certain facts when he closely associated Machaon with Nestor ; for Nestor is a Minyan, and in that part of Messenia, in the settlement called Gerenia, where we have undoubted traces of a Minyan element, we find later the grave-shrine of Machaon, where miracles of healing continued to be performed in the days of Pausanias ; and the local tradition still connected him with Nestor, who is said to have brought back his bones from Troy. His worship in Kos may have been stimulated by old Thessalian tradition. The hero-cult of Podaleirios was brought to the Daunian territory on the east coast of Italy, either by settlers from Kos ^ or later Achaean migration ; here, near a hill called Drion, the rite of incubation for the healing of diseases was practised at the hero's tomb, the same rite that prevailed so widely in the cult of Asklepios. We may then regard these as real names that Homer has culled from Minyan-Thessalian tradition ; he affiliates the bearers of them to Asklepios merely perhaps because of their medical character ; but Arktinos may have had some reason for the divergent view, doubtfully attributed to him, that they were the sons of Poseidon, the great Minyan god and the paternal ancestor of the Minyan stock ". We have seen reason for believing that it was more con- sonant than it used to be supposed with the Greek tempera- ment in earlier times to pay heroic honours after death to men of great distinction and prowess — warrior-dynasts and priests, for instance. It is easily credible that a famous physician might be so honoured before the dawn of history, * Cf. Gorgasos and Nikomachos, infra R. 214. '■ Strab. p. 654 C. " Aithiopis, Frag. 3 (Kinkel), but vide E. R. E. 6, p. 546. 238 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS as the cult of Hippokrates himself shows what was possible in the historic period ^s^. The Homeric poems themselves are proof that the art of medicine had already in that period become a secular profession and that physicians were in high repute and were required for the army on the cam- paign. We do not know that the cult of Asklepios had already become even locally established as early as the Homeric period ; its later diffusion would be quite con- sistent with a later date ; but if it were so early, we should have no right to say that this disproves the human reality of the object of the cult. The question at once arises, by what test can we decide between these two equally plausible theories ? In similar cases, the three tests usually most convincing are : {a) the evidence from the name of the personage ; (b) the evidence from the forms of cult ; (c) the character of the myth attaching, which, if cautiously handled, will sometimes help to a decision. Now the name ' Asklepios ' has hitherto defied all attempts to explain it and remains an unsolved mystery, at least for those who possess a philological conscience. It is only scholars of the type of Wilamowitz who could suppose that the discovery of the cult-title 'Ao-ycAaras of Apollo at Anaphe and the supposed equation of aa-yXri with aiyXri could throw any light upon it. The etymological problem is the harder in that we are not sure of the original form of the name ; we find variants such as AtfrxAa/3tos (on an archaic Bologna bronze in Corinthian-Megaran writing ="), and 'Ao-xXaTTio? in Boeotia ^ ; while the personal name 'AaKaXa- 7Tto'5ajpos found in Thessaly"" suggests an original Thessalian form 'Aa-KaXd-mos, which curiously reminds us of the personal name in the Iliad^, 'ka-Kaka^o'i, the leader of the Minyans from Orchomenos. The original significance, then, of the name 'Ao-KAr/Trio? remains unknown ; but one cannot help feehng that it has more the fashion and sound of a personal-human than of a divine name, and that it is ■■^ Roehl. I.G.A. 549. " 7 q 5 j 3191, •= At Phalanna, Collitz, Dialect. Inscr. 1284. •• 2. 512. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 239 certainly an incongruous and unparalleled name for a Greek earth-god or earth-daimon. Wherever the latter can be clearly recognized, we find him designated either b}^ some mere title of reverence as 6 deos or by some transparently functional or adjectival name such as 'AiSr/j, the ' unseen ' one, UXovTcav, ' the wealthy ', EvjSovXev^, the ' good coun- sellor', Tpo(f)(ai'ios, the ' nourishing ' one, Evvoo-tos, ' the giver of a goodly harvest ', '0<^e'ArTjs, the ' giver of increase '. Though the argument is not clinching it tells with some force against the dogma of the divine origin of Asklepios. The forms of his cult ought to enable us to decide. But unfortunately there was always great resemblance betv'een the ritual at a buried hero's tomb and that at the under- ground shrine of the earth-deity or daimon ; therefore in certain cases it might be hard to determine whether the personage belonged to one or the other class ; and in the shifting popular tradition the one could easily be trans- formed into the other. The act of ritual, for instance, that was most characteristic of the Asklepios-shrines atEpidauros, Kos, Pergamon, and elsewhere, the eyKoiVr/o-i?, or incubation, belonged equally and with equal reason to the cult of heroes as to the cult of divinities : the buried hero or the nether earth-god can send up prophetic dreams to the sleepers on the ground. And here and there in the records of the ritual we may detect other chthonian features : at Trikka, according to the hymn of Isullos '', the shrine was a nether ' aduton ', and this subterranean structure may have prevailed else- where, accounting for the rise of a legend that such and such communities possessed the tomb of Asklepios ^. Even the Athenians, who only received his cult after he had developed into a high god, seem not wholly to have forgotten his associations with the lower world ; part of his service was performed at night, for we hear of a ' pannychis ', a cere- mony with torches ", and hard by his temple near the " 1. 30. •• At Kunosoura, Cic. De Nat. Deor. 3. 22. 57 (? in Laconia, Paus. 3. 16. 9) ; in Arcadia, not far from the river Lusios, Cic. ibid. ; at Epidauros, Clem. Recogn. 10. 24. <= /. G. 2, add. 453 '•. 240 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS Akropolis a j36dpo^ has been found, the pit which received offerings to the deities and spirits of the lower world ^ ; these facts might account for Tertullian's statement that ' the Athenians offer funeral-rites to Asklepios and his mother as if they were among the dead ' ^. We should expect to find similar evidence from Epidanros. Here, too, a late authority attests the existence of his grave ; and the foyapa, or low altar, properly belonging to the hero or nether earth-daimon is almost certainly recognizable by the side of his statuette found there *". A similar object, the om- phalos, is found by him in one or two monuments ; and this might indicate him as a chthonian god or buried hero ^. Finally, a peculiar form of ritual is described in somewhat obscure language by Pausanias as practised at Titane in Sikuon :' a triple sacrifice, in Greece characteristic of heroic as well as of theistic cult, consisting of a bull, a lamb, and a pig, was offered to Asklepios in an unusual way ; the greater part of the victims was burnt on the ground, not on the altar, a rite suggested by his chthonian associations, and appropriate to nether-god or hero ^. Again, his incarnation is the snake, at Epidauros, Kos, and Rome, and the snake-rod becomes the symbol of the physician ; but this mysterious beast was equally the familiar of the buried hero and of the nether-god. The case is different with the other animal that we now know to have stood in a somewhat mystic relation to him — namely, the dog. In many of his shrines we have evidence of the maintenance of sacred dogs, in Epidauros, Athens, Lebena in Crete, and finally at Rome ; and at Epidauros at least the animal was possessed of the divine power of the god * Ath. Mitt. iSj'j, p. 254. '■ Ad Nat. 2. 14. ■^ Eph. Arch. 1885, ntV. 2, no. 9 ; cf. relief in Villa Albani, Jahrb. 1887, p. 109 : relief in Lateran, Benndorf u. Schone, no. 259 ; that this low rounded object is an fffxapa rather than an omphalos seems proved by the Theseus-relief in Paris, where a similar one appears between him and his worshipper, Mon. d. Inst. 4. 22 B. ■^ Amelung, Fiihrer der Antiken in Florenz, no. 94, fig. 18 ; cf. Mus. Borbon. 9. 47 ; vide Daremberg et Saglio. Diet., s. v. ' Omphalos '. "^ Paus 2. 1 1. 7 ; a later passage, 2. 27. i, suggests that the offering was not wholly burnt but was partly consumed by the worshippers. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 241 and was able to work miraculous cures by licking the patient "". At Athens also, when the cult won its way in from Epidauros, the dog entered as a sacred animal, and in one of the earliest ritual-inscriptions we find that an actual sacrifice was ordained to it and even the mysterious Kwrfyerai, or dog-leaders, were invested with a sacred char- acter ^. It is probable that already in Thessaly, the original home of the cult, the animal was closely associated with Asklepios ; for on a bronze coin of the Magnetes of the second century b. c. we see him at the feet of the god •=. Now the dog is not associated as a rule in any mystic way wdth any Hellenic divinity except Hekate, and plays little part in Greek ritual. But he was the constant companion of the 'heroes', appearing often on sculptured reliefs dedi- cated to the heroized dead ; and this arose only from the immemorial friendship between the man and the dog. The dog of Asklepios seems, then, to point to a human rather than a divine conception of him*^. As regards his sacrificial ritual, the record only speaks of animal-sacrifice ; we hear nothing of wineless offerings or oblations of cereals and fruits, such as sometimes were prescribed in the cult of the powers of vegetation and chthonian divinities. And as nearly all species of animals were offered him, they throw no light on his special char- acter ; had he been vividly remembered as a chthonian god we might have expected to hear that victims of a dark hue were preferred in some of the centres of his worship. This is not the case. The only fact from which a conclusion can with some hesitation be drawn is the rule attested by fair authority that the goat was generally excluded from the list of sacrificial animals normally acceptable to him ". * PausanJas records the Epidaurian legend that the infant Asklepios, being born and exposed on a mountain in that region, was nourished by a goat and protected by a dog : 2. 26. 4. ^ Vide infra, pp. 261-262. '' Head, Hist. Num." p. 300. ^ Reinach's theory, Rev. Arch. 1884, p. 129, that the dog was the original form of Asklepios rests on no evidence (for the Phoenician Esmun and his connexions with the dog give no evidence for the origin of the Hellenic personage) ; it is prompted by a totemistic bias. « Sext. Emp. "tirorv-n. 7, § 220 (Bekker, 173, 1. 8) ; cf. Paus. 2. 26. 4 and 9. 2460 R 242 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS But the goat was frequently offered to the earth-divimties, especially the black goat ; it was only tabooed in the hero- ritual. Therefore if this rule were aboriginal and universal, it would certainly strengthen our belief in his original human-heroic nature. The chthonian traits noted above in the cults of Asklepios were probably rarely found ; and at least in the later period his worship was generally assimilated to that of the celestial deities. Here and there a taboo such as was common in hero-cults might compel the worshipper to offer him a whole burnt -offering ^ and to refrain from partaking himself ; but usually we may suppose that he feasted with the god ^ ; nor would this occasional taboo help us to decide whether the chthonian or heroic conception of him was the dominant one that survived ; for the 6\oKavTr]ats, or total consumption of the victim by fire, was no certain test of chthonian worship ^ The original character of a mythic personality may be revealed by the type of prevalent myths that attached to it ; although, as we have seen in the case of Trophonios, this is not always a sure test. Still it is always worth appl3^ng ; and appUed to Asklepios it somewhat confirms our impression of his humanity as the primary fact. The ApoUine legend of his miraculous birth, embodied by Hesiod in his Eoiai and shaped by Pindar into a theme of our highest Uterature, is of no value as evidence ; for we cannot assume it to be part of the earliest Asklepios tradition. Modern scholarship rightly insists on the close attachment of the name and legend of Asklepios to the semi-mythical tribe of the Phleguai, who left real offshoots or at least a vivid memory of themselves in the historic Phokis, and who were always aliens and persistently hostile to Apollo. Even if it were primary, the dogma of divine paternity would prove nothing for our present purpose ; for in Greek * e. g. at Epidauros, inscription recording contributions to a great 6\oKavT7](ns in his honour, Cavvadias, Fouilles d'£pidaure, no. 244. *> e.g. at Epidauros and Titane, Paus. 2. 27. i : and in Attica, Prott- Ziehen, Leges Sacrae 48 [rwy 5k Kpeu/v /xij fipeaeai], "^ Vide Nillson, Griech. Feste, p. 428. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 243 and other mythology it is as freely affirmed of purely human characters as of divine or elemental powers. As regards the mother Koronis, no legend reveals or even hints at hei- divinity : on the contrary her legend and family-history are human and romantic. The name occurs in many mythological appHcations ; the ' Koronides ', maids who received heroic and piacular honours at Orchomenos, may be parallel figures*^''; but the name is not discernibly divine, even if we regarded it as a lengthened derivative of a Thessalian Kore. The miraculous birth of Asklepios from the funeral pyre of his mother is an interesting piece of folk-lore, which has its parallel — not in the miraculous rescue of the babe Dionysos from the burning Semele — but in the story of the wonderful Twins that spring from the ashes of the Koronides. Whatever be the origin of the myth we cannot call it hieratic, for there is no known Greek ritual that could have prompted it ; and it was never told of any known chthonian personality of Greece. Nor again can we trace back the myth to the cradle of the Asklepios-tradition, the locality of Trikka ^ ; it may have been an aftergrowth, an accretion formed in Boeotia, perhaps in the Boeotian Orchomenos. It was not accepted by Epidauros, which otherwise seems to have connected its cult as far as possible with Trikka, nor by other States of the Peloponnese which cherished other versions of the birth ^. It is indecisive, therefore, of our present question ; and at least it cannot be quoted as a proof of original divinity. Nor can we quote as evidence of it the legend of his death, how that he was struck with lightning by Zeus as punishment for raising the dead. Our earliest voucher for the story is Hesiod ", who may have derived it from a Thessalian source. We may safely say that the story ^ It would certainly clash with the version of the birth that Strabo gives as a genuine tradition of Trikka, viz. that Asklepios was born on the banks of the river Lethaios {14. 39, p. 647) ; but we cannot be sure of its genuineness. '" The Epidaurian version supposed a peaceful birth either on the mountain-side, Paus. 2. 26. 4, or in the chamber (Isullos-Paian) : so also the Messenian version, in which the local heroine Arsinoe is made the mother, Paus. 2. 26. 7 ; Schol. Find. Pyth. 3. 14. "^ Frag. 125 (Rzach). R 2 244 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS could not be hieratic, could not have arisen from any possible ritual ; nor is it one that could naturally be told of any god ^. It is inconsistent with any behef in him as a chthonian daimon ; and, marking the thrilling end of his human career, it falls naturally into its place in a series of legends, which express nothing else than the tradition of Asklepios as a human healer of supernormal power. We note also that no other kind of legend, none of the heroic or epic type, attaches to Asklepios on any trustworthy authority ''. To draw from this fact the inference that he was originally a god and that the remembrance of his divinity debarred him from any place in the story of human adventure is a misjudgement *=. Legends were told of him, neither of the divine nor of the chivalrous-epic type, but merely those that would naturally attach to the culture-hero, whose imagined activity was confined to the practice of his art. A chthonian daimon or deity may easily come to possess a power of healing ; but his or her chief function belongs to the world of vegetation. It is therefore in the highest degree singular, if this was his origin, that no cult or title or legend of Asklepios reveals any association of him with the ideas of growth and increase ; he is interested merely in herbs and simples, as the modern medical student may b,e interested in botany. Nor do the records of his cult disclose in him any near and natural affinity to the other divine powers undoubtedly belonging to the sphere of vegetation. He has no bias towards any association with Dionysos, Demeter and Kore, Hades, Plouton ; his connexion with the Eleusinian mysteries is merely that of an outsider, he is admitted to them as a new denizen of Athens ^. As any Greek divinity might at times be called ^ To be struck by lightning is a common fact of human experience ; and in early Greece as at Rome, such people might be naturally regarded ' sacred ' or accursed. ^' It is only Hyginus, Fab. 173, who puts him into the Calydonian hunt : Clemens enrols him among the Argonauts {Strom, i. 21, p. 382 P), wrongly quoting ApoUonios, who nowhere mentions him in his list, Arg. 1. 23-227. Thraemer in Pauly-Wissowa, i, p. 1653. His Attic association with the Eleusinia is reflected in the later cult at Epidauros (vide Cults, 3, ' Demeter ', R. 236.) THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 245 on 'to exercise the therapeutic art, Asklepios might find himself on occasions associated with any one of them. The only real partnership into which he entered was Apollo's, and this vitally concerned the whole course of his career ; however it originated, it became purely a medical partner- ship between an elder and younger practitioner. But the only figures with whom Asklepios is habitually grouped in the art-monuments are the members of his own family ; and these, apart from the ' heroic ' pair Podaleirios and Machaon, are merely abstract personifications of hygiene or the heahng art, Hugieia, laso, Panakeia, or such an emanation of his own light-producing power as AtyXrj. , The value and the correctness of the statement in the last paragraph would be, to say the least, impaired, if we believed that Trophonios of Lebadeia was in origin identical with Asklepios and was remembered by a later world as of close kinship with him ; for, as has been already shown, Tro- phonios, the ' nourishing one ', is quite obviously the daimon or the god of tlie nourishing earth and obviously a chthonian power. And some modern scholars have easily taken for granted the identification of the two, merely because the sculptor Praxiteles in the fourth century is said to have made a statue of Trophonios having a general resemblance to Asklepios ^ ; and because Cicero presents a theory that of the four Mercuries one was ' the son of Valens and Coronis, the same as he who beneath the earth is deemed Trophonius ' '' and of this Mercury one of the many Asklepioi was his brother. We would like to know how far in the Praxitelean statue at Lebadeia the resemblance between the two divinities was expressed. The context in Pausanias some- what suggests that the image of Trophonios in the sacred cave bore a staff entwined with serpents, the usual symbol of the healing-god. It is also likely enough that a master of ideal expression such as was Praxiteles might have charged the countenance of Trophonios with the expression * Paus. 9. 39. 3. '' De Nat. Deor. 3. 22. 56. Valens is obviously the Roman equivalent of the Arcadian Ischus, who plays the part of the mortal lover in the story of Koronis. 246 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS of mild benevolence and wisdom proper to the physician- god. But this does not oblige us to believe that there was any genuine local tradition of Lebadeia preserving a true memory of the original identity of Trophonios and Asklepios. The legend of the former is manifold, but at no point touches that of the latter ; they are never associated in ritual, and the forms and the purport of the worship of each are dissimilar. The cult of the former is hedged round with taboo and mystery ; he is an underworld power of vegeta- tion and therefore associated with Demeter ; he is oracular, yet not consulted as a physician, and we hear nothing of incubation at Lebadeia. On the other hand Asklepios has no mysteries, no natural affinity with Demeter^, is not in the general sense oracular, and as a rule is only consulted for medical purposes ^, and the process called incubation is the characteristic mode of access to him. But as the statue by Praxiteles was likely to be impressive and widely known, it could easily engender a later belief, reflected in the passage of the De Natura Deorum, that Trophonios and Asklepios were in some way identical. Such views are not necessarily of any value for the discovery of origins. This review of the various lines of evidence gives us reason for rejecting what may be called the orthodox academic view that Asklepios was fundamentally and from origin a chthonian deity, and inclines us to the belief in his human origin as a culture-hero. Whether all culture- heroes are to be regarded as real or whether many were fictitious is not a problem to discuss here. But, if this interpretation of Asklepios be accepted, we can read the later records of the diffusion and development of his cult as one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of the Mediterranean idea of the man-god. And one cannot avoid * An inscription from Hermione {Cults, 3, p. 320, R. 37) couples Zeus- Asklepios with Demeter Chthonia, but Zeus-Asklepios is a late development. ^ The vague phrase in Lucian, Div. Concil. 16, suggests an oracular Asklepios consulted for general purposes ; but I am not aware of any recorded example except the Epidaurian inscription, Kavvadias, op. cit. 2. 24, where he gives an oracle through incubation to a father whose son had been washed up on a rock from shipwreck, telling him where he was. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 247 the belief that the cult of a hero of famous earthly memory would spread throughout Greece far more easily than that of an obscure daimon of an insignificant town. It is interesting to follow certain tracks in the diffusion of this cult and to mark certain stages in his later career. Assuming that Trikka was its original home, we would like to know when and along what routes the cult, that by the time of the Roman Empire had spread itself over the civilized world, began to migrate. Other communities in Thessaly had adopted him, at least as early as the fifth century ^. At some indefinitely earlier date it was carried into Boeotia and Phokis probably by settlers of the Phlegyan stock, a people once regarded as merely mythical, whose historical reality was, however, championed by O. Miiller on good grounds and, so far as cult and myth can establish a proof, may be taken as proved. They preserved a tradi- tion of their settlement in Boeotia on or near the site of Orchomenos, and of their later expulsion into Phokis. In Boeotia none of the records of Asklepios-cult are ancient enough to serve as telling evidence. But at Tithoreia in Phokis we find strong corroboration of the Phlegyan tradition and of their close association with the hero-god ^. He was worshipped not only by the inhabitants of that small town on the slopes of Parnassos, but by all the Phokians under the title ' Apxny^rrj'i , as ' the Founder ' of their community, and this term was only attached in Greek religion to god or hero who by some received tradition was accepted as the ancestor of the tribe or stock or who was the leader and settler of the colony either actually or in the popular belief. At Tithoreia we must suppose it to have signified that Asklepios as the ancestral hero-god of the race had led his Phlegyan people to their home on Parnassos. This early Phlegyan settlement in Phokis and in the vicinity of Delphoi was doubtless influential upon the development and crystal - ^ The earliest evidence is a coin of Larissa, Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Thessaly ', p. 28, PI. V. 9, Asklepios feeding serpent from patera, 450-400 b. c. ; a famous Thessalian seat of Asklepios must have been Hupata, for he retained the title 'rTiaraios even in Paros and Thera ; vide Ath. Mitth. 1902, p. 237. " Fans. 10. 32. 12. 248 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS lization of the orthodox Asklepios-legend, in which is reflected the ineffaceable hostiUty of Apollo to the Phleguai and the skilful reconciliation effected, doubtless by the priesthood, between Delphoi and the popular Phokian culf". Apollo becomes the father of the physician-hero, but the cult is never admitted within the Delphic area ; at "least the very large number of Delphic inscriptions and other records are entirely silent about it. The curious legend recorded by Pherekudes^ that Asklepios practised his heahng art in Delphoi, ' restoring the dying to life ', may have arisen from the identification of the Delphians with the Hyperboreans and from the story that the life of the latter people was miraculously prolonged ". Whatever may have been his status when Asklepios- worship first entered Phokis, the evidence of Pausanias combined with that of certain inscriptions shows that in the later period at least he had acquired the rank of a divinity and one of some influence in the social-political life of the community. Apart from the significance of his cult as 'Apxnyhrjs, to him chiefly was attached in this region the important function of effecting and safeguarding the manumission of slaves ; and the method practised in his name was the same as that which was practised in the name of Apollo at Delphoi '^. This may be taken as a proof of his recognized godhead, for none but a divinity was ever charged with this function ; also of his close association with the social life of his worshippers in Boeotia, Phokis, and Lokris, the only communities where these manu- missions are attested ^. It seems as if in these adjacent countries the tribal » If we can trust the Scholiast on Nikandros, Theriak. 685, who states that the Delphians erected a shrine of Apollo called after Phleguas vitz combined this evidence with the cult-name of Apollo 'Ao-ye- Xdras to explain the origin of the name 'Ao-KX-qinos, though the philological equation is impossible. In regard to these titles, we may also observe that at Tegea we find record of his association with the sun-god HeHos, a common altar being dedicated to them both "". But these facts afford no proof at all of any real kinship in nature, apart from their healing function, between Asklepios and Apollo or any solar power. He may well have been styled ' the god of the bright face ', a gleam of light may have played around him at his birth, he may have shared an altar with the sun-god, merely because it was he who delivered men from death and restored them to the hght of the sun and because Greek imagination and poetic speech associated light with health. This is strikingly illustrated by a terra-cotta relief found at Eleusis, dedicated by a certain Eukrates to Demeter, whose head is represented with rays surrounding it, while beneath is carved a nose and a pair of eyes, one of them blind ^ ; the art- * C. I. G. 4. 1005. '' Hesych. 5. v. '^' Eph. Arch. 1906, p. 62, inscription first century b. c. : the late inscription from Gutheion in Laconia, mentioning ' the priest of Zeus Boulaios, Hehos, Selene, Asklepios, Hugieia ', C. /. G. 1392, proves nothing, for in the later period the same person could undertake the service of the most hetero- geneous cults. '' Eph. Arch. 1892, HiV. 5 : Kern, who publishes it, is misguided in inter- preting the representation as Demeter-Selene : this identification would have been impossible for an ordinary Greek of the third century b.c, to which the reUef belongs. 256 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS language is easy to interpret here ; the dedicator has been restored to sight b}' Demeter, and therefore the goddess who has given him back the boon of seeing the sunhght is imagined with radiant beams, although an earth-goddess and of the lower world. Therefore a rayed or radiant Asklepios need not have been imagined as a solar or an astral power. Even at Epidauros his nature remained essentially chthonian, and this alone would prevent his complete identification with Apollo, to whom the ritual of the dream- oracle and the associations with the lower world were specially repugnant. Elsewhere this connexion with Apollo was recognized not infrequently in cult ^, but except at Athens we cannot with certainty trace this to the direct influence of Epidauros, as it may have been prompted by the prevalence of the Hesiodic tradition. The later Panhellenic position of Asklepios owes much, then, indirectly to his early development at Epidauros ; and directly also, in so far as she propagated it by missionary effort, at least when she was invited to do so. The question at once arises as to the origin of the Askle- pieion at Kos, which if not so richly endowed and adorned as that of Epidauros, attracts the historian of science by its association with the name of the founder of European medicine, Hippokrates. Is the Coan shrine, then, to be reckoned among the early religious foundations from Epidauros ? Certain historical facts might seem to favour this vie'w. The Dorian population of the island derived from Epidauros*' ; and a tradition, which Pausanias preserved, connected the settlement of Epidauros Limera on the Laconian coast with an expedition from the Argive Epi- dauros that was bearing the sacred serpent to Kos "". But the legend is vague and only attests an intercourse of cult between the two greater cities ; it is no evidence of origin. Nor can we attribute much historical authority to the " See Thxaemer in Pauly-Wissowa, i, p. 1655. " Herod. 7. yg. « 3. 23. 6. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 257 Emperor Julian's statement ^ that Asklepios came to Kos from Epidauros. For against this vague and dubious evidence we have the express and authoritative statement by Herondas in his second mime that the god came direct to his island from Trikka. Doubtless the native poet is giving us the native tradition ; and the traditions of the Greek temples concerning their own origins are on the whole to be respected and preferred as evidence ^. We have noted already indications of an early prehistoric connexion between Kos and Thessaly " ; and these legendary associations were often stimulative of later intercourse. We shall never be able to determine at what period and through what agency the Coans visited Thessaly to bring back an offshoot of the cult of Trikka. We need not suppose a very early date for this transplantation ; the recently found temple of Asklepios in the island is not much older than 200 B.C., and though it is built on older founda- tions we have no chronological evidence for Asklepios in Kos older than the date of Hippokrates and the story of his connexion with the temple, which had evidently grown into high repute by his time. It may have been in emulation of the fame which the Epidaurian shrine was achieving in the sixth century that the Coans conceived the ambition of founding their cult direct from Trikka for themselves. But we can well believe that they developed it under Epidaurian influences and encouragement. Pausanias' story concerning the ship that was bearing the sacred serpent from Epidauros to Kos is evidence of this ; and this mystic animal was as prominent in the ritual of the island as at Hieron on the mxainland ; here he occupied an ' abaton ' '^ while in the Coan temple he enjoyed an underground treasure-chamber, into which ' pelanoi ' or money might be thrown by the grateful consultant ^. At Epidauros the chief supernatural method of cure was incubation ; and » Adv. Christ, p. 198 (Neum.). " Mr. Paton's reasoning on this subject in Inscriptions of Kos, p. 347, is unavailing, as he was not then aware of the evidence from Herondas. « Vide supra, p. 120 ; cf. also Paton and Hicks, op. cit. p. xiv. ^ Dittenb. Syll.^ 802. *= Arch. f. Religionswiss. 1907, 207. 2460 S 258 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS it is probably only an accident that no trace of this has hitherto been found at Kos ^. In both cult-centres we find his two associated goddesses, Hugieia, the goddess ' of health ', Epione, ' the gentle one ' ; though more stress appears to have been laid on them in the island-shrine ^. Towards the close of the mime of Herondas we find an interesting record that the holy bread which the worshipper was allowed to take away from the temple was itself called * Hugieia ', as if it were the very body of the goddess ; so that we must conclude that the eating of it was in the strictest sense a sacramental communion. One of the greatest achievements of Epidaurian propa- gandism, and one about which we are very well and minutely informed, was the introduction of the cult into Athens '=. Two fragmentary inscriptions that have been care- fully edited and restored, so far as possible, with great probability, combined with some testimony from Greek authors, enable us to give the following account of the event : in the archonship of Astuphilos, 420 b. c, the cult was introduced into Athens by a citizen called Telemachos, and the presence of the god was indicated and solemnized by a chariot escorting his sacred serpent from Epidauros ; he arrived on the 19th of Boedromion, ' at a late hour in the mysteries ', whereupon the city, being desirous of initiating him into the great Eleusinian celebration, and thereby joining him with themselves in the deepest spiritual fellowship, instituted a second sacrifice preliminary to his initiation, and called ' Epidauria ' in perpetual recognition of his metropolis. We gather the impression of a ceremony strange, ap- pealing, and, in regard to the hallowing of a new deity in * Paton and Hicks, op. cit. no. 348, is wrongly quoted as evidence bv Thraemer in Pauly-Wissowa, i, p. 1690. ^ The earliest record of Hugieia at Epidauros is an inscription of the second century b. c. (C.I.G. Pelop. 1. 1137) ; statue of Epione in the precincts at Hieron, Paus. 2. 27. 5 ; in the shrine of Asklepios in Epidauros, 2. 29. I ; priestess of Epione at Kos, Paton and Hicks, 30 ; of Asklepios, Hugieia, Epione, Apollo Dalios, and King Eumenes, Arch. Anz. 1903, p. 10. ■^ Vide C. I. A. 2, 1649 and Korte's reconstruction in Ath. Mitth. 1896, p. 314 ; cf. Philostr. Vit. Ap. 4. 18, Paus. 2. 26. 8, Arist. Ath. Pol. 56. THE CULT OF ASKLEPlOS 259 the historic period, altogether unique ; and we gather also that the naivete of the Athenian religious imagination in the latter part of the fifth century was not much changed from that of the mythic period. Yet they were usually cautious and scrupulous in the admission of new cults. But this one was already famous in important Greek centres ; and the ready enthusiasm of the Athenians may well have been quickened by their fearful experience of the great plague, against which their native physicians as well as their heroes and deities of medicine had proved helpless, so that they came to yearn for a new divine healer. And- the way-had been prepared for Asklepios' reception. We must trust, the IhscriptioTial record that the unknown Telemachos was the pioneer of the cult, and that it was he who built the first altar. But a greater than he, the poet Sophokles, had the credit of having enjoyed already the familiarity of the god in Athens, of having received him in his house — such epiphanies of the deities to mortals were common in the mythical age, and were reported even in the historic — and of having composed a paean in his honour, which was still sung in the later ages ^, Within a few years after the reception of the god, his stately temple was built on the southern slopes of the Akropolis, from the site of which many epigraphical records and reliefs have been recovered, and it was here that Aristophanes, who in 422 b. c. was obliged to transport his brainsick hero of The Wasps to Asklepios' temple in Aigina for an incubation cure, laid the well-known scene in the Ploutos, describing the miraculous restoration of Ploutos' eyesight when he wrote that play in 389 b. c. But the cult was not confined to this spacious establishment. It invaded the neighbouring and more insignificant shrine of Amunos "^^ on the south of the Akropolis. We have proof also of shrines in the Peiraeus (on the hill of Mounuchia), and in one or two of the Attic Demes ^. The great vogue of the temple a Vide R. 266, S.V. A(^iojr. '' The Scholiast on Aristoph. Plut. 621 mentions the two Asklepieia, one ' in the city ' and one in the Peiraeus (he adds doubtfully that some placed the second in Acharnai). An interesting inscription of a village-cult of S 2 26o THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS on the south slope of the AkropoHs is attested by the large number of ex-voto reliefs and inscriptions found on its site. And the inconvenience caused by the great crowd of con- sultants might explain the purpose of the oracle which the Athenians obtained from Delphoi about 350 B.C., bidding them consecrate to Asklepios the house and garden of a private citizen called Demon ^. The Athenian cult preserves and reflects the whole Epidaurian tradition and ritual of Asklepios. He came as a full-blown god, though his earthly and subterranean character was not wholly forgotten. He brought with him from Epidauros some at least of his female emanations and companions, laso, Panakeia, Akeso^, figures quickened and spiritualized by Greek art, incarnating the tenderness of female ministration craved by the sick, just as the god incarnated the grave and mild wisdom of the physician. He brought with him his sacred serpents, and as we find them active agents in the cures of Epidauros, so in the famous scene of the Aristophanic comedy they are the god's ministers that finally effect the cure of Ploutus' eyesight. He brought with him even his sacred dogs, at least to the Peiraeus if not to Athens. And above all he brought with him the ritual of incubation, which forms an important chapter in the ancient history of supernatural therapeutics. Aristophanes is our chief and sufficient evidence for this ; and we have further corroboration in private Attic dedica- tions commemorating a dream-cure " or gratitude to Askle- pios, Hugieia, and Sleep '\ In fact, the only points in which we may regard the Attic cult as independent of the Epidaurian was the introduction of the health-goddess, Hugieia % and the place in the calendar Asklepios and Hugieia with a sacrificial meal in the temple shared by ' the husbandmen and their neighbours ' is published in Bull. Corr. Hell. 1881, p. 262. ^ C. I. A. 2. 1654. ^ Vide Aristoph. Plut. 616-736; inscription found in Peiraeus; C. I. A. 2. 1651. '' e.g. C.I. A. 3. 186. J C. Z.J. 3. 132 ^ " Vide Cults, i, pp. 316-318 ; the view suggested there, that Hugieia arose at Athens as an emanation of Athena, is inconsistent with the words in the inscription, C. I. A. 2. 1649 ay^.a ^\9ev "TyUia, THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 261 assigned to the festival called ' Asklepieia ', which in Athens was solemnized in spring shortly before the great Dionysia, at Epidauros in summer at the end of the Epidaurian year ^. Finally, as the Epidaurian Asklepios was intimately associated with Apollo Maleatas, so we find the latter god installing himself in the dual aspect of Maleatas and Apollo in the Asklepieion at the Peiraeus shortly after the admission of the former into Athens. The cult-record that deals with this event, an inscription set up near the beginning of the fourth century, repays close examination on account of a curious fact of ritual that seems to show contemporary religious thought at a very low level ''. The text prescribes the preliminary sacrifices that must be performed {TrpoOveaeaL) before the main sacrifice to Asklepios : after ordaining the offering of ' three cakes ' respectively to Maleatas, to Apollo, Hermes, laso, Akeso, and Panakeia, it orders three also ' to the dogs ' and three to ' the dog-guardians ', Kvvqyhaii. The comments of the few scholars who have noticed the phrase are not enlightening. One thing seems certain : we know of no daimoniac beings who could possibly be called ' dogs ' in this connexion ; we must therefore interpret the words as referring to real sacred dogs such as we know were kept at the temple of Epidauros, and which must have been maintained for a time at least in the precincts of the temple at the Peiraeus. Who then are the Kvvr]y4Tai ? These could not conceivably be the human and mortal keepers of the dogs ; for at no period of Greek paganism could the human guardians or officials of a temple receive a Ovaia or a irpodva-La. The ' dog-guardians ' must therefore be imagined as unseen heroic beings, let us say, such as Machaon and Podaleirios. A sacrifice to them causes no difficulty. What shocks us is that Athenians of the fourth century should be ordered to pay sacrifices, a definite act of worship, to temple-dogs by an Eleusinian priest in a public ritual law. Examples of animal-worship * Cf. C. I. A. 2. 741 ^ and 741 '', 1. 14 ; Kavvadias in Eph. Arch. 1901, p. 82. " C.I.A.2. 1651. 262 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS are to be found even in the later periods of Hellenism ; they have been carefully considered in a treatise by de Visser ^ and sometimes misinterpreted ^. They can be generally explained by the idea that the animal was the occasional or habitual incarnation of the deity to whose temple or altar it belonged, or whose familiar companion it was. But the dog of all animals had the least part in ordinary Greek ritual ; and what Aelian " tells us of the sacred dogs in the temple of the Sicilian city Adranon does not belong to Hellenic religion, and in any case is no real parallel to the degrading ritual-law of the Peiraeus. It is obviously due to the fact that the dogs that frequented the Epidaurian temple were sometimes regarded, like the serpents, as the ministers of the god and his assistants in the cures. And even in higher religions the animals that haunt a shrine may acquire a sacrosanct character, and might occasionally be reverentially fed ; the women in Herondas' mime drop a cake piously, €V(f>riix(os, into the hole of the sacred serpent ^, and we are familiar with the Herodotean story of the monthly cake offered to the snake-guardian of the temple of the Athenian Akropolis " ; if we can believe Aelian, the Athe- nians went so far as to put to death a man who killed a sparrow in their temple of Asklepios *", and Sir James Frazer has called attention to the sanctity of the sparrows in Jahve's temple at Jerusalem. Yet the proclamation in the ritual inscription of the Peiraeus, putting the dogs on an equal footing with the higher personal divinities in the matter of sacrifice, may well have startled the more edu- cated Athenians and provoked the saving sense of humour. And we have an interesting testimony that it did actually excite such feelings in the humorous fragment of the comedy called Phaon, written by Plato the comedian a little later than the probable date of this inscription § ; the passage is * De Graecorum diis non referentibus speciem humanam, 1900. ^ Vide my Greece and Babylon, pp. 67-68, Tj-'jB. •= Nat. An. 11. 20. ^ 4. 90. •■ 8. 41. ' Var. Hist. 5. 17. e Meineke, Frag. Comic. Graec. 2, p. 674 and my article in Classical Quarterly, 1920. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 263 a parody of Attic ritual, ordaining grotesque sacrifices to a crowd of disreputable ' daimones ', and prescribing as a finale some offering kvctL re koI Kwrj-yerats — the very words of the Peiraeus inscription. We hear no more of the dog- worship at Athens. And in spite of such aberrations the cult of Asklepios belonged to the higher plane of religion. Whether the Epidaurian cult, before achieving the con- quest of Athens, had already propagated itself across the sea through the islands and to the eastern Aegean, is difficult to decide. We must believe that it had done so before the fifth century if we believe the report of Pausanias concerning BatagraTihThe Cyrenaica and Lebene in Crete, the port of Gortus^'^r Tor he declares that Balagrai derived its cult directly from Epidauros and then transmitted it to Lebene ; and excavation has proved that the Asklepios-temple at the latter site must have been founded near the middle of the fifth century ^. But recent criticism has attempted to refute the statement of Pausanias, and to derive the Lebena-cult from Gortus and indirectly from Thessaly ". At any rate, certain evidence suggests that it was after the conversion of Athens that the wave of Epidaurian influence mounted to the full, and the political and moral influence of Athens may well have given it impetus. With the exception of Kos and Crete, none of the islands reveal trace of Asklepios before the fourth century ; and only a few, Paros '^, Keos ^ Thasos ^ and Nesos s had received him as early as this. Somewhere near the middle of this century the god was admitted to Eruthrai, according to the ^ 2. 26. 9 ; this is somewhat corroborated by Philostratos' statement that the temple of Lebene was much frequented by Libyans, Vit. Apoll. 4. 34. ^ Vide Arch. Anz. 1912, p. 269. " Vide paper by Zingerle in Ath. Mitth. 1896, pp. 67-92 (his arguments against the ancient tradition are not convincing) . Adv. Nat. I. 48-49. "= Vide 'ETiiypatpal Trjs MaKtdovias (Athens, 19 15), by G. Oikonomos. '' Vide I. G. 2. 835, long list drawn up by priest of Asklepios, chiefly of effigies of limbs cured. T 2 276 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS ardently besought than that which provides this escape ; and none other awakens so warmly the gratitude of the worshipper. Again, the type of Asklepios was a blend of two virtues : on the one hand, of the a-o^ia, or deep wisdom, enriched by science, the traditional Hellenic ideal, an ideal which gives a unique value to their best religious thought, and on the other of philanthropy, or love of mankind, which permeates their religion rarely and at a later time and with less force. They recognized, as we do, the physician's calling as the most philanthropic of all social activities, and they transferred this quality in the fullest measure to the physician-god. Asklepios is above all others ^iKavOputTios, the Saviour, bearing more frequently than any other deity the title 'Saviour', prophetic of a higher religion: he is the lover of the people, (f)i\6\aos, in Laconia '•", the ' con- siderate ' god who feels for human weakness — ^vyyvcofxcov at Epidauros '\ In fact, Juhan's phrase "" concerning the ^L\av9pu>TT€vixa of Asklepios, who heals not for reward but to gratify his own loving heart, not inaptly expresses the popular conviction and marks off this man-god from the older Hellenic divinities. The tender regard for children, a growing sentiment of the Hellenistic age, suggested the strange title and invocation of the god as Asklepios rTais, Asklepios 'the Child' at Thelpousa and Megalopolis in Arcadia ^, not invented to commemorate the myth that the god had once been a child, for all Hellenic deities had passed through that phase, but in accordance with a strange and often unrecognized law of Greek invocation ; namely, the title whereby the deity was invoked in the public prayer acted upon him somewhat as a spell, at once expressing the need of the worshipper and binding, or at least quickening, the will of the higher power to fulfil that need. Hence Hera was entitled ' Girl ' or ' Widow ' in Arcadia, that she might be moved to protect girls and lonely women ; and those who were anxious for their little ones might win the god's aid by invoking him as 'the Child'. ^ At Asopos, Paus. 3. 22. 9. '* Fouilles, 70. <" Ep. 40, Teubn. p. 541. "^ Pans. 8. 25. 11, 8. 32. 5. THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 277 Greek art caught at the idea ; and as in the earlier periods he had occasionally been represented as a youth, perhaps that he might be attracted to care for youths, so in late Roman times we have record of a statue by a certain Boethos representing him as a new-born infant ^ ; and the same sentiment is discernible here as that which popularized in the Christian period the type of the Holy Babe. \ The strength of the emotion that this cult aroused iri the souTof the ^ople Is attested by an interesting and probably typical prayer that is preserved on an Attic stone of "the second century a. d. '' ' These are the words of thy \ foving servant, O Asklepios, child of Leto's Son : how shall I come into thy golden house, O blessed one, O God of my longing, unless thy heart is favourable to me and thou art willing to heal me and estabhsh me again in thy shrine, that I may behold my God who is brighter than the earth in spring-time. Thou alone, O divine and blessed one, art mightyj thee, that lovest compassion, the Supreme Gods have granted as a mighty boon to mortals, as a refuge from their sorrows.' The^ tone approaches the warmth of some of the best and most personal of our Psalms. The fervour of the popular devotion inspired the great masters of Greek sculpture in dealing with this theme. It was not on the lines of his close association with Apollo, his ever-youthful father, that the ideal of Asklepios was shaped. This might account for such eccentric works as the youthful Asklepios of Kalamis and of Skopas, though the religious motive described above might also explain them. But it was felt that the full imaginative presentation of the divine physician demanded maturer forms, bearing the imprint of the thought and experience that comes with long studious years ; therefore the bearded Asklepios becomes the canonical type. As regards the expression, the late rhetorician Kallistratos, who usually emits mere rhetorical vapour, has left us an account of the ideal from * C. I. G. It. Sic. 967 : the inscription itself may be as late as the third cen- tury A. D. ; but as the statue is described as the x*^P^^ Sety/xa TiaKaiyeviav it may be the work of the sculptor Boethos of the second century b. c. b C.I. A. 3. 171 \ 278 THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS which we can derive a few significant words : he speaks of the benign and kindly glance, ' the unspeakable depth of dignity mingled with compassion ' ^. The most striking embodiment of such a divine type that has come down to us is the Melian head in the British Museum, a work un- surpassed in the religious sculpture in Europe ; so master- fully is the a-eixvoTi^i, the sublimity of thought and deep intelligence, blent with the mild benignity of the loving and saving god ; and the warmth of the chiselUng is fully equal to the profundity of the conception. It is undoubtedly an early masterpiece of the Attic school of the fourth century, and we could imagine the Asklepios-statue of Kephissodotos to have been just such a work as this. Archaeologists have found it impossible to decide whether this is a head of Zeus or Asklepios ; though the cult of the latter god in Melos speaks somewhat for the latter designation, and a later Pergamene coin with an undoubted Asklepios-head shows a type that resembles the Melian closely ''. As this art-type is a blend of two divinities, so in the later epochs, of the worship the interesting personality emerges of Zeus-Asklepios, of whose cult we have evidence from Pergamon and possibly from Hermione ". The man-god has triumphed, and won his way to the headship of the Pantheon, has become 'Okvixirtos — a title that he enjoyed in the public worship of Pergamon ^ — and has become fused with the ancient high god of the Hellenic race. The enthu- siastic words of Aristides are especially noteworthy '^ : ' It was not for nothing that they founded here [at Pergamon] the shrine of Zeus-Asklepios ... he it is who is the guide and dis- penser of the universe, the saviour of the entire spheres, the guardian of the immortals '. Hence it is that the rhetorician ascribes to him a varied activity in several spheres of life and magnifies Pergamon on his behalf as ' the [kolvi] tQv '^ Ekphras. lo (Philostrat. 2, p. 433, Kayser). ^ Brit. Mus. Cat. ' Mysia ', PI. xxvii. 6. •^ /. G. 4. 692, dedication Aa^arpi x^ovia Ail ' AaK\t]mai : it is impossible to determine whether Zeus-Asklepios designates two personages or one ; the inscription may be of the first century a. d. '' Vide Pauly-Wissowa, p. 1661. « Or. 6 (i, p. 64-65, Dind.). THE CULT OF ASKLEPIOS 279 &vdpu)Tr(ov eoTia] common hearth of mankind ' ^. Yet the trustworthy Hterary or archaeological record that illustrates this wider range of activity is of the scantiest. For the people who adored him — probably with all the greater fervour because of their beUef in his original humanity — he remained the physician-god ; he was generally hailed as Saviour in the sense that he saved men's bodies, not in the more mystic sense that he saved men's souls or received them after death into a blessed immortaUty. At least, so far as we can discern, the title Scott^p applied to him took on no eschatologic significance in Greek lands ; and with the theosophic speculation of Egypt, where his character was transformed by fusion with Sarapis or with Thoth, we are not here concerned. Among the Greek communities there were no mysteries of Asklepios and no mystic theology was evolved concerning him. Julian may theologize about him and, in rivalry with Christian dogma concerning Christ, may dogmatize that Asklepios had been begotten by ' the Father (Helios-Apollo) to fulfil the divine order of the universe, but that nevertheless he had been eternally existing by his father's side before the universe was made ' ^. But this propagandist -theology is. barren and as un-Hellenic as it was anti-Christian. For neither Julian nor Aristides had the genius of the true prophet or the inspired preacher. Had it been otherwise, had later Hellenism produced its own prophet, a peer in genius to those of Palestine, there were rich germs that might have been quickened into a high theology in the pathetic legends of the birth and death and in the life-story of this man-god. ^ Ibid. 6. (I, p. 63). " Or. 4, p. 144 B (p. 187. Teubner). CHAPTER XI THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES A GREAT number of the personages of the Greek hero- world are purely human in their character and story and heroic in our modern sense, the stirring and full-blooded dramatis personae in the greatest epos in the world. It is these that interest us most, and it is about these that modern controversy has been most troubled. What are we to say of Achilles, Aias, Diomed, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Oidipous, Bellerophon, Hektor, Theseus, and other great names of early saga, of whom the cult is attested in the later records ? Whatever may be our final view concerning the origin of these personaUties, the study of the cult-facts will not be wasted ; for it will be found to provide valuable evidence to the historian .concerning tribal settlements and migra- tions ; and it concerns the Homeric critic and the genesis of the Homeric epos. The theory that has most commended itself hitherto to modern scholars is that all the leading epic heroes and heroines were old deities, displaced from their original status, faded and half-forgotten and degraded at last into mere men and women ; and that where their cult is found, as of Zeus Agamemnon in Laconia, we must regard it as the sporadic survival or memory of the aboriginal truth. We find the theory still in vogue in contemporary treatises and monographs of English, French, and German scholars "". But even in Germany, where its excesses have been most devastating, the saner and more critical thought of men like Rohde and Deneke has rejected it ; and among our- selves Mr. Chadwick's excellent treatise has vigorously * The most eccentric was Usener, who reduced the story of Troy to a lepbs Xoyos, regardless of excavation: vide Arch. f. Religionswiss. 1904, PP- 313-339. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 281 assailed it and helped to bring us to a more hopeful point of view. The evidence for the ' decayed-god ' theory is found to be frail at every point, when critically examined, in regard to the saga-heroes. It rests often on doubtful etymology of the hero's name and on an etymology that would agree with the humanity of the hero as readily as with his divinity : often on some myth attaching to the hero, presumably of divine origin, though comparative folk-lore shows us how easily a divine myth can be linked to a human hero : sometimes on the birth of the hero from a divine parent, though we are aware that supernatural birth is often attributed at a certain stage of faith to real personages. The one solid fact on which the theory seems to rest is the actual cult of the hero, believed to be the aboriginal fact from which we ought to start in explaining his or her career. But its upholders do not seem aware of the impHcation involved in such an assumption and really fatal to it. All the hero-cults are chthonian, with a ritual only appropriate to a buried spirit. Therefore, if the cult is the aboriginal fact, prior to the myth, every hero was once a chthonian divinity, an earth-god or earth-daimon. And this dark and vague power must have arisen from his subter- ranean shrine, shaken off his ' infernal ' character, and projected on to the human arena such varied and bright manifestations of himself as Alas, Achilles, Diomed, and Agamemnon. This is all the harder to believe, because the known and recognizable earth-divinities or chthonian powers of early Greece, whether male or female, Hades- Plouton, Eubouleus, Trophonios (the most freakish and independent of all), Demeter, or Kore, never thus escaped from their appropriate shade to play dramatic parts in the battle-fields of Thebes and Troy. As a matter of fact, the champions of the hieratic theory do not feel bound to explain the aboriginal divinity lurking behind the hero- figure as chthonian ; they discern Zeus behind Agamem- non, Ares behind Diomed, a Mycenaean sky-god behind Aias Telamonios, Poseidon behind Odysseus. But this is to abandon altogether the evidence of cult, which in the 282 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES hero-record is always chthonian. The theory in fact has been mainly suggested by a negative attitude of mind, an unwillingness to admit any solid foundation for saga and saga-names and an inabihty to imagine any other origin than the divine for heroes and hero-cult ; mythologic study having engendered in many an uncritical bias towards ' celestial ' explanation of prehistoric tradition. But there is now a healthy reaction against this inhuman, hieratic or sacerdotal, view of all saga ; and students of Scandinavian and Celtic religions are no longer so clear that Sigurd and Arthur were faded divinities ; while on the side of Hellenism the more critical are beginning to reject it. The theory is of value, as we have seen, for explaining certain cult-figures ; to apply it as a universal solvent is to believe that there is only one ' key to all the mythologies ', and to ignore the complexity of the elements in the ancient soil of religions. Where the hero's name is obviously divine, Eubouleus, Trophonios, or where the only myth about him is obviously a Upds koyos, a story invented out of ritual, where, in short, the theory explains the facts, it is illumina- tive and of scientific value. But as appHed to most of the Epic people in whom we are interested, it appears barren and pedantic. Let any one impartially test it upon each detail and each line of the record concerning Orestes, Oidipous, Achilles, and he will feel that it is not equal to the strainiof the facts. It is not now of course a question of getting absolute truth or cer- tainty ; it is merely a balance of probabihties. We have been recently told that Aias reXaixcovLos was an armed Mycenaean pillar-god, one of those divinities that we see hovering over a sacred pillar on Mycenaean-Minoan seals ; because in later Greek reXaixav is a word found denoting an architectural column ^. This is certainly ingenious, but much that is ingenious is not worth saying. If this significance of nXajxtav was as old or older than the Homeric significance of the word ' sword-belt ', and if we discerned that the cult of Aias was always or generally a pillar-cult, and that the varied legend of his life and death contained certain ob- " Girard, Rev. d. £t. Gr. 1905, pp. 1-75. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 283 viously hieratic or ritualistic elements, we would be grateful for this new explanation of reXajuwj^toj and of Aias, But as we find nothing of this we may prefer the belief, which was mocked at by the former generation of scholars, that Aias was a real hero-ancestor of the Achaean Aiakidai, who did something that was vaguely remembered in connexion with a real event known as the Sack of Troy. In fact, modern anthropology and modern archaeology are in favour of the human historical and against the hieratic explanation of heroic saga and saga-figures. We know that the heroes of Icelandic saga were mostly real historic men ; we know that the taking' of Troy was a real and important historic event ; and it would be astonishing if no real nanies of actual individuals were handed down in connexion with it, though in any special case we may be unable to separate the real from the fictitious. And modern anthropology justifies us in believing that some of these real people re- ceived heroic or divine honours after their death =". When we are speculating on the remote past, it is wise to admit the possibility that certain tendencies which we discern at work in the later periods may also have been operative in the earlier ; and if we find without doubt that the Greeks were heroizing real individuals in the sixth and fifth centuries b. c, it is rash to assert that they could not have been doing this at a much earlier date. And if the hypothesis that some of these heroic cult-figures were once living men, remembered and worshipped after their death because of their striking qualities or achievements, is found to explain the multiplex tangle of the records better than any other, we will not be afraid of it. It is well also to re- member that for the student of comparative rehgion it is what men beUeve to be real that matters most ; and it is indisputable that the post-Homeric Greeks were worshipping * Mr. Sidney Hartland seems to rule out all human historical explana- tions of long-abiding hero-cults by the dogma that it is only the recently dead that are really worshipped, Man, 1914, p. 187 ; vide his article in Folk-Lore, 23, p. 136 ; but this is by no means borne out by the evidence from ancient Greece showing the heroic worship of real men to have been continued for centuries. 284 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES these epic heroes in full conviction that they had once lived a real human life. It is also observable that most of the cults of the distinguished names of Greek saga, Achilles, Diomed, Philoktetes, Aias the Less, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Oidipous, have the air of being post-Homeric and by no means primary and aboriginal. We find them spread confusedly about the Mediterranean, and they often emerge in the most unlikely places, where their existence is not expHcable by any record of ethnic or tribal settlement. Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the Aiakidai, Aias Oileus, the heroes of the house of Pelops, we find the hero-cult strong on the ancestral soil, and here we may regard the personage as one of the local ancestors glorified by saga. But often the cult reveals no ancestral character at all ; and that it originally was ancestral is merely the presupposition of the theorist who holds that all worship of heroes was originally worship of ancestors ; and I beUeve this theory to be narrow and gratuitous. Pondering on the shifting phenomena that the records of this complex subject presents, one seems to perceive a number of great hero-names drifting about the sea-tracks of migra- tion and the later colonization. What set them adrift was the flood of epic poetry. In fact, we must attribute more influence to the epic than some scholars are willing to allow on the spontaneous generation of hero-worship. And if some ancient grave in a new land, of which the tenant was regarded with awe, happened to be nameless, the new settlers would be prone to attach to it a great epic name if they could find any reasonable excuse. Only, before we resort to this explanation, we should always try the ancestor- theory first ; and endeavour to discover in the records of the migration any indication of an ancestral tie between the hero and any of the emigrants. Also, we must admit the possibility that many of Homer's heroes, say Sarpedon and Glaukos, were already enjoying ancestral-heroic cult in their own homes among their own kinsfolk, before Homer took their names and wove them into the great fabric of his song. The question of method and the value of these observa- THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 285 tions may be best tested by a more minute investigation of the cults and traditions of the leading epic heroes. It is only relevant to examine the tradition so far as it bears on the question concerning the cult and the original nature of the hero. Achilles- cult ^^ The cult of Achilles is as complex and widely extended as any, and will serve as a crucial test of our theories of interpretation. Of all the heroes of all the sagas he im- presses us, thanks to the genius of Homer, as a very live man. At least we have no right to regard him as an imagined ' eponymous ' ancestor of a tribe called ' Achilleidai '. There were no ' Achilleidai ' that we know of, and we have no right to invent them. But his name and his parentage, his birth from the sea-goddess, have persuaded many that he was originally a river-god, his name arising from the same root as the river-name 'AxeAwos. On this theory we may explain the facts thus : a Thessalian river-god becomes the ancestor of a powerful Thessalian tribe, a most natural evolution ; the ancestor leaves the river and becomes a mere ancestor-hero, who accompanies the tribe in its wanderings and conquests, and shares in the glory of its achievements. This hypothesis might satisfy if more of the facts were relevant to it. But none of them really are, except the name 'AxLXkevs, which certainly seems to claim affinity with 'AxeA«o?, though other etymologies have been suggested. But if we have reason to suspect a primitive custom once prevailing in Greece of baptizing children in rivers, if we find in the Aeolic Troad a rite that may be old ThessaHan, of maidens dedicating their virginity to the river-god before marriage, so that the spirit of the river-god might enter into the child she might conceive ^, what would be more natural than to name the new-born child after the name of the river-god ? Nowhere does the cult and legend of Achilles betray any reminiscence of an aboriginal river-god or of any other nature-divinity. No river is ever named after him, possibly one fountain (while many are associated with Herakles) and two or three * Vide Cults, 5, p. 423 : hence such names as Kephissodotos. 286 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES harbours. Our geography preserves many names of real persons ; why should not the ancient Greek ? Now the chief and earUest attested centre of Achilles-worship was the Black Sea, in the island Leuke at the mouth of the Danube, at Olbia, and in the island at the mouth of the Borysthenes. His name and cult reached these waters of course in the post- Homeric period, for the Hellenic discovery and colonization of the Black Sea is post-Homeric. Yet they reached there early in this period, for Arktinos of Miletos is aware of it, and Alkaios speaks of the hero as lord of Scythia. We may be sure therefore that it was the Milesians who carried his fame and his worship to these waters, of whose trade they were the earhest pioneers. Therefore the Milesians had begun to worship him in the earliest period of their colonial history. Now, unluckily, the record is silent about any actual cult of Achilles in Miletos itself. But we have one valuable hint supplied us by Tzetzes '^ that Miletos was attacked by Achilles, a legend of which the natural interpretation is that the post-Homeric Greeks who captured and first Hellenized Miletos cherished the memory of Achillesas a hero-leader. Could he have had ancestral connexion with any of them ? We cannot with certainty trace any. The Greeks who settled Miletos were no doubt a mixture of tribes ; the lonians predominated, and there was a Minyan strain. Achilles was no Ionian, nor, as far as the genealogic record speaks, a Minyan, but a Thessalian Hellene, akin to the Aiakidai, who are Hellenes par excellence. It is possible, indeed, that the Minyans of Thessaly had adopted him as a tribal hero, for we find his cult at Brasiai in South Laconia, a Minyan settlement, and again in Elis with an interesting ritual that we shall have to note. But in Asia Minor the name and the cult appear sporadically among the post-Homeric settle- ments that are mainly Ionic ; and it was just in this region and at the epoch when this tide of colonization was flowing that the fame of the Iliad was reaching its zenith. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that Achilles came to be wor- shipped in these parts, not as any tribe's supposed ancestor, '^ Ad Lykophr. 467. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 287 but as a real glorified man, the hero of Asia-Minor legend and song. Certainly the worship at the mouth of the Danube and Borysthenes was in no sense ancestral, for ancestral-cult tends to cleave to the home-centre, but altogether heroic, for the hero's power can spread to the circumference. And Achilles in the Black Sea behaves altogether like a hero : runs races by himself or with the Dioskouroi, gives oracles, helps pious mariners who approach his island, and, hearing that in the latter ages a girl lived at Ilion who boasted to be a remote descendant of Priam, demanded her surrender to his vengeance and, having obtained her, tore her in pieces. On the theory that Achilles emerged into prominence as the putative ancestor of the Achaean Hellenes, and that the later cult of him was primarily ancestral, cleaving to certain tribes because of some fiction of descent, we should expect to find clear traces of it in Thessaly. Here in the very home country of the hero not a single inscription attests it ; all that we have by way of evidence are : {a) certain Thessalian coins, the earliest about 300 B. c, the others of the Roman period, that are stamped with his head (and this is not direct evidence of cult) ; {b) a long and suspicious account written by Philostratos of a Thessalian sacrificial ritual devoted to Achilles in Ilion and in Thessaly. But as the rhetorician has invented the hymn of praise for the occasion, he may have invented other portions of the narrative ; and what we may suppose to be genuine in the account has the air of late religion, certainly of nothing aboriginal. His worship in Epeiros, attested by Plutarch, may well have been more genuine, so to speak, and not only heroic, but in some degree ancestral in its motive ; for the Epirote kings claimed to be Aiakidai, and Achilles was their putative ancestor. But even here the cult may have been started by the post-Homeric legend of Neoptolemos' travel to Epeiros, and by the then prevalent heroic conception of Achilles ; it is doubtful if we can regard it as a primeval heritage of ancestral- worship. If anywhere, we ought to find it under this aspect in Aigina, where the ancestral cult and glory of the Aiakidai, whose last feat was the victory 288 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES of Salamis, lingered till the Athenian conquest of the island. But, strangely enough, Achilles is nowhere mentioned among them. We should consider, finally, the ritual-records of Elis and Kroton which agree in substance and are of pre-eminent interest : in both these communities an annual solemnity was instituted in which the hero was formally bewailed by a chorus of women ; Elis had dedicated to him a cenotaph with this ritual, in obedience to an oracle, and the lamenta- tion and other rites, all performed by women, took place at sunset ; at Kroton in the similar service gold and purple garments were forbidden, the women wore black, and, says Tzetzes, ' bewail the nine-cubits high Achilles ' : fortunately for our faith, Lukophron, on whom he is commenting, tells us much the same. Now if this ritual is, so to speak, primeval, a heritage of ancient Achaean cult, then this exclusive service of the women is an important phenomenon of early religion, which does not concern us here. What concerns us more immediately is that these facts, if we interpret them in the above sense, prove that originally Achilles was no river-god, for river-gods were never bewailed, for the reason that they never died. Now we can understand the people of Kroton, being Achaeans, preserving a genuine ancient piece of Achaean ancestral-heroic ritual that the other members of this stock had lost. But the theory falters when we apply it, as we must, to Elis; for here the Achaean tradition is very weak, the Minyan element strong. But can we say that Achilles was a Minyan ancestor ? Now our imagination cannot help associating this in- teresting ritual with the famous episode to which Homer in the Odyssey alludes, and Arktinos in his Aithiopis narrated at length : when the Achaeans at Troy had laid the corpse of Achilles on the pyre his mother the sea-goddess and all her nymphs rose from the sea and gathered round the dead hero and melodiously bewailed him ; and thus the greatest epic story of the world ends With the sorrowful music of romance. What then was done by Thetis and the sea-fairies continued to be done by the women of Elis and Kroton. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 289 One of two things must have happened : either Homer must have known of an actual Achaean cult in which women ceremoniously bewailed the hero ; he then transforms ritual into romance, idealizes the real women, and, as so often happens, the myth is suggested by a pre-existing ritual ; or the Homeric episode is a spontaneous creation and is the prior fact, which has suggested later to the people of EHs and Kroton a mimetic reproduction of the same motive in an annual funeral rite. This also would be in accordance with ancient Greek custom, for we have other examples of commemorative performances at graves ; and such an epic motive could easily capture the imagination and prompt here and there a chorus of women to enact it. I have presented all the facts that appear to me relevant ; and the working hypothesis that they suggest for dealing with Achilles-legend and cult is merely this : Achilles was no local Achaean god, nor in his primary significance an Achaean tribal ancestor like Aiakos, but a definite heroic personage associated with a definite Achaean saga of semi- historical value ; and always regarded, whether rightly or wrongly, as a real man ; his cult was always hero-cult, and may have begun before Homer, but in post-Homeric times, independently of tribal affinities, was diffused and quickened by the powerful influence of the epic. Diomedes '^ Of perhaps equal interest and presenting just the same problems are the legend and cult of Diomedes. He, too, like Achilles, has been explained away as a god in disguise ; and this theory about him seems to be the orthodox one among our contemporary scholars. And we will accept it if it is supported by any independent records, and if it explains the facts best. Those on which we must build our theory are mainly these : a leading hero in the Homeric and cyclic epic, he is specially favoured by Hera and Athena, and in the Trojan saga two peculiar feats are attributed to him : (a) the capture of the white horses of Rhesos, a Thracian hero, or, as some scholars beheve, a god akin to the Thracian 2460 u 290 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Ares-Dionysos ; (b) the capture of the Palladion ; in both of these achievements he is associated with Odysseus ; otherwise his feats and character are wholly secular and of the ordinary heroic colour. He is regarded mainly as an Argive, but his connexion is intimate with Aitolia, where he was residing at the time of the outbreak of the Trojan war. We must now consider the records of his cult : he was certainly receiving worship by the time the Thebais was composed, for the poet averred that Athena conferred upon Diomedes the immortahty that she had promised to his father Tudeus, but withheld from him at the moment of his death on account of his dying act of savagery. What is of most importance is the geographical area of Diomedes' cult. In Aitoha, North Greece, and the Argolid we have no trace of it, except the record that the shield of Diomedes was borne aloft in a procession in honour of Athena at Argos. But some wave of Thessalian or North Achaean migration brought his name and cult to Cyprus, where he supplanted the earth-goddess Aglauros in the ritual of a human sacrifice, that continued to be offered to him with very peculiar rites until the third century B. c. The chief centre of his worship is, however, the Adriatic, which he dominates almost as Achilles dominated the Black Sea. He is the chief hero of Metaponton, the hero-founder of ' Argurippa ', the city ' of the silver horse ', of which the earliest name was "Apyos "\-mriov. The Italic tribes of Umbria accept him, and in the northern corner of the Adriatic the Veneti sacrifice white horses to him. He enters Daunia under the patronage of Athena, and a strange legend is recorded of his cursing the Daunian land in which some of his comrades had been buried alive ^. Now the Diomedes-cult in the Adriatic is obviously a post-Homeric phenomenon, accounted for partly by the Achaean colonization of Magna Graecia ; but it had already reached those waters by the seventh century B. c. ; for Ibukos of Rhegium was aware of the holy island in the Adriatic where Diomedes was worshipped as a god. The * Tzetz. Lyk. 603. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 291 kholiast on Pindar and one or two other later writers .peak of this worship as divine and not merely heroic ; and t may have been so for the Veneti with their sacrifice of vhite horses. But we cannot trust the exactness of the later vriters in their use of the common phrase rt/xarai ws deos ^, he is honoured as a god '. It is probable that at least in the \chaean colonies his ritual was of the chthonian type usual n the cult of heroes ; the human sacrifice falls easily into ine with this ; we have the clear record of it in Cyprus, and he legend of the living burial of his comrades in Daunia nay have arisen from similar ritual. Now, to understand ill this, is the theory that Diomedes was an aboriginal god, iegraded by Homer, but still retaining his divinity among :ertain stocks even in a later age, of any avail ? Has it any iirect evidence for its truth ? In the first place the name AtojurjSrj? is purely Hellenic md very human : ' counselled by God ', ' cared for by God ', [his is just such a name as a later Greek would choose for lis child. And nowhere is it attested as borne by an actual ^od. The theory of the godhead of Diomedes was merely suggested by the legend about the Thracian Diomedes, whose man-devouring horses are captured by Herakles." Hence the following deduction : Diomedes is an old Thracian war-god, a Thracian form of Ares, associated with horses and human sacrifice ; he descends into Greece and becomes partly civihzed, but always associated with horses, and being another form of Ares he marries Aglauros in Cyprus, just as Ares marries her in Athens ^. The general theory, of which this is a sahent example, is seen here at its weakest. Apart from actual misstate- ment, as, for instance, the imaginary and unattested marriage of Diomedes and Aglauros in Cyprus, it rests on no evidence ; it clashes with many facts, and fails to explain the history of the cult. The Diomedes of Thrace may be the same ^ This vagueness continues even in the early Christian period ; cf. C. I. 12, Fasc. 3, Suppl. 1385 ®(ds 'Evwx Kal 'KXias ^arjet inscription of Thera, ? third century a. d. *> Vide Miss Harrison, Hell. Journ. i8gi, p. 354. U2 292 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES virtually as the Diomedes of Argos and Aitolia, or may easily have been independent of him, for the name was a fairly obvious one "". If, however, they are the same, then instead of concluding that a Thracian god or hero has travelled south, I should draw the opposite conclusion, that an Argive or Achaean hero has travelled north ; that is, that the Hellenes were aware among the Thracians of some heroic personage who, because of certain traits, reminded them of their Diomedes, which name, of course, could not be Thracian, but which might have resembled something they heard in Thrace. Apart from linguistic evidence of the name, the Thracian origin whether human or divine of the Hellenic Diomedes is unsupported by any probable evidence. Neither his legend nor cult had any root in Greece where the Thracian tradition is found ; he had no associations with the Thracian Dionysos, and so far as he had any relations with Ares, possibly a Thracian deity, they are merely hostile. And look- ing at the ethnic probabilities, we must admit that the cults in Cyprus, the Adriatic, and among the Veneti do not suggest the hypothesis of a Thracian origin. One may be allowed, then, to attempt a different solution of the problem that the facts present. Originally an ancestral-heroic and human name in the tradition of the Thessahan-Achaeans, Diomedes is brought to AitoHa and the Argolid before the Homeric epos is finished. Probably already in the ninth century he was receiving heroic cult, which was quickened by the influence and diffusion of the epos : his cult and legend were powerful among the Western Greeks, hence in the later stratum of the epic his close association with Odysseus. From these or from Aitolia the lUyrians receive him, and as they were prone to a ritual of horse-sacrifice, it may have been thence that the legend of Diomedes' association with horses arose ; and the Illyrians may have handed on the cult and the ritual to their kinsmen the Veneti, * The prevailing tendency to identify all the various personages in Greek saga who bear the same name, making one Aias of the two Aiantes, might be corrected by a study of Teutonic hero-record (vide Chadwick, Age of the Epic), and also by common sense. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 293 and possibly to Daunia "". The late Homeric episode of Diomedes' capture of the white horses of Rhesos may have been vaguely suggested by this ritual-tradition. Then later, when the Achaeans settled Magna Graecia, they took with them the Homeric hero-cult and the story, whether suggested by Illyrian ritual or directly inspired by the epos, of the white horses of Diomed, which gave its name to Argurippa. In another way the influence of the epic saga may be traced along this track : we find in Magna Graecia a legend of the Palladion and the cult of Athena Bias, and this legend generally attracted the name of Diomedes ^. Aias Oiliades or Oileus^^ The interest of the epic personage called Aias Oiliades, known to us also as Aias the Less, is unique, because in his case more than in any other the combined weight of cult and tradition comes near at least to proving the historic reality of a legendary figure. There is nothing to prevent us believing in the actual existence of an Agamemnon, a Menelaos, an Odysseus ; but there is something that almost compels us to a behef in the reality of Aias Oiliades or Ileus. No one, except Usener and a few of his followers, could suppose him to be a disguised or faded god. No one, who considers the facts, could explain him as the eponymous ancestor of a tribe, individuahzed as a hero by tribal vanity. His character and personality in Homer is very strongly marked, and in one passage with very unpleasant traits S as if a real and living tradition clung to his name. In the post-Homeric cyclic epic his role was the evil one of the violator of Athena's shrine and the outrager of Kassandra, and on his homeward journey the wrath of Athena brings about his shipwreck and death at sea. His cult was deeply rooted among the later Lokroi, and was carried with them to their settlements in Magna Graecia. In Opous we hear of games in his honour, called the Aianteia, and we are told by a later authority that when the host of the Lokroi- ^ Daunia is connected in a ioundation-legend with Illyria ; vide Festus s. V. Daunia. ^ Ael. Nut. An. ii. 5 and Strab. p. 2G4. ^- //. 23. 473. 294 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Epizephurioi was drawn up for battle a vacant place in the ranks was always left for the hero. In the type of a warrior charging, he appears on the coins of the Opuntian Locrians and of Skarpheia. A unique funeral ceremony in his honour is recorded both by Philostratos and the SchoHast of Luko- phron, the dispatching a funeral-ship with black sails and black victims to sea, which was set on fire at the moment when the wind from the land filled the sails and wafted it towards his sea-grave. We are reminded of the magnificent funeral of the Norse viking in his blazing ship. The Schohast speaks of it as if it had once been an annual Locrian rite ; Philostratos as having been performed by the Achaean army on one occasion only, namely, when they first received the news of the hero's death and were smitten with remorse for their ungrateful treatment of him ; but apart from the fantastic and often childish character of Philostratos' treatise, the chronologic vagueness of both these citations prevents our assigning much historical value to this particu- lar record. All that we gather from the facts just quoted is that the memory of Aias Oiliades was preserved with singular vividness among the Lokroi both of Greece and Magna Graecia. But of far greater value for rehgion and history are the records concerning the ritual of ' the Locrian maidens ' ^^ '', a much debated theme of recent scholarship. Though certain details are disputable, the general facts are clear and authoritatively proved. For many centuries after the Sack of Troy, down to a late period in Greek history, the Locrians of North Greece maintained the custom of sending over the sea to Ilion two maidens every year to appease the undying wrath of Athena provoked by the outrage of Aias. The citizens of the historic Ilion met the maidens at the coast and did their best to slay them, evidently in no mere ritual- sham but in grim earnest ; yet the maidens, being skilfully guided by Locrian protectors, usually managed to escape and fled for their lives by a secret passage into the temple of Athena on Ilion. Here, though their lives were safe, they lived in the deepest degradation as temple-slaves, hated both THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 295 by men and by the goddess whom they served. They could not approach her, or leave the temple, except by night. If one of them died, or was killed on landing, her body was burned with boughs of a wild barren tree and the ashes cast into the sea, a sign that they were regarded as scapegoats and under a curse. It does not seem that in later times, at least, they were often killed, but Aeneas Tacticus, writing in the middle of the fourth century b. c, ascribes this not to any mercifulness but to the skill of the maidens' conductors, who were always able to evade the watchfulness of the Trojans. Most of such cruel rites were mitigated in later Hellenic history, but Lukophron, writing near the beginning of the second century B.C., attests the fact that the slayer of any of the dedicated women received the thanks and praise of his fellow-citizens. The rule appears to have been, in later times at least, that two maidens should be sent every year ; it is not certain, but probable, that they replaced those of the preceding ^^ear, who were then allowed to return home ; but in any case they were all doomed to perpetual celibacy. We are told by Polybius that the victims were selected by lot from a hundred noble Locrian houses ; but from an inscription found in West Lokris and pubhshed a few years ago ^ it appears that, in the first half of the third century B.C., the Aianteioi, a clan who claimed descent from Aias and who belonged to Naruka, his ancient home, took the burden upon themselves in return for certain privileges and for the removal of certain disabilities under which they had suffered on account of their ancestor's sin. It concerns our present purpose to know when this strange rite was first instituted. It bears upon it the mark of great antiquity ; yet Strabo, following Demetrios of Skepsis, supposes it to have arisen as late as the Persian domination of Asia. But Demetrios had a motive for dating it as late as possible '', and his statement is in contradiction not only to all probability and the general implications of Lukophron ^ Vide infra, p. 296, note a. '' This is well shown by Leaf, Troy, a Study in Homeric Geography, p. 134 ; in his Appendix he collects all the passages bearing on the Locrian maidens. 296 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES and the Scholiasts and Plutarch, but to an important passage in Polybius : the historian declares that the noblest families among the Lokroi of Magna Graecia belonged to the ' Hundred Houses ' who were supplying maidens for the Trojan rite before the colony started for Italy. Here, then, is valuable evidence, not easy to gainsay or explain away, that the ritual was in vogue at least as early as the eighth century. As regards the time of its cessation, we are left somewhat in the dark ; the Locrians seem to have made more than one attempt to evade it, but divine punishment and the voice of the Delphic oracle as often recalled them to their duty. The custom was in full vogue in the third century b. c, and Plutarch definitely says that it died out not very long before his own time ^. We have now to consider what was the original meaning of this remarkable rite, or what motive could have originated it. We ought first to realize vividly how remarkable, how unparalleled in Greek annals, it really is ; for by failing to realize this some who have recently written on it have confused an& obscured the problem. Nowhere else in Greek or in Mediterranean records do we hear of a whole people imposing upon themselves or submitting to so cruel and so hateful a service, and, in spite of their loathing and attempts to evade it, maintaining it for many centuries — in fact, for nearly a thousand years — the annual tribute of two of their noblest maidens sent forth to slavery, degradation, and the chance of a cruel and shameful death, with the certain doom of perpetual celibacy if they escaped. There ■^ De Ser. Num. Vind. 12 : this passage alone makes strongly against Dr. Leaf's interpretation of the newly published inscription, circ. 260 B. c. from Western Lokris in Annual of British School at Athens, 1914-1915, p. 148 ; as if it marked and ratified the final ending of the curse, and the removal of the social taboo from the Aianteioi, on condition that they provide for the future maintenance of the last pair of maidens that had been sent : this does not seem the natural sense of dveSf^auro ras Kupas, and the slight service that Dr. Leaf supposes them to be bound to render does not explain the extraordinary privileges that the rest of the Locrians were wiUing to give. Dr. Leaf's criticism ignores these and looks only at the social disabiUties removed. Wilhelm in his long discussion of the inscription in the Jahreshefte des Oest. Arch. Inst. 14, 191 1, takes the more natural view. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 297 was a curse in the house of Athamas at Halos, maintaining a certain law of grim ritual for many ages ^ ; but that was comparatively mild and easily avoidable. It is a general rule that all Hellenic ritual-cruelties became mitigated in the later ages ; this alone was never mitigated so long as it endured ; there is no hint that the murderous intentions of the Ilians were ever appeased or diverted into a mere harmless ritual-drama ''. They always did their best to kill those maidens if they could catch them, and their danger must always have been great. One might imagine in old times a powerful and vindictive tyrant imposing, and a long Hne of vindictive successors maintaining, such a heavy punishment upon a conquered people. But the later Ilians were in no position to tyrannize over the Locrians. Other traditions of human sacrifice in Greece all refer to a supposed tribute that a city or a tribe owed to its own temple, and they nearly all belong to the prehistoric period : but the Locrians must send their tribute of lives across the seas to a shrine and a city that appear to be alien and hostile, and it seems to have endured with little change nearly down to our own era. There is in truth no parallel in Greek history ; yet the facts are perfectly attested. We may doubt, then, if the comparative method can help us much here ; and a recent attempt made to explain it in accordance with a principle of interpretation dear to some modern anthropologists fails entirely when brought to the test of criticism. That principle is that the myth which explains a ritual is always later than the ritual, and having arisen out of ritual through a misinterpretation of it is then * Vide Cults, i, pp. 42, 93-94. ^ This has sometimes been asserted ; but apart from the ancient evidence, the new inscription referred to above affords a new proof how real their danger was ; for by a practically certain restoration made by Wilhelm, op. cit., it is covenanted that the Aianteioi, having undertaken henceforth to supply the maidens themselves, shall ' not give their sons as hostages for the maidens ' to the Lokroi ; this implies that when the Lokroi had had to furnish them, they always demanded hostages of the Aianteioi, the guilty clan ; and this can only mean that one of their sons given as hostage might be put to death in vengeance if one of the girls was kiUed. 298 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES proffered as an explanation of the ritual. Therefore, as a distinguished and lamented French savant has recently argued ^, the story of the violent outrage of Aias upon Kassandra in the temple of Athena arose from a misunder- standing of an old and solemn ritual practised there of a holy marriage between a god and a goddess : Kassandra, then, represented the goddess and Aias the local god. And the writer would explain in a similar way the few other stories dealing with love-affairs and sexual intercourse with or without violence in the holy places of Greece, stories which survived as temple-myths and passed into literature ; the romantic story of Melanippos and Komaitho, the epic story of Herakles and Auge, the hieratic story of Poseidon and Aithra ''. But before venturing to assert that all such stories are to be traced back to one such special fact of ritual, we ought critically to examine each on its own merits. Again, we ought to examine the forms of ritual that reveal the ceremony of the Upoyafxia, or ' holy marriage', in early Greek temple-worship. The ceremony can be discerned, though faintly and rarely ; but nowhere does it reveal any trace of violence and impurity, nor to have been anywhere such as could naturally engender myths of the Aias-Kas- sandra type. Moreover, this ' aitiologic ' explanation of the myth assumes that Aias and Kassandra were originally either the male and female deities of the temple at Troy or, as priest and priestess, their human representatives. But tradition has left no record of any god in that temple either in prehistoric or historic times, and whatever we may believe about Kassandra, no one could so falsify the evidence as to believe that the lesser Aias was originally a god ^ except for * M. A. Reinach in Rev. de I'Hist. d. Bel. 1914. '' I had made the same suggestion in Greece and Babylon, p. 275, note 3. '^ Vurtheim's theory in his treatise De A iacis origine cultu pair i a (Leyden, 1907) that the Locrian Aias was a giant of chthonian type and character who violated Athena is favourably noticed by A. Reinach in Rev. de I'Hist. d. Rel. 1908. The only ' gigantic ' or chthonian trait mentioned of the lesser Aias is in Philostratos, Heroik. (8, i. p. 308), who says that he was habitually accompanied by a tame snake five cubits long ; but very little that Philostratos gives us in that absurd treatise is genuine mythology ; and if this were genuine, it would not prove much. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 299 the fatal dogma that all the epic heroes were disguised gods ; and certainly there is no touch of the priest in the character of Aias. Even if it were possible to accept this explanation of the Aias-Kassandra story, it would not help us to explain the tribute of the Locrian maidens. The above-mentioned writer thought that the two virgins were sent to play the part of brides in a ' theogamia ' . But why two, when elsewhere in such ceremonies there was always only one ? And who was the male deity in the temple where Athena Ilias ruled alone ? Surely, also, any unprejudiced observer who marked the behaviour and the treatment of the Locrian maidens on their landing might exclaim, like Benedict, ' this looks not like a nuptial'. No Hellenic 'brides of god' were ever treated in this incongruous and deadly fashion. And it makes the theory worse instead of better when the author of it attempts to explain the murderous attack by suggesting that besides being brides of a god they were also (papnaKoi, or scapegoats. It is of little importance that what we know of the (papixaKos ceremonies in other Greek communities in no way resembles this Ilian ceremony. The theory is con- demned by the impossibility of imagining that the same person could combine two such contradictory roles, the despicable and fatal role of the 4>ap[xaK6= Vide Wide's Lakonische Kulte, p. 345. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 323 believed in his original manhood. Why should not we ? We cannot sensibly maintain that the legend of a grave proves the supposed occupant to have been more probably of divine than of human origin : we cannot truthfully assert that in Hellenic popular belief, while a d^os could easily become a man, no man could ever become a ^eo's : we cannot sensibly read any hieratic meaning into any part of the Menelaos-story : nor can we with any probability regard the very human name ' Menelaos ' as a natural name for an old chthonian god. We may believe that his heroic cult was fostered by the influence of the Homeric epic, which already contained the story of his miraculous transla- tion to the Happy Isles ^, also by Spartan devotion to old Achaean saga. If we believe the pseudo-Plutarch about his cult in Egypt, we could discern in this another proof of the power of the epic to propagate and foster worship. Helene 1^ ^ The question concerning Helen needs more consideration. A prevalent modern view would relegate her also, the heroine of the greatest world-epic, to the limbo of faded deities ^. The facts of her cult are unquestionable. At Sparta she had a separate shrine, and at Therapnai she shared one with Menelaos and was also supposed to be buried there with him. We hear of a Laconian festival called 'EAeVeta, probably in her honour ; and it may have been in the celebration of this that the maidens rode to her shrine in a special kind of chariot. At Athens — according to Pausanias — a triple sacrilice was offered to her in conjunction with the Dioskouroi. And we have a record of the singular cult of Helene ' Dendritis ' at Rhodes, explained by the legend of the vengeance wrought upon her by the Rhodian women, who hanged her upon a tree to revenge the loss of their husbands in the Trojan war. It is prima facie open to any » Od. 4. 561 : the passage may have been suggested by an already existing hero-cult ; but in any case would have assisted the development of one. '' I was infected with this theory when I wrote Cults, 2, p. 675. Y 2 324 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES theorist to interpret these as sporadic rehcs of the cult of an aboriginal goddess who at a later period decayed into a human heroine : and from the same point of view the apparently human stories of her abduction, whether by Theseus or by Paris, can be and have been interpreted as cosmic myths. But the champions of the goddess-theory have not suc- ceeded in determining what manner of goddess Helen was. She has been imagined as a moon-divinity because of a possible connexion of her name with ' Selene ' : and the movements of the moon have suggested love-stories of abduction. We might with Herodotus "" regard her as a double of Aphrodite ; but so far from legend justifying such an approximation of the two, it suggests at times an antagonism between them. Nor can we recognize any true mythic tradition in the version of her birth given by the poet of the Kiipria, who makes her the daughter of Nemesis. There are elements of folk-lore in his story and some echoes of local Attic cult ; but his affiliation is studied and didactic, suggested by the epic role of Helen, in which she figures indeed as the daughter of ' divine wrath '. It was the same reflection on the epic story that led the later men of Ilion to worship her as ' Adrasteia ', the woman of ' Doom '. The two objections to the whole of this goddess-theory are in the first place that it is sterile ; in the second that it is unnatural : sterile because it utterly fails to explain that which alone interests us, the epic career of Helen, for which there are no real analogies in the legends of moon-goddesses and earth-goddesses in any known mythologies : un- natural because it proceeds ' widershins ', for it reverses the order of the evidence, the earliest testimony pointing to the humanity of Helen, while we cannot find evidence for her divinity earlier than the prophecy of Euripides at the close of the Orestes ''. The chronology of our evidence may of * 2. 112 (his identification of the £6/1/7 'AfpoSiTtj of^Memphis with Helen is obviously of no value). '' The Spartan rehef showing the two Dioskouroi standing one on each side of a somewhat archaic idol of a goddess would be earlier evidence, if we were certain — as we cannot be — that the goddess was Helen : figured Roscher, Lexikon, i, p. 1167. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 325 course deceive us, but it is all that we have, and we must shape our hypotheses accordingly and maintain that the human origin of Helen is the more natural theory. For we do not accept the dogma that no ancient mortal woman could be heroized or apotheosized. We cannot believe that the tale of Troy was a Upb'i Xoyos, or that the war arose from the abduction of the statue of a goddess. It is by no means incredible, as Mr. Chadwick has well shown, that in the ' heroic ' period a love-episode should be the occasion of a great war between powerful States : he points to similar motives in the semi-historic Teutonic saga "". Finally, we ought to maintain the principle, as a new and much needed axiom in the procedure of folk-lore, that no story should be relegated to the realm of cosmic or celestial mythology that can reasonably be explained on the lines of human life. For lovers ran away together on our real earth before such conduct was imputed to the stars or the moon. In regard to the development of the cult of Helen, it owed much no doubt to the growth of the stronger Dioskouroi- worship into whose circle she would be naturally attracted. It owed still more, we may believe, to the influence of Homer on the popular imagination. The unique cult of Helene ' Dendritis ' at Rhodes may seem at first sight to gainsay this ; yet the aetiologic legend about it is in the main based on Homeric saga. We may interpret it as an offshoot of the Achaean or Dorian tradition in the island ; and we need be no more surprised by the transformation of a heroine of saga into a tree-daimon than by the fact that Christian Madonnas and Christian saints have been employed as guardians of vineyards. It is at least a gain to our imaginative valuation of the great epic that we are not scientificall}^ obliged to desiccate Helen of Troy into a goddess. There are other still clearer cases, which will hardly now be questioned, of cults arising under the influence of the epic : the hero-worship of Alkinoos •'" in Korkura attested by Thucydides, of Idomeneus and Meriones in Crete mentioned by Diodorus Siculus "^. " Op. cit. pp. 97, 337-338- 326 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Odysseus ^- We can also discern how the later ages were captivated by the great epic poems in observing the sporadic cults of Odysseus. The ' faded-god ' theory has of course been tried in his case, and again found wanting "^ ; nor does any ancestral worship of him appear anywhere. We have, for instance, no trace of the cult in Ithaka or the western islands, though there were people still in Ithaka in the time of Plutarch who traced their descent from personages mentioned in the Odyssey ^\ But he was worshipped in Laconia purely as a hero and as the husband of Penelope, who was of Laconian family : and in the account of the cult given us by Plutarch we see the influence of the Homeric and post- Homeric epics ; and again in the establishment of his worship on the coast of Libya, in the territory identified with the land of the Lotophagoi. Also, the frequent mention in the Odyssey of Odysseus' intercourse with the people of the mainland opposite his island will explain the record, for which we are indebted to Aristotle, that an Aetolian tribe, the Eurutanai, paid him heroic honours and con- sulted his shrine for purposes of divination, calling it ' the oracle of Odysseus '. This need not tempt us back to any belief in his aboriginal godhead, for the buried hero, especially one whose wisdom was so famed in tradition, could be easily credited with oracular powers ; for example, we learn from Pindar that Alkmaion the son of Amphiaraos came to possess after his death an oracular seat near Thebes ^^. Talthubios ^^ The last case that need be quoted is of special value for our question, the case of Talthubios at Sparta. An interest- ing record of .Herodotus shows us that this obscure herald and henchman of Agamemnon was of more power long after his death than in his lifetime, if indeed he had ever lived outside Homer's imagination. For in some early period •^ Vide a foolish article by Meyer in Hermes, 30 : Odysseus is Poseidon ' the Angry One ' — not a probable title for a Hellenic god (in spite of Demeter Eriuus). ^ Plut. Quaest. Graec. 14. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 327 before the Persian war the Spartans had consecrated a shrine to him, and he became the guardian of an important prin- ciple of international law, the sanctity of ambassadors. Herodotus narrates how the wrongful act of the Spartans, who slew the Persian herald sent by Darius to demand their submission, aroused the wrath of the herald-hero and how the self-devotion of two citizens endeavoured to appease it. And he incidentally informs us that a certain guild at Sparta, named ' Talthubiadai ' after him and claiming to be his de- scendants, were entrusted with all public business pertaining to heralds. This passage is of value as showing the ethical and social utility that a hero-cult might occasionally possess, but still more as bearing on our particular ' Homeric question '. It might seem at first to justify the theory that Talthubios was taken up by Homer from a real Achaean tradi- tion and that independently of the epic his name survived in the later Dorian State, which cherished the memories of the ancient Achaean monarchy, and that he had left real or putative descendants in Laconia. But granting as much reality as we can to the prehistoric genealogies and traditions, can we suppose that they alone under an alien regime could have preserved the name of so subordinate a personage in such vitality that it became a figure of cult ? And even if this were possible for Laconia, how can we account for an obscure local hero of Sparta becoming a familiar type in early Greek art ? For a relief from Samothrace of the sixth century, with an inscription in Ionic letters, shows us Talthubios and Epeios standing behind the throne of Agamem- non : also, as the faithful servant of the old Argive dynasty, he appears on archaic Attic vases depicting the vengeance of Orestes. Surely we can explain these facts in no other way than by attributing a powerful and far-spread influence to the great epics that enshrined his memory and at last evoked his cult. We do not know when the Talthubiadai were established at Sparta as a guild ; but we may regard their claim to descent from him to be the same sort of fiction as the title of the Greek physician to be called ' a son of Asklepios '. 328 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Perhaps the most obvious example of the cult-influence of the Homeric poems is the fact recorded by Aristotle ^^ that the men of Tarentum established almost en bloc the worship of the leading Homeric heroes grouped in families, the Atreidai, the Tudeidai, the Aiakidai, the Laertiadai, and even the Agamemnonidai, worships that are purely ' heroic ' and not at all ' ancestral '. And from Strabo we might almost gather that the inhabitants of the historic Ilion were prone to offer heroic honours to all the leading Achaean warriors who were reported to have fallen before Troy and to have been buried in their territory, Aias, Patroklos, Anti- lochos, Protesilaos, for example, and possibly Palamedes. Hektor ^4 We note a singular phenomenon in Boeotia. Like the rest of the Greeks, the Boeotians down to Pausanias' time were wont to adorn nameless or half-forgotten graves with the names of Boeotian heroes culled from the Iliad, and they were equally keen on the acquisition of ' relics ' "*. But the Thebans, and they alone, adopted the great enemy of the Achaean name, the Trojan Hektor, and instituted a cult of him, in obedience to an oracle which bade them secure his bones. Lukophron and Pausanias are our sufficient authori- ties for the fact. Its significance for modern scholars is enhanced by the misfortune that it has served as the main basis of a theory put forth by Bethe, assuming what is called a Sagejisverschiebung, a dislocation or transplantation of the epic-saga on which the Iliad is based : most of the combats narrated in that poem and located on Trojan ground had really occurred on the Greek mainland between heroes who were eponyms of neighbouring Greek tribes : the historic kernel of the Iliad was merely the fact, that Aias and his men from Rhoitaion fought against and captured Troy : all the other heroes save him, Achilles, Aineias, Hektor, Dei- phobos, Paris, &c., came originally from North Greece : hence the hero-cult of Hektor recorded in Thebes is a relic ^ e. g. Paus. 9. 4. 3 ; 9. 39. 3 ; cf. the recovery of the bones of the Phokian leader Schedios. 10. 36. 10. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 329 of the autochthonous tradition, which the poet of the Iliad has forgotten, though he is still to this extent under its influence that he represents his Hektor as killing Boeotians or Thessalians by preference "". This theory is disfigured by some bad scholarship : the psychologic fallacy involved in it is obvious, and its weak- nesses have been exposed by sounder German scholarship and more recently by Mr. Chadwick. Our concern is only to suggest an explanation for the phenomenon of Hektor' s cult at Thebes. So far from assuming it to be aboriginal, we shall regard it as a late and artificial importation : the oracle which dictated its institution is of late style ; it cam- mands them to convey the bones of Hektor from Asia ; and the scramble for holy bones is comparatively a late fashion. According to Lukophron, the oracle came to Thebes at a time when they were invaded and troubled by a hostile army. Now the situation at Thebes before and after the battle of Plataea might well explain this curious fact in religious history. Thebes might feel herself seriously threatened in the event of a Hellenic triumph, and as a fact she was deservedly punished after the victory. She had taken no part in the war against Troy, and she was now aiding Asia against Hellas ; therefore Hektor, " the great champion of Asia, might be reasonably expected to aid her against the descendants of his ancient foes, especially if they could secure his bones. Explained thus, the cult is explicable on the lines of Greek thought, is very discreditable to Thebes, and is a curious example of the abiding influence of epic tradition. Kassandra ^^ This last example shows that hero-cult is not dependent on the ancestral tie : even a powerful enemy may be heroized. In some ways as singular as the Hektor-cult and as difficult to explain is the Hellenic cult of Kassandra. Pausanias found a shrine and a statue of Kassandra at Leuktra in South " Bethe, A^. Jahrb. 1901, p. 672 : for refutation, vide W. KroU, ' Saga und Dichtung ', in N. Jahrb. 1912, pp. 161-180, and Chadwick's The Heroic Age, p. 269. 330 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Laconia, and he adds the significant remark that she was called ' Alexandra ' by the natives : we gather also from Plutarch that the Cretan goddess Pasiphae, worshipped at Thalamai in South Laconia, was by some interpreted as Kassandra who died here and was called Pasiphae because her oracles ' gave light to all '. More important still was Kassandra's cult at Amuklai, where Pausanias records a shrine and a statue of ' Alexandra ' interpreted by the in- habitants as the prophetic princess of Troy ; and in the shrine or its precincts was a statue of Klutaimnestra and a grave-monument (ixvfjiJLa) of Agamemnon. We have an in- scription of about 100 B. c. proving that her official name was 'AXf^dvbpa and her shrine was a depository for State- documents : on the same slab as the inscription there is carved in relief the figure of a goddess playing on the lyre ^. Finally, in the poem of Lukophron, Kassandra prophesies that she will be worshipped after her death among the Daunians of Apulia ; the prophecy attests the existence of a local cult known to the verse-maker of a goddess who — we may believe — was properly styled ' 'AXe^dvbpa ', the ' warder- off of men ' — for she was the special refuge of maidens wishing to escape a repugnant match — but who was identified there, as in Laconia, with ' Kassandra '. These facts are of intrinsic interest and of importance for the questions concerning the constructions of epic plot and the cult-influence of epic poetry. The story of Kassandra's death, heightened by the genius of Aeschylus, is one of the great possessions of tragic literature ; our earliest record of it is the passage in the Odyssean Nekuia, where it occurs as an episode in the account of Agamemnon's murder, which — we may imagine — was supposed to take place at Mukenai. And it is quite clear from the nexus and style of that passage that Homer did not invent it ' out of his head ', but gives it as a known tradition. Could it be explained at all by the facts of cult ? The cult-records just set forth establish this much^ * The statue carved by Aristandros of Paros that Pausanias — 3. t8. 8 — saw at Amuklai, describing it as ' a woman holding a lyre ' and interpret- ing it as a personification of Sparta, is no doubt Alexandra. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 331 that there was in the Achaean or pre-Dorian period a Laconian goddess called 'AXf^dvhpa, a virgin-goddess probably akin to Artemis ""j perhaps an offshoot of the great Cretan goddess and therefore liable to be confused with the Cretan Pasiphae. Originally this goddess had nothing to do with the princess of Troy, and her true cult-name remained unchanged down to a late period. Her Daunian cult may have been a product of the influence of the Achaean colonies in Magna Graecia, and on that view it would corroborate our belief in the early Achaean occupation of Laconia ; or it may have been propagated there by the later Laconian tradition of Tarentum. The first question that arises is how this independent goddess became interpreted in popular belief with Kassandra. We can discern no sufficient reason for such a misinterpretation in the mere fact that at Amuklai statues of Klutaimnestra and Agamemnon stood near the image of Alexandra in her shrine. The true cause was in all probability that the Greek name ' Alexandros ' for Paris, attested by the epic, was well known in the Peloponnese and induced people to interpret the feminine ' Alexandra ' as his sister. But could this verbal illusion have had the power to give birth to the pre-Homeric legend that Kassan- dra had been brought to Laconia by Agamemnon as his captive-concubine and there murdered ? We do not know when the illusion arose ; we have no right to carry it back to pre-Homeric times, and our first evidence of its prevalence is Pindar's ode, in which he places the murder of Agamemnon and Kassandra in Amuklai ^' ; for the natural explanation of this change in the traditional geography of the legend is that the equation of Alexandra and Kassandra had already taken place at Amuklai and that this, combined with the presence in her shrine of a statue of Klutaimnestra and a grave- monument of Agamemnon, suggested to the Amyklaeans to claim their city as the scene of the murder. It need scarcely be said that those statues were post-Homeric. It is not probable that the name 'Akf^dvbpa would have been ^ This would account for the representation of her as playing on the lyre. ^ Pyth. II, 32. 332 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES interpreted as Kassandra, had there not been a prevalent independent tradition of her journey to the Peloponnese as a captive from Troy. And that this tradition was not dependent on the misunderstanding of the name is clear from the fact that it existed at Thalamai in the cult-precincts of Pasiphae, where there is no hint of ' Alexandra '. We may say, then, that there was nowhere any real cult of Kassandra, the Trojan prophetess, but only of 'Alexandra ', the goddess who for certain reasons was sometimes con- fused with her ; and that there is nothing in the cult of ' Alexandra ' which could explain the pre-Homeric and vivid tradition of Kassandra's murder. Here, as so often, having tried other explanations in vain, we revert to the suspicion that there was a considerable element of reality in the traditions out of which Homer wove the incidents as well as the main plot of his poems. Oidipous ^^ We must attribute the same cult-evoking power to the post-Homeric epic. The influence of the Theban cycle of epic tradition is fairly manifest in the sporadic cults of Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, Adrastos, Oidipous, perhaps of Tudeus. The figures of Adrastos and Oidipous have been disfeatured by the ravages of the hieratic theory ; and their names have been pressed to give false evidence for the paradox that they were faded gods "". A more candid review of the record obliges us to place them in the human category ; their record is wholly human, and their tradition is partly dynastic and genealogical. The folk-lore of Thebes that gathered about the house of Laios doubtless lived on for centuries independently of the epic and drama. There was no worship of Oidipous at Thebes recorded by any writer, but heroic sacrifice to his sons was being maintained there in the time of Pausanias, and the story that he tells us con- cerning the parting of the flame of the pyre suggests an epic * The interpretation of the name as ' swell-foot ' is still the most proba- ble : such a name could not be given to any god. Kretschmer's explanation of it as ' snake-legged ' is mere fancy (vide Roscher, Lexikon, 3, p. 741). THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 333 source. This worship of them might have been gentile- ancestral there rather than heroic, for their reputed descen- dants were surviving in Thebes through the historical period. But when we read in Herodotus that the Theban Aigeidai who migrated to Sparta established there the cult of Oidi- pous and of the ' Furies of Laios ' in obedience to an oracle we are not inclined to impute this to folk-lore or ancestral tradition, but to the Panhellenic influence of the epic on the minds of the Delphic priesthood. The occurrence of greatest moment for European litera- ture was the penetration of the Oidipous-legend and cult into Attica. We cannot safely regard Sophokles as a wholly trustworthy spokesman ; but he built with daring creative- ness upon a certain foundation of fact : Pausanias testifies to a heroon of Oidipous and Adrastos ^*' at Kolonos ; and records the former's sepulchral monument on the Areopagos in the precincts of the shrine of the Semnai, and explains it by the report, which he seems to believe, that the bones of the hero had been brought from Thebes. It is strange that Pausanias in describing the antiquities of Kolonos mentions no site or vestige of the Semnai-cult there. Nevertheless, the great Sophoclean drama, addressed to an audience that knew the locaHty well and describing the holy grove of the Eumenides with an air of careful topographic accuracy, would convince us that the local ritual of the village actually associated the Boeotian hero with these goddesses, were it not for the negative evidence of Androtion. He was one of the group of writers in the fourth century who composed ' Atthides ', detailed histories of Attica, and were specially devoted to local antiquities ; he dealt minutely with the history of Oidipous and his arrival at Kolonos, but repre- sents him as a suppHant there in the temple of Demeter and Athena and does not mention any cult of him or of the Semnai in that village. The legends of the house of Laios are very shifting, even at Thebes. There is nothing at any rate in the drama of Sophokles, even if it were all based on real religious fact, and nothing in any record of Kolonos, to suggest a chthonian god 334 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES lurking behind the personaHty of Oidipous. We know that Boeotian cults and legends crossed the border into Attica. And we must suppose that he arrived at Kolonos as a hero, for we have the record that he shared his hero-slirine there with Adrastos, an association that at once suggests the influence of the two Theban epics. His grave in the shrine of the Semnai on the Areopagos was probably an Attic fiction inspired by the Attic drama. The only other intimate association of Oidipous with the divine sphere is the record of his burial at the Boeotian town of Eteonos in the temple of Demeter. The story as given by the Scholiast on Sophokles' Oedipus Coloneus from two older historians "" reflects a tradition, that must be fairly old, of the difficulties con- cerning his interment : his remains were not thought to bring a blessing on any land : at last his friends succeeded in burying him at Eteonos, and an ApoUine oracle forbade the inhabitants to disturb ' the suppliant of the goddess ', as he seemed to have taken refuge with Demeter ; the interesting statement is added that her temple there was called after him ' Oidipodeion '. But this last fact, if accepted, by no means proves that he was an aboriginal earth-deity ; for we have other examples of a divinity taking a title from a local hero. Against any such theory about him is the important fact that neither his name nor his legend is hieratic '' and that Thebes, his real abode, had no tradition of him at all except as a mortal king of tragic history. His cult is extraneous and cannot be dated to a very early period. It illustrates the hold on the Greek imagination of a great and terrible story preserved by tradition and enshrined in epic poetry. Adrastos '"^ The same pseudo-science has been tried on Adrastos of Argos and Sikuon, the nominal leader of the two expeditions against Thebes. The dogma that he was a proto-Hellenic » Lusimachos, possibly contemporary with Cicero, and an unknown Arizelos. ^ The legend that he was put to sea in a chest as an infant is told of various divine personages but also of ' heroes ', and cannot be used as a genuine myth for his interpretation. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 335 god worshipped on both sides of the Aegean lacks the support of any real evidence. Whatever was the true meaning of the name, we never find it applied to a divinity but in our earliest mythologic records to various human personages. It is embedded in the early Argive genealogies, is connected with a Minyan strain, and his legend reflects an early Argive supremacy over Sikuon. We only find his hero-cult at Sikuon, Megara, and a slight recognition of it at Kolonos in Attica. The statement in Herodotus is familiar to most scholars, how that Kleisthenes, tyrant of Sikuon, hating the Argive connexion, endeavoured to expel the spirit of Adrastos, and in spite of the protests of Delphoi deprived him of the ' tragic choruses ', in which his sufferings were periodically commemorated — probably at his tomb — and gave them over to Dionysos ; and further invited from Thebes the spirit of his bitterest enemy Melanippos ^^, who had slain his brother and son-in-law in the Theban war, and firmly estabhshed the cult of Melanippos in Sikuon, having no doubt persuaded the Thebans to give him the hero's reputed bones ; the object of this strange transaction being to make Sikuon an undesirable habitation for Adrastos. The narrative illus- trates most vividly the naive and sober faith of the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries in their hero-cults and their view of the unseen spirit-world. It also proves indirectly the influence of the epic on cult, the subject of our immediate interest. For it is incredible that Kleisthenes should have known who was exactly the right hero to send for in order to oust Adrastos, had not the name and exploits of Melanippos been preserved in the famous epic poems dealing with the great expedition of Argos against Thebes. We may regard this tradition as we now regard the siege of Troy, as based on a historical event ; and it is most natural in both cases that the memory of real names should have been preserved. Tradition might have been strong enough in itself to start the cult of Adrastos ; but doubtless it was strengthened by the epic ; otherwise Megara would have had less reason for competing with Sikuon for the honour of his grave. His personality then belongs wholly to human-historic 336 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES saga. There is nothing hieratic about him. The Herodotean narrative of his honours at Sikuon gives us no reason for associating him with Dionysos nor does the fact that his house at Argos stood near the temple of that god, if we may trust a rather broken passage of Pausanias. Nor does the uncanonical myth preserved by Hyginus, that Adrastos and his son voluntarily flung themselves on the funeral pyre, justify us in interpreting them as aboriginal puppet-gods ; for such a myth, even if arising from a ritual-source, could easily become secular. The influence of the Cyclic epics dealing with the Trojan cycle in fostering or suggesting hero-cult was equally great, and may account for the heroic honours paid to some of their favourite personages such as Protesilaos ^^^ and Palamedes ^^ in locaHties far from their reputed homes. These poets doubtless drew from a wealth of real tradition ; but ancestral traditions would tend to become vague and lost in the drift- ing currents of Greek migration and colonization but for the saving power of literature. The cult of Idmon the Argonaut at Herakleia Pontike'®, founded by Megarians and Tana- graeans, was suggested to them by an oracle. Idmon is connected with the Abantes and has no ancestral con- nexion with the colonists ; but he had figured prominently in the Naupaktika and in the poem of Eumelos. And the Argonautic epics must be reckoned with in accounting for the cults of Argonautic heroes in Asia Minor — Jason, for instance, at Abdera, Kuzikos, and in Kolchis '^. Nevertheless, however many influences we recognize at work, the geogra- phical distribution of hero-cults remains puzzling at many points ; and we are often baffled in the inquiry why a parti- cular hero's name was applied to a prehistoric grave, why the name of Protesilaos, for instance, to the grave on the Thracian Chersonese at Eliaious "^ : we are driven to assume some unknown ethnic strain in the colonists. " Vide Kretschmer, Einleitung, &c., p. 177. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 337 Perseus ^^o The tradition is easier to reckon with when the cult cleaves to its aboriginal home, as, for instance, that of Perseus to Argos. His name and his saga were so deeply engrafted in the most ancient Argive genealogies and tradition that these alone could engender his heroic cult in his own city ; for the cult of him was always heroic and we do not know when it began. There is nothing about him that points to an aboriginal god ^, though his adventures mainly belong to the wonderland of folk-lore. At some time, no doubt, they received epic treatment, and thereby became Panhellenic. This would account for the honours paid to him at Seriphos and Athens, which city may have confused him with a local hero IT eppei^s and was strongly pro-Argive in her policy. At some later period the city of Tarsos may have raised him to the dignity of a city-god, to support their claim to ancient Argive descent. Theseus '^ The last in this review of human epic heroes, who became part of the religion of Greece, to claim our attention is Theseus. The theory of his divine origin has a certain vraisemUance at first sight ; for his mother is Aithra, an apparently celestial name, and his father was Aigeus or Poseidon, and there are strong reasons for supposing that Aigeus is a disguised form of Poseidon of Aigai, the great Ionic god. But Telephos ^^^ of Arcadia and Mysia was the son of ' Auge ' — whose name means ' Light '■ — and Herakles ; yet there is nothing divine about Telephos, nor is there about Theseus. And as priestesses sometimes bore the names of divinities we might thus account for ' Auge ', priestess of Athena Alea, and ' Aithra ', priestess, as we may surmise, of Athena at Troizen. We know nothing of, and ought not to assume, a god ' Theseus ' ; his name is human and was borne by one of the early colonizers of * The sane article on Perseus in the later part of Roscher's Lexikon, in which the solar theory concerning him is rejected, shows that mythologic study in Germany can progress. 2460 Z 338 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES Kume in the Aiolis ; his character and activity are purely human, though he is associated with certain deities ; and his cult at Athens, for this is the only place besides its dependency Delos that worshipped him =', cannot be shown to be earlier than the period of Kimon, who obtained an oracular mandate from Delphoi to bring his bones from Skuros. After this stirring event, we may suppose, the ritual of the Thargelia and the Puanopsia was re-interpreted to reflect his legendary voyage to Crete ^. But the tradition of him in Attica had been powerful from early days and was doubtless quickened by epics such as the ' Theseis '. He was already known to Homer as a helper of the Lapiths against the Centaurs, ' Theseus son of Aigeus, the peer of the immortal Gods ' ; and another passage shows indirectly that the poet knew of his association with Troizen and Attica ^ We must regard Theseus, so far as we know his tradition at all, as essentially an Ionian hero ; for the theory that would explain him as a Minyan and derive him from North Greece is based on the frailest evidence '^. He is closely linked with the Ionic deities, Poseidon, sharing the eighth day of the month with him in the festal calendar, and with Aphrodite whose temple he built on the Akropolis of Athens with the title Pandemos, and whom the oracle bade him take as his guide to Crete. His name and his legend may be taken to reflect some part of the Ionic migration that reconstituted Attica ; but hardly the main movement ^, for it does not appear that his tradition was preserved by any other Ionic State than Attica and Troizen. * His statue stood in the palaistra at Messene, but we do not hear of his worship there : Cults, 5, p. 71, ' Hermes ', R. 56. '' His intrusion into these was all the easier, as his feast was on the eighth and these on the seventh of the month. <^ II. I. 265 (a Une wrongly suspected) : 3. 144. ^ We can base nothing on his friendship with Peirithoos, on the cult of the Attic Phorbas, his charioteer, and on the possibihty that one of the many Phorbantes may have been a Minyan, nor on the tradition that one of the founders of the Aeolic Kume was a certain Theseus. *^ We cannot argue from the legend of the bull of Marathon that he belonged originally to the Tetrapolis : his name appears in no inscription from this part of Attica. THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 339 In his complex story, it is hard to determine how much is original, how much is due to later accretions ; for it has been obviously worked over and embellished by Attic patriotism and vanity. His Troezenian-Attic ancestry, his association with Poseidon and Aphrodite, his voyage to Crete in which he comes into some contact with the Attic- Cretan Apollo Delphinios, may be regarded as fundamental elements ; and some light glimmers through his story on a prehistoric connexion of Attica with Crete and Delos, which again is attested by the Attic cults and legends of the Cretan heroes, Daidalos, Perdix, and Androgeos. How much in the Theseus-story that has been made familiar, to us by later writers was imported into it by the epic poets is impossible to determine. But one interesting point may be regarded as certain. It was they who were responsible for the wild story of the campaign of the Amazons against Attica and their overthrow by Theseus and his Athenians. And it is a striking instance of the influence of the epic on cult that this reckless fiction was adopted by the State- religion which ordained a sacrifice to the Amazons on the day before the Theseia. But it was not only and not mainly the epic that worked upon this personality, but the love and the imagination of the whole Athenian people ; and no hero-record of any other Greek State presents us with a parallel. He became for them what under a more auspicious sky our King Alfred might have become for us, the incarnation of the soul of a people. For Theseus incarnates the ideal of Athens herself at her best and highest, grace and charm, skilful daring, versatility, and political ' sophrosyne '. In the dramatists he becomes the champion of a high-toned democracy, the defender of the oppressed, the noble friend who can comfort the heartbroken Herakles with words of enlightenment. And the great artists of Athens dealt lovingly with him, the circle of Pheidias, the great vase- painters, the sculptors and painters of the fourth century, as well as the humbler craftsmen. The political writers attribute to him the union of Attica and the foundation z 2 ^ 340 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES of the democracy. Even in his cult we see some reflection of the idea of him as the champion of the poor and oppressed ; for his shrine in the market-place was the chief refuge for such ; and his festival, the Theseia, was the occasion for a distribution of food and money among the people. And while they honoured him as the statesman and the citizen's friend, neither the folk-lore nor the religion forgot the warrior. The thrilling story arose and was preserved that his phantom was discerned fighting for the Athenians at Marathon, and a thankful sacrifice was offered him for the victories of Phormion. Thus poetry and folk-lore have contributed rich material to the shaping of a complex dream-figure ; but we may assume a substratum of reality on which they built and which explains the enduring strength of the tradition. Finally, in this particular example we can best estimate the ethical and spiritual value of the worship of heroes. For the effort to realize a certain ethical ideal is powerfully stimulated when it can be incarnated in an ideal personality regarded as once human and actual and consecrated later by religion. Throughout this chapter reasons have been urged for the belief that much hero-cult was directly engendered by the powerful influence of the Homeric and other epics. And those who find it hard to believe that a nation's literature could evoke the actual cult of the great personages who are its theme should consider the development of saint-worship in Christendom, the Christian parallel to the Hellenic hero- worship, fostered and stimulated by the narrative of our sacred books. Also, the more one studies the minutiae of the record of this special growth of Hellenic religion, which in all proba- bility arose for the main part in the early post-Homeric period, the more one may discern that the old epic poetry not only suggested many a name to forgotten graves, but occasionally also imposed laws on the ritual. We may find an example in Aristotle's record of the cults of Tarentum^^: ' they say that at Tarentum they offer funeral offerings at THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES 341 certain times to the Atreidai, the Tudeidai, the Aiakidai, the Laertiadai, and to the Agamemnonidai they consecrate a special festival on another day, at which it is not lawful for women to taste the sacrificial flesh offered to these heroes ; they have also a shrine of Achilles amongst them.' Here we have almost a complete catalogue of the Achaean epic heroes, arranged in family groups as if to lend a fictitious ancestral character to the cults. The Laconian Parthenioi who settled Tarentum may have rightly claimed Achaean descent ; but no one will believe that these are genuine and ancient ancestral worships that they brought with them as an inheritance from the early Laconian tradition. The Aiakidai are the only genuine clan-name among them, but what have they or the family of Laertes or the family of Tudeus to do with Laconia ? We can only believe that the new colonists of Tarentum desired to connect them- selves with those heroes of the great Achaean past that the epic had made glorious. The taboo on women in the festival of Agamemnon is a point of interest ; such restric- tions were not uncommon in Greece, and the aetiological legends invented to explain them are usually obvious after- thoughts ; at certain religious rites, especially those intended to aid the campaign, women's presence was felt to have a weakening and dangerous effect. But Aristotle probably interpreted the rule of Tarentum as pointing to the hatred that Agamemnon and his house would naturally have for women ; and in this case he may well have been right ; it would be an interesting example of epic-saga affecting ritual. And others might be found. Plutarch records that the name of Achilles must not be mentioned in the shrine of the hero Tenes in Tenedos i»^, because according to the epic-legend Achilles had slain him. The fact may be taken as certain. Shall we say that the taboo is prior to the epic and that the epic poet took the story from the priest of the shrine ? It seems more likely that the priests knew of the epic than that the epic poet knew a local legend about a taboo preserved by the priests. If we are in doubt here, we cannot be in regard to another example of the same type. 342 THE CULTS OF EPIC HEROES In the temple of Asklepios at Pergamon the name of Euru- pulos, the son of Telephos, was scrupulously avoided, because according to the epic version of the Little Iliad it was he who had slain Machaon the son of Asklepios. The chronology of the Asklepios-cult shows that this taboo was an afterthought, which could only have been suggested by the epic. We so often hear how saga reflects cult that we are in danger of ignoring the reverse truth that cult may reflect saga, for cult was often mimetic of past events, and the memory of these was preserved mainly by saga-poetry. The statement that Homer and Hesiod made Greek theology is sometimes foolishly interpreted. But it is more applicable to the set of facts considered in this chapter than is often supposed. CHAPTER XII THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS The cult of heroes and the cult of ancestors frequently overlap, and the forms of ritual are mainly the same. But it is right to distinguish them, for there is a difference in the root-idea that affects their geographical distribution and the sentiment attaching to them. As we have seen, the hero ijijthe_Greekj^^ious_sense is a person whose virtue, influence, or personality was^ powerful in his lifetime or through the peculiar circumstances of his death that his spirit after death is regarded as of supernormal power, claiming to be reverenced and propitiated. He is not confined to his original locality, but may pass far beyond his border, and the ghost of a gifted stranger or an enemy may be worshipped by an alien tribe ; in this case the worship is more likely to be based on fear than on affection. On the other hand, the ancestor pure and simple is local, the reputed founder of a tribe or clan or family, who possess his grave in their midst where they maintain periodic rites ; the tie is that of kinship and the cult is based, at least in part, on reverential affection. Now when the ancestor was famous — that is to say, when he was the theme of epic-saga — he could be worshipped both as ancestor and as hero ; or the same personage might receive cult under the one aspect in one locality, under the other elsewhere. One may imagine that ancestor-cult is the original and prior pheno- menon, from which hero-cult subsequently arose, some ancestors being also ' heroic ', so that their worship might give the impulse to the worship of ' heroes ' in general ; and this on the whole appears to be Rohde's view. Or one may conceive that certain distinguished people real or fictitious were worshipped after their death because they were heroic, and, as they were also the reputed ancestors of certain families or clans, gradually the desire arose to 344 THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS extend the same reverence to other ancestors who had not been prominent as heroes. But the facts of modem anthro- pological study convince us that the question of priority in regard to these two motives of cult is an idle one ; both are found operative simultaneously in early and late periods. It is of interest to review the records concerning ancestral religious tendance ; the phrase is preferable to the term ' worship ', which is often misleading. The phenomenon is presented in its simplest form when the ancestors are name- less, a mere group of tribal or family ghosts, lacking the individuality and personal prestige of heroes. Certain Attic and other recorded festivals have this indefinite character ; for instance, the yivia-ia, called also perhaps the v€Kvaia or v€iJ.€(na ^, a ritual of sorrow performed by the y4vr] or clans in honour of the ancestors who are called by the generic name yovels, which reminds us of the Sanskrit ' Pitri ' or Fathers ; or again the Krvvat or KToivai, deiined as the oblation of victims to ancestors ''. Of these general festivals of the dead the most detailed and interesting record is that which has come down to us concerning the Attic Anthesteria, which I have considered elsewhere in detail ". In my opinion, we must regard the Anthesteria as originally a festival of Dionysos, hilarious and genial for the most part, which happened to become combined with an old Attic All Souls' service in honour of the dead ; the rites called the x^^V^i on the last day of the Anthesteria, about March i, were wholly funereal, and even the middle day, ' the Feast of the Cups ', which was mainly devoted to merry-making and drinking, was slightly clouded by the presence of ghosts : ' in the festival of the Choes . . . when the souls of the departed are supposed to ascend to the upper world the Athenians used to chew buckthorn from the beginning of the day onward and anoint their doors * Hesych. s. v. Ttviaia : Bekk. Anecd. i, p. 85 s. v. ; cf. p. 240. 3 (on the fifth of Boedromion — from Philochoros) . Herod. 4. 26 : for Nf/xeVia vide Cults, 2, 'Artemis', R. 137 ; iorvtuvaia. Cults, 3, p. 309, R. iG**. The passage in Herodotus suggests a yearly ritual performed by the son on the birthday of his dead father ; cf. Isaeus 2. 46. '■ Hesych. s.v. '^ Cults, 5, pp. 214-224. THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 345 with pitch ' ^, These are prophylactic methods commonly used to keep spirits at a distance. Also all the temples except that of Dionysos in the marshes were closed on this day, as there was fxCaaixa, the taint of ghostly presences, in the air. The last day, the x'^Tpot, the Feast of Pots, was wholly devoted to the tendance of the departed, who were now so far from being desired to keep their distance that they were specially invited to arise from their tombs and to enter the houses of their living kinsfolk. The account of it reminds us somewhat of the beautiful Japanese All Souls' Festival, the * Feast of Lanterns ' ''. The Athenian All Souls' Day was quaintly called ' the Pots ' because of the x»^rpot or x^Vpat in which was cooked the cereal food intended for the ghosts. We are specially told by the Scholiast on Aristophanes, quoting from Theo- pompos, that no service was offered on this day to any of the Olympian deities, but only to Hermes, the god of the nether-world, on behalf of the dead : and by a probable combination of other records we can conclude that sacrifice was also offered to mother-earth, a honeyed cake being thrown into a cleft of the earth that was near her shrine. The two Scholiasts differ in their paraphrase or citation of Theopompos in one interesting detail '^ : according to the one who is probably the more trustworthy, none of the priests tasted of the offerings, from which we might gather that the porridge-pots were eaten at a family meal by the kinsmen and the ghosts, the official priests of the State having nothing to do with the ceremony ; according to the other 'no one tasted of the offerings', which means that the porridge-pot was tabooed and reserved solely for the use of souls. The point is of interest and importance, as we shall see. The whole ritual closed with a formula that had the effect of ridding the houses of the ghosts : ' Begone you ghosts ; it is no longer Anthesteria.' This phrase of exorcism is not likely to be very ancient, for iambic verse was comparatively a late vehicle of expression. But the * Photius, s. V. Uiapa Tifxtpa. '' Vide Frazer, G. B. g. 151. '' Vide Cults, 5, p. 318, R. 124''. 346 THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS whole of this ghost-service has a very primitive air ; and as Dionysos, who had by his ancient inheritance a special con- cern with the lower world, had yet nothing to do with it ^, we are compelled to suppose that it was pre-Dionysiac in Attica — that is, of earlier institution than the eleventh century. We have then a glimpse revealed of Attic beliefs of the days before Homer ; and it is well to take stock of them carefully. In the first place, we have no hint here of anything we should call worship ; no hint of prayer to the dead or of any expectation of divine blessings that they can confer. All that is done might be prompted by the belief in_ the continued life of the spirits, in their dependence upon the living for food and sustenance, and by the affectionate desire of the surviving kin to minister to their needs and periodically to invite them to a loving reunion with their old household. It is quaint and pathetic, and the same simple feelings and beliefs are picturesquely manifested in the Japanese festival. Another trait in the service is of importance for higher religion. The souls are not without hope, for special divinities, Hermes and the Earth-mother, have charge of them ; and the hving kinsmen can supplicate these powers on behalf of their dear ones. Here for the first time in Europe we have record of a service similar to prayers for the dead ; and this implies the feeHng that the lot of the soul after death may be the happier if the nether powers can be specially propitiated. The idea that Hermes is the intercessor with the Earth-mother on behalf of the souls of the departed, which we may detect in this ancient ritual of the Anthesteria, appears to be expressed also on a grave- relief now at Verona on which Hermes is represented holding out a libation cup to Ge, who is seated on a rock ; the sepulchral significance of the monument adds to its impor- tance ^. The old Attic thought, in fact, as attested by the records just examined, by no means harmonizes with the Homeric imagination of the posthumous existence. In the * We may trust the Athenian Theopompos for this rather than Didymos : vide Schol. Aristoph. Acharn. 1075. '' Vide Cults, 5, p. 39. THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 347 primitive belief of the xi^'^po '-service the soul does not flit away helplessly and irrevocably to a far-off shadow-land somewhere in the west, but abides under the kindly guardian- ship of the Earth-mother in or near the grave in the Attic soil, whence periodically it is invited to return to the living friends, perhaps to share a meal with them. And let us note also that the departed souls in Attica were specially called by the auspicious name ATjjUTjrpeiot, ' those whom Demeter has gathered to herself ' -'' ; though it is possible that this special term was the privilege of those who had been initiated at Eleusis. The ritual of the Anthesteria presents us with another question of psychological importance. Was the emotion of the living towards the ghost mainly one of fear or affec- tion ? The former is usually regarded by writers on the subject as the aboriginal emotion of man in his relation to the unseen world, and as the most usual stimulus of cult ; it is certainly the more frequent and the more obvious ^ ; but as a matter of fact the records both of backward and advanced societies show us the blending of the two emotions, and now one, now the other, as predominant. We have noted that in Homer there is scarcely a hint of fear of the ghost, and although Odysseus frankly confesses ' pale fear seized upon me ' ", when the throng of phantoms crowd around him in the lower world, in the upper air neither he nor any other Homeric hero seems to be so troubled. Nor has Homer any apparent consciousness of the miasma of J:h^dead to which Hesipd is the first to give testimony ; it is wrong, he declares, to beget children ' when one has just returned from the ill-omened funeral ' ''. Doubtless this feeJing_ofjthe miasma of the dead was world-(^d injGreece ^ The desire to secure the favour of the Earth-mother for the departed might explain the curious Lycian custom of men wearing female garments during the period of mourning (Plut. Consol. ad Apoll. p. 113 A) ; for it is a recognized law in ritual that the worshipper should endeavour to assimilate himself to the nature and type of the divinity. But we must reckon with a different explanation, namely, that the change of garments was intended to deceive the ghosts that are wandering round at such times. ^ Frazer's Belief in Immorialiiy, pp. 152-158. ," Od. II. 43. '' Erga 735. (^ THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS as in most other communities ; but it varies in intensity at different periods, and according to its intensity different customs arise. When strongly felt it would prompt the law that the dead shall not be buried within the dwelhng or within the city-wall, and therefore the records concerning this custom in the Hellenic communities are of interest for our present theme. As has been already observed ^, the ^ Mycenaean world appears to have enjoyed the society of its dead, and the graves are found near to the houses within the circuit of the city. The rule of historic Greece jva^ almost universally the opposite ; the dead were banished to their own city, the nekropolis outside the walls, and in explaining such institutions in early society the superstitious reason is more appropriate than the hygienic ; the early Greek knew more about ghosts than about typhoid fever. The exceptions to this Greek rule are few and of special / interest. Plutarch ^' declares that Lukourgos specially allowed the Spartans to bury their dead in the city and to have the tombs close by the houses, intending thus to relieve them from all superstitious fears about the dead ; therefore when we find at Sparta clear proof of the actual worship of ancestors, at least from the sixth century onwards, we must impute affection rather than fear as the ruling motive. Elsewhere the rule against city burial appears to have been only relaxed in special and peculiar cases. At Athens it seems to have been absolute in the later period, although according to Plato at a very early time the law ' allowed interment within the houses of the living ". Was Plato really aware of certain prehistoric houses such as that found at Thorikos, where grave-niches are found in the walls ? '^ At Sikuon, according to Plutarch, there was an ancient law that no one was to be interred within the city, and this was enforced, he declares, by strong superstitious terrors ; but they were most anxious to do this honour to Aratos -^^ ; having then obtained a Delphic oracle and secured his relics from the Achaeans, they chose the most » Vide supra, p. 4. " Vit. Solon. 12. " Minos, p. 315 D. ^^ Eph. Arch. 1895, -p. 251. THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 349 conspicuous spot in the city for his grave and honoured him as Founder and Saviour. We have ample evidence that this privilege was generally given to the founder of the colony, who always received heroic honours after his death ; and the motive doubtless was that his friendly spirit should always abide among his people. The same motive must have prompted the men of Megara when they built their 1 council-hall so as to enclose the graves of the heroes within | it, obeying an oracle which they interpreted as enjoining them ' to take the spirits of the dead into their counsels ' *, or when they allowed those who fell in the Persian war to be buried within the city. We find the tradition of Megara still powerful among the Hellenes of Cherson, who traced their origin ultimately to Megara, and who alone of all the subjects of the Byzantine Empire maintained the spirit of early Greece in the tenth century a. d. ; the patriot-lady Gukia, who at this period saved her city from despotism by burning her treacherous husband with his fellow-conspirators in her own palace, obtained from the grateful citizens the solemn promise that they would give her the exceptional privilege of interment within the city ; but it was only by a ruse that she was able to keep them to it, so great was their inherited fear and dislike of the practice ^. So, then, we have this evidence, at least, that the fear • of ihe^host Ibecame stronger after the Mycenaean period of Greece. And this fear appears at the Attic All Souls' Festival, compeUing them to adopt prophylactic measures against the miasma of the dead, and suggesting the formula of exorcism at the close of the ritual. This feeling of fear does not by any means imply that the ghost is malevolent ; the other ceremonies reveal an affectionate relation between the living and the dead, each yearning at certain times for communion with the other. But even the loving ghost brings pollution, an uneasy condition half-psychical half- physical, which renders one unfit for intercourse with one's fellows or with the higher deities of the upper world. Hence a Paus. I. 43. 3. ^ Finlay. History of Greece, 2, 350. 350 THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS arose the elaborate ritual of purification after funerals that belonged to the private custom and often to the public law of Greece. A fifth-century inscription of Keos gives us valuable information on these points ^ ; the State decides how far the impurity spreads through the different degrees of kinship, and prescribes the ritual of purification ; it orders a thorough cleansing of the house, which closes with a sacrifice to Hestia, the Holy Hearth, the chief source of domestic purity. A later law of Gambreion ^ deahng with the same subject adds also a significant threat of excom- munication : any one who exceeds due measure in the funeral rites of lamentation shall be cut off from communion with the Gods — that is, from temple worship — for ten years. We can thus discern the meaning of the rule at Olympia that those who partook of the sacrifice to Pelops ^^° were for a time under a taboo and were debarred from the worship of Zeus ; the god of the living is infected by those who have communion with the spirits of the dead. But here and there we have glimpses of an idea that is entirely contrary ; namely, that one might shake off the impurity of death by sacrifice to or communion with the god of life ; for instance, as I have pointed out elsewhere ", ' the mourners at Argos put off the taboo by eating of a sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit of the pure god in the sacred food could destroy the miasma within and around them '. And in Plutarch's life of Solon '' it is specially said that the Cretan Epimenides restrained the extravagance of sorrow and the violent excess in the old Attic funeral rites ' by combining certain sacrifices with them ' : the natural interpretation of this phrase in the context appears to be that he enjoined certain sacrifices to the upper gods in order to take off the miasma. But usually, as the miasma of death came from the lower world, so the rites of purifica- tion were also chthonian. At Athens, in the process called airovifj-ij.! or 'washing off', one dug a trench to the west of the grave-monument and then, looking towards the west » Dittenb. Syll.'' 2. 877. t i^^jj 2. 879. ■= Evolution of Religion, p. 135 ; Plut. Qiiaest. Graec. 24 <> c. 11. THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 351 along the trench, one poured water and myrrh over one's person, uttering the formula ' to you powers, whose due and rite it is, is this washing-off ' ^. Now this prevailing feeUng that the association with the dead is repugnant to the higher andjdeathless divinities affected Greek e'schatology and Greek rehgion directly. It sharpened the contrast in the polytheism between the upper and the nether divinities ; and it made the popular Christian conception of heaven impossible for the ordinary Greek ; for, according to the logic of his creed, the spirits of the dead have their own darker divinities, in whose nether region they might find a congenial, perhaps a happy, abode : the sky was no place for the ghost. Only, no orthodoxy and no religious logic could ever prevent the Greek from contradicting himself, as in this very matter we shall see that he did. Also, as the consciousness of the miasma produced by the dead became more intense, the greater would be the fear with which the ghost was regarded ; and such feeling would be a stimulus to actual worship, as the power of the spirit-world was felt to be awful and mysterious in its activity. Where therefore these ancient ceremonies and customs markedly reveal the motive of fear, we cannot indeed at once dogmatically assert the establishment of ghost-worship, but we may suspect that it is not far off. How early is the Greek rule of superstitious morality which Plutarch quotes from the Eudemian treatise ' Concerning the Soul ' ^ : ' It is a sin to belie the dead or to speak evil of them, as the spirits are better and more powerful than we ' ? Eudemos goes on to assert that this commandment was of dateless antiquity. We cannot determine when first the souls were habitually spoken of as 01 KpdtToves, a title which certainly suggests worship ; _thejiogma that the dead are better and more powerful — fSeXrCov^s Kal 'kp€lttov€s — than the living is quoted by Plutarch from Aristotle "^ ; but the first utterance of this reverential feeling » Athenae. p. 409 F from Kleidemos. ^115 A-B. '^ Consol. ad Apoll. 27, p. 115 B. 352 THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS are the famous words of Odysseus to the nurse ^ ; only the poet would probably have alleged the re/xco-ty of the gods rather than the nemesis of the ghost as the reason for the rule. The same emotion is indicated by the Greek custom, which probably belonged to ancient superstition, of keeping silence when passing a grave, lest speech might evoke the ghost to the harm of the passer-by ^ ; the custom is recorded of Eretria by Strabo in connexion with the heroon of Narkissos •=, and the buried ghost hence acquired the popular sobriquet of SiyjyXo?, ' the silent one '. Of most interest for the revelation of the two conflicting emotions of fear and love are the family meals given to \ the dead. We will not yet use the question-begging term * sacrifice ', for the custom of nourishing the departed ghost with gifts of food may long prevail, as we see from the record of Egyptian tomb-ceremonies, without actual worship. But what we wish to know is whether these Hellenic funeral gifts were merely food offered to the dead, or whether they were not sometimes a meal eaten by the survivors with the ghost, whose company was specially invited for the purpose. It is this latter practice that more clearly testifies affection, and it may develop into a mystic religious idea, the concept of sacramental communion with the souls of the saints. It is found, apparently, in Vedic ritual, and the evidence of it in Greece, though scanty, is clear. As we have seen it may have formed part of the ceremonies of the Attic ' Feast of Pots ', but the confusion of the Scholiast's quotations from Theopompos leave us uncertain. In a simple fashion the spirits of the dead might be supposed to be nourished at the tables of the living, as the crumbs that fell were regarded as the property of the ghost '^ ; and the second libation at the banquet was consecrated to ' the heroes ' ". On the third day after the funeral, the relatives gathered together, and partook of the funeral- * Od. 22. 412 (' it is not righteous to vaunt oneself over slain men '). *> Schol. Arist. Av. 1490 ; Hesych. s. v. Kpe'iTToves. ■= p. 404. ^ Diog. Laert. 8. i, § 34 ; cf. Athenae. p. 427 E : the same observance in old Prussia, vide Frazer, G. B. \, p. 351. " Piut. Quaes!. Rom. p. 270 b ; Schol. Plato, Phileb. p. 95 a. THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 353 feast called the TrepibHTrvov in the house of the departed*, and the living and the dead appear to have been here re- garded as feasting together, for an interesting passage in Artemidoros declares exphcitly that the spirit of the defunct was regarded as the host on this occasion ^ : and the same view was probably taken of the feast called the Kadihpa ", the meal to which the kinsmen sat down together on the thirteenth day after the death. In the ritual regulated by the will of Epikteta, inscribed at Thera about 200 B.C., one of our chief documents concerning the Greek worship of the dead ^, we find that the relatives who gathered together in the heroon were allowed to partake of the sacrifices offered to the heroic spirits of the family ^. Of this, which we may regard as a simple sacramental family meal, we have only very few examples elsewhere in literature : it seems that those who brought burnt-sacrifice to Pelops at Olympia or Telephos at Pergamon might in exceptional cases partake of the holy flesh ^ but, as we have seen, this communion with the dead rendered them unfit for com- munion with the higher gods for some time after. We gather also that the Phokians held a sacrificial meal daily round the grave of their ' hero-founder ' at Tronis in Dauhs, giving him the blood while they ate the flesh of the victim s ; this is a unique fashion, and if rightly interpreted is a striking example of the fervent desire to hold continual communion with the founder's spirit. Again, we have Aristotle's authority ^ for the fact that women were for- bidden to partake of the burnt-sacrifices offered to the family of Agamemnon at Tarentum, a taboo which attests the privilege of the men to enjoy the sacrificial meal. These are interesting exceptions to the generally observed * Phot. s. V. ntpiSdiTvov ; Lucian, De Luct. 24 ; Demosth. De Cor. § 288. '' Oneirok. p. 271 (Hercher). " Phot. s. v. '' Ins. Gr. 12. 3. 330 ; cf. Cauer's Delectus, 148 ; Roscher, Lexikon, i, pp. 2530-2532. « Vide also Pfuhl, Das Beiwerk auf den ostgriech. Grabreliefs, Jahrb. 1905, pp. 123-155, who considers that at the commemorat've meals held by the family at the grave the dead was regarded as the host (p. 144). ' Paus. 5. 13. 3. ^ Id., 10. 4. 10. *> p. 840 A. 2460 A a 354 THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS rule that the offerings to the dead could not be partaken of by the living. They are specially called erayiV/xara. The word may originally have been used only of the burnt- offerings, as distinct from the libations, the xo«t» but like kvayiC^iv it comes to refer generally to the offerings consecrated to the dead as distinct from those sacrificed to the gods. Now the natural explanation of the word is ' to put an ayo? into the food ' or possibly ' to put things that are under an ayos into the grave '. ,But an ayos is a taboo and impHes fear and abstention. Therefore, as these offerings to the ghost were commonly called kvay'i(T\xaTa, the idea is conveyed that the food was tabooed against the use of the living ; and certainly the rule was very general in Greece that one did not eat of the offerings of the dead, whether through fear of the wrath of the ghost or through the apprehension lest by entering into communion with the shadowy world one should be brought under its power. One salient example is the rule at Sikuon, where Herakles was worshipped both as god and as hero : the victim laid on the altar and offered to him as a god was eaten by the worshippers, that which was consecrated to him as hero was not ^. The authority for the use of the word kvayicry-a is unfortunately not older than Herodotus ; but it is the oldest distinctive term recorded of all offerings to the dead, whether hero or ancestor or the recently deceased ; and we may take it that it expressed a sense of fear. The same emotion is attested by another name for one of the Attic ghost-festivals, to. Ne/xeVeia ^, where offerings were made to the deceased parents ; the word could only have arisen when the Ne/xeo-t? of the dead was dreaded. V We must then regard these two emotions, fear and affection, as coeval facts underljdng the earliest Greek tendance of the dead, the former stronger probably in the post-Homeric period, and perhaps a stronger stimulus to actual worship. But actual worship is not revealed in these records of * Paus. 2. lo. I. •* Demosth. p. 1031 ; Bekk. Anecd. p. 282, 1. 32 (Cults, 2, p. 594). THE CULTS OF ANCESTORS 355 the rites of ancestral tendance that we have so far been con- sidering in this section : in the old Attic Anthesteria, the living did not pray to the dead, as far as the records tell us. Direct evidence reaches us not earlier than the sixth century. But we have found reasons compelling us to date at least some hero-cults back to a remotely early period. And we may believe that the worship of certain ancestral or family spirits is no less ancient. The clearest evidence is perhaps afforded by the Athenian cult of the TpLToirdTopes. Their name clearly reveals them as ' fathers of the third degree back ', and thus bears the stamp of primitiveness upon it, for the ' third degree ' was an early expression of an indefinite remoteness of ancestral affinity ^. Inscriptions suggest that each Attic phratry, kinship being in each the nominal bond of association, sacrificed to their own Trito- patores, as a vague group of fathers of the kindred '' ; and we are told that the Athenians prayed to them at the marriage ceremonies for the gift of children ", just as Elect ra in the Choephoroi vows to the spirit of Agamemnon that she will bring him libations from her inheritance on the occasion of her marriage ^. Another mark of great antiquity in the conception of these figures is that the Attic Trito- patores had time to develop by the classic period into spirits of the wind "", a religious equation natural to early animism but not found clearly elsewhere in Greece ^ Another proof of the great antiquity of at least the exceptional cult of ancestors would be afforded, if the hypothesis were proved that I have offered in explanation of the maintenance of perpetual fires in the city-halls or temples of the Greek States ^ : the rite descends from the days of monarchy, when the king's hearth-fire was the ^ Cf. Soph. O. T. 1062 ovS' eav Tpirrjs tyuj firjTpbs shortly after the great event 2*2 ; and these were maintained down to the age of Plutarch, who has left us a glowing description of the beautiful commemorative service whereby a dying Hellas expressed its remembrance of its glorious past. A solemn banquet was prepared for the dead, prayers were offered, probably for their happiness, to the god of heaven and the god of death ; the archon, putting on a blood- red tunic and girding himself with a sword, pledged the souls of the heroes in a cup of wine with the words ' I drink to the men who died for the liberty of Greece '. And we may be sure that this was more than mere commemoration, for Thucydides speaks of the yearly a-napxai and Plutarch of the religious ritual of washing and anointing the tombstones. HISTORIC PERIOD 363 Our record of the worship of the heroes of Marathon ^^i is w later by chance, but it is most Hkely that it was instituted already in the fifth century, as Thucydides alludes to the exceptional rites of their burial. Two of the bravest Spartans who fell at Thermopulai were honoured with a temple at Sparta, and as it was specially associated with their names, Alpheios and Maron ^*^, it is not likely to have been conse- crated long after the event. We have the valuable testimony of Thucydides to the public cult of Brasidas at Amphipolis^^, where the citizens revered him as their second founder, abolishing for this purpose the religious monuments of the Athenian oekist Hagnon. Similar in motive to the above- mentioned cults was that of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the tyrannicides at Athens '•^^''. Our earhest authority is Demosthenes in the fourth century, and the view is sometimes expressed that the public institution of the posthumous worship of historic personages was impossible in the Athens oFlhe fifth century^. This opinion is against probability; for there is no reason for regarding the Athenians as less grateful or less superstitious or in this respect more enlight- ened than the rest of the Greeks. The Marathonian hero- cult had probably arisen by the time of Thucydides ; nor" need the tyrannicides have waited till the fourth century for their billet of divinity. Twice in the earlier period had statues been consecrated to them, and from its ancient reHgious association the statue might always prove an incentive to cult. But the clearest proof would be the famous skolion in their honour, a work mainly at least of the fifth century, if we may regard its reference to the glorious immortality of Harmodios in the isles of the blest as suggested by the contemporary worship that he was enjoying. Such honours for great public services may well have had a certain social value as a stimulus to effort and sacrifice ; for their appeal to the vanity of the Hellene, whatever was his actual faith in these matters, must have been strongly felt. It is interesting also to note that the great names of ^ e.g. Deneke in Roscher's Lexikon, i, p. 2543. 364 CULTS OF REAL PERSONS IN THE Hellenic literature begin already in the fifth century to appear in the galaxy of the heroized dead. The rehgious honours paid to the tombs of Hesiod at the Boeotian Orchomenos 282 and Anaxagoras at Lampsakos ^49 appear to have been instituted not later than this age ; and we have at least vague indications that the striking ritual- regulations at Delphoi in honour of Pindar ^o^, to whom the oracular mandate of the Pythoness awarded an equal share with the god in the a-napxai offerings and whose spirit the voice of the priest invoked by name ' to come to the banquet of the god', came into vogue not long after his decease =*. The only other famous name of hterature whom we may beheve to have received a similar distinction in this century is that of Sophokles^ee, We are told on the respectable authority of Istros that the Athenians decreed a yearly sacrifice to him ' on account of his virtue '. How soon after his death this was ordained is not certain. And it may have been that the heroic status was at first awarded him not as the great tragedian but as the apostle of a new cult ; for it was he who was mainly instrumental in introducing the worship of Asklepios into Athens from Epidauros in the latter years of his life ''. We have epigraphical evidence of the existence of a private Biacros or rehgious brotherhood in the fourth century who were devoted to the worship of Asklepios, Amunos, a hero-doctor in his train, and Dexion " : and we are certain that Dexion was no other than the poet Sophokles, 'the host ' of Asklepios^. We have here, then, ^ There is a similar ritual-practice recorded of the Argives, who invited the spirit of Homer to the sacrifices of Apollo, R. 304, but the date of its institution is uncertain. *• Vide supra, p. 259. ^^ Ath. Mitth. 1896, pp. 295, 299. '' Heinreich in Antike Heilnngsivunder would explain this 'Dexion' as a h6ro-physician who ' heals with the hand ' and compares x«'/'07''»' Vide the fragment of Philippides the comedian quoted by Plutarch, Vit. Demet. 12 ; Plutarch himself beheved that the Athenians were punished for their impiety. HISTORIC PERIOD 369 Byzantine Greeks corrosive of the sense of public duty, as is illustrated by the story of the Saracenic capture of Thessalonike in A. d. 904, a disaster which was mainly due to the indolent and besotted trust of the inhabitants in St. Demetrius. There is nothing hke this to record of earlier Greece. The hero-cult may have often served rather as a stimulus ; we hear of the Locrians of Italy leaving always a vacant place in the phalanx for Aias Oileus ; and the presence of the Aiakidai was an encouragement at Salamis. Nor do the manifold records endorse the dogma formulated by Babrius ^ that the gods alone give good things, the heroes only evil. There are, of course, certain stories of the ' wrath ' of the dead, who might cause dearth and disaster in return for injury ^. In one of Lucian's Dialogues a doctor who had a private cult of the great Hippokrates ^89 complains that the spirit of the great savant made the house uninhabitable, upsetting the furniture, the medical books, and appliances until he was appeased. But the earlier Greek was on the whole healthy-minded. The saga-hero of the tribe, or the ancestral or family hero of the community or household, was deemed to help his people in war, sickness, or even in the matter of crops. In the evolution of these cults we see at work the social instinct of Greek rehgion ; the hero, having been a man, sympathizes with his fellow- men ; just as the solitary and ascetic saint of Christian legend becomes socially useful after his death ''. It is noteworthy that even the heroized athlete atoned for his life by serving after death as divine healer of disease ; for owing doubtless to the practice of incubation on the grave the healing-art becomes specially the hero's function ; the personage known vaguely as the ijpm larpos of Attica doubtless had compeers in many other regions. The demonology that clouded the intellect of later Greece, and to some extent penetrated its ethical speculation, is not known to have been evolved from hero-cult. * Fab. 63. '' Odysseus' sailor Polites, R. 92, who was buried at Temesa, was a thoroughly bad daimon, who at last was expelled by the first-rate athlete Euthumos. " Cf. Wundt, Volkerpsychologie, 2. 3, p. 493. 2460 B b 370 CULTS OF REAL PERSONS IN THE As regards the relation of these hero-spirits to the higher divinities,, the vagueness of Hellenic theology prevents us expecting any dogmatic precision : for much of the popular polytheism remained unsystematized. There was no prevail- ing dogma that the soul of the great departed could only attain this exalted status by the direct decree of God, though here and there the possibility of this view is suggested, and those who consulted the Delphic oracle in this matter were appealing to the highest divine Court. Had such consulta- tion been general and necessary, the Pythian shrine would have exercised the same powers in this department as Catholic Christendom has assigned to the Pope. But the spirit of the Greek States resisted any such centralization of authority ; and they appear to have believed themselves qualified to heroize or apotheosize the livingjor dead on their own account, without considering how far this might disturb the divine Kosmos^^. The hero-cult once instituted, the Greek religious consciousness was at least able to keep clear the distinction between the hero and the deity : the forms of worship were different, at least as between the heroic ritual and that of the Olympians ; and the hero was a sub- ordinate personage, though immortal, with local and limited power. We have even examples of deliberate uncanoniza- tion, as when the Amphipolitans decided to suspend the worship of Hagnon to make room for Brasidas : and Kleis- thenes of Sikuon considered himself able to expel the ancestral hero Adrastos, though his conscience moved him to consult the Delphic oracle, whence he received a powerful rebuke. But for the clear regularization of the position of the hero to the deity, there was no accepted dogma or consistent system : often indeed the former was closely associated with the latter in worship, as Theseus with Poseidon at Athens, Ikarios and Erigone with Dionysos at Ikaria, Skephros with Apollo and Artemis at Tegea ; the association " Also the private religious societies claimed the same power (e.g. Ath. Mitth. g. 291 (ppovriaai Se roiis opyewvas onaji cuprjpcoaO^ Aiovvaios : second century B.C.). HISTORIC PERIOD 371 was inevitable when the hero had been the priest or apostle of the divinity — we have, for instance, the troup of heroic physicians in the train of Asklepios — or when the heroic grave happened to be within the precincts of a temple. In such cases, we may imagine, though we have no clear statement about the point, that the heroes might play the role of mediators and intercessors with the higher power, thus fulfilhng part of the function of the mediaeval saint in Christian theology. But most frequently we have no clue by which we might assign a definite place to the hero in the hierarchy of divine powers : he appears often as an isolated fact, to be reckoned with in a particular locality or society, counting for something in the popular belief — ^how much, we usually cannot estimate. The subject still suggests one or two other questions of interest for eschatologic inquiry. How did the people generally conceive of their heroes, in respect of nature and substance ? We speak in this connexion of the worship of the ghost or the ancestral spirit ; but these terms in their modern sense do not express the popular conception of early or later Hellenism. For the philosopher soul and spirit were non-material conceptions, but we know that it needs a long process of mental development before the immaterial concept of the soul or even of the divinity can penetrate the popular mind. And the average idea of the heroized dead in Greece seems to have been more materialistic than spiritual. The evil sailor-demon of Temesa ^^ is carnally robust, and the athlete Euthumos gives him a thoroughly corporeal thrash- ing, just as an Icelandic hero treats a troublesome ghost in one of the sagas. Echetlaios fights at Marathon with a plough- share 2^", and Aias Oileus fought as a hoplite in the Locrian ranks. In this respect, then, the hero-cults of Greece in no way reflect the Homeric view of the dead as mere frail and shadowy wraiths. Nor again do they agree with the Homeric conception of the abode of the dead, with his picture of Hades or Elysium, or with the Hesiodic dream of the Happy Isles. The later poets following the Homeric convention might speak of the heroic personage as in those far-off B b 2 372 CULTS OF REAL PERSONS fortunate abodes ; but the people who worshipped him hoped and beheved that he was present among them, near or beneath his grave mound or his ' eschara ', through which they were pouring down the offerings. It was easier to beHeve this if they had his tomb in their land, or his bones or some relic ; but popular faith can overleap such limita- tions and is not bound to give a consistent account of itself. The hero, being a robust bodily personage, though unseen, can travel, can gallop up on a horse to the place where he is wanted ; and much of the popular ritual aims at persuading him or compelling him to come to the place of the worshipper. Pindar was buried at Thebes, but was annually invited to the Apolline festivals at Delphoi : it was not unusual to proclaim aloud the heroic name or names before the sacri- fice ; hence probably arose the term ovofxaTa, ' the ceremony of names', 'the heroic roll-call', for the first day of Herakles' festival at Sikuon =*. The Locrians knew that their tribal hero Aias Oileus had died at sea, and if we can trust Tzetzes on Lukophron they expressed this belief and their affection by a ritual unique in Greece and recalling vividly the Scandinavian viking-funeral ^ ; yet wherever there are Locrians, he can fight in their ranks if he will. All this is very un-Homeric, nor was it worked out into any consistent eschatologic system : confusion in the popular thought is in fact a test of genuineness. * Paus. 2. lo. I (Deneke in Roscher, i. 2515 suggests this). A curious parallel may be quoted from a report on the Tlingit people of Alaska : tobacco was placed on a small dish which was held over the fire while one of the ofiiciators called out many names of the clansmen who had passed away, ' brave men and noble men who were worthy of being remembered ', Museum Joiirn. Philadelphia, June 1917, p. 107. ^ Vide supra, p. 294. CHAPTER XIV INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY : THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM We can now leave this side of the whole subject, and collect what we can gather of general interest concerning the eschatologic beliefs and hopes or fears of the ordinary Hellene, who could not look to receive posthumous divine honours from his fellow-men. There were other ways whereby he might hope to attain to glorified existence after death^ if he were one of those — probably a minority in the earlier period— who troubled their minds in the matter. He could initiate himself into one or more of the many mysteries of Greece, most of which had probably begun from tHe sixth or fifth century onwards to offer some eschatologic promise to the initiate. As early as the seventh century the Eleusinian Demeter proclaimed "" ' happy is he who has seen these mysteries ; he who hath had no share in them hath a worse destiny after death in the world below '. I have considered elsewhere ^ at some length the main Eleusinian problems and the question by what ritual the mysteries guaranteed or effected their promise of salvation. One is able to assign only a somewhat subordinate place in this religion to the mystic idea of sacramental communion ; which, however, played some part at Eleusis and may have been more prominent in the Samothracian initiation. An inscription that refers to the latter informs us that the priest ' broke the cake and poured out the cup for the mystae ' " : but we cannot affirm that any mystic idea of transubstantia- tion attached to this ritual, or that the votary was supposed, by participating in the sacrament, to become of one sub- stance with the divinity. And all we know of the similar "" Horn. H. Dem. 480. ^ Cults, 3, pp. 126-198. ^ Arch. Epig. Mitth. 1882, p. 8. no. 14. 374 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY Eleusinian rite was that the catechumen drank the KVKedv, the cup containing the hquid compounded of cereals that the goddess herself had drunk in her sorrow when she first broke her fast. We may call this drinking sacramental in the less mystic sense, as the worshipper drank with the goddess and shared her sorrow ; but the fullest communion was obtained at Eleusis, not so much by the eating of sacred food or the drinking sacred drink, but by the vision of certain holy things. After this solemn k-noTiTiia, which was the peculiar means of grace, the initiate felt himself to stand in an intimate privileged relation with the Mother and the Daughter, so that they would be sure to extend to him their divine favour when he entered their domain after death. But there is no hint or probability that he believed himself to be transubstantiated by fusion of his mortal substance with their divinity. The Eleusinian faith main- tained that the mortal could secure a happy immortaUty by entering into the close contact during life with the powers of death, not that the mortal could become himself a god. More transcendental was the mystic service of the Orphic- Bacchic sects, which in equal degree with the Eleusinia but by a different vehicle conveyed the promise of a blessed immortality. Even before the institution and diffusion of the Orphic brotherhoods in Greece, the oldest form of the Dionysos religion contained the pregnant concept of the union of the mortal with the divinity, inheriting this, we may well beheve, as a tradition from the Thrako - Phrygian religion, to which the Hellenic Dionysos ultimately belonged. In the Greek nomenclature of the Bacchic ritual, the inspired male votary was himself BaKxo?, the inspired female Bokx^ : the poetic phrase quoted by Plato, * many bear the narthex but few are real Bacchoi', shows the prevalence of the idea that those who had rehgious genius might attain through ecstasy real communion with the god. Also this divinity was in his aboriginal home and always in his later career a lord of souls, a great deity of the land of the dead ; he himself also periodically suffered death and enjoyed a THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 375 periodic resurrection ; and in this sacred drama the ' mystes ' played a mystic part, partaking of the sacred body of the dismembered deity and assisting at his resurrection : in such ritual there were probably latent aboriginally the germs of the idea that the ecstatic worshipper could, like his god, rise again, and as he had temporarily been BaKxos in this life could rise again as Bclk^os, becoming himself after death divine through the union of his substance with the god "". But it was only in the Orphic ' thiasoi ', not in the public cults of Dionysos, that eschatologic ideas become powerfully developed and worked into a systematic faith. This has been revealed to us by the discovery in our generation of the gold tablets found in graves of South Italy and Crete, which are inscribed with the mutilated fragments of what is evidently a ritual hymn composed for Orphic sectaries as early as the fifth century B.C., and the discovery is of priceless importance for the history of eschatologic mysticism. The tablets are well known to students '', and have been discussed and appreciated in various commentaries and accounts ; and it is only needful here to cull the ideas that are of interest for the general religion of our subject. The writing down of formulae from a sacred book, the placing of them near the hand of the dead in the tomb, so that they may serve as amulets for the saving of his soul, all this savours of magic and reminds us of the magical tomb-rites of Egypt. But the ideas expressed in the formulae are on the higher plane of religious imagination. Having avoided the dangers of error on the road, the soul addresses the divine guardians of the Lake of Memory in terms that proclaim his kinship with God : ' I am the son of earth and starry heaven, and by birth I come from God : ye know this well yourselves.' We have here the claim to immortahty based on the presence of the divine element in man's soul ; and the origin of man in this Orphic Confessional is the same as that which Hesiod attributes to the Gods, It is not clear that there is any allusion intended here to the Orphic myth * Vide Cults, 5, pp. 107-108, 150-151, 161-172. '' Vide Miss Harrison's Prolegomena, pp. 660-674. 376 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY of the origin of man from the ashes of the Titans who, having devoured Dionysos, transmit to man an imperishable seed of godhead. But of this at least we can be sure that as that myth itself arose from a misunderstood ritual of the devouring of the god by his worshippers, so this Orphic faith in the divinity of man had been engendered and sustained by the mystic sacrament of the Orphic societies, by means of which man and god became of one flesh. But the soul of K the initiated even after death must perform further ritual to attain a blessed immortality. He must drink of the cold waters of Memory, which the guardians will give him because he makes the mystic claim, and appeals to them with the moving words, ' I am parched with thirst and perishing ; give me quickly to drink of the cold water from the lake of Memory ' : whereupon his request is granted and he becomes ' one of the blessed " heroes " ' — the word has lost now any significance of cult. This drinking is not so clearly a sacramental act as a magical ; we find the same ritual in the Graeco-Egyptian Osiris-rites ; a Greek inscrip- tion from Alexandria contains the prayer ' May Osiris give I thee to drink of the cold water ' ''. The Orphic formula reveals the conception that Memory, or the preservation of personal identity, is a necessary condition of a blessed immortality, and implies also the doctrine that the impure and uninitiated soul passed into Lethe, or self-unconscious- ness ; but this latter tenet could hardly have been worked out consistently with the doctrine of rewards and punish- I jnents that is often imputed to Orphism. In the tablet from Petelia just considered, the blessed soul is welcomed among the company of the heroes ; in another, from Subaris, we have words that claim for it a stiU higher status : ' All hail, thou that hast suffered in death a change that thou hast never suffered before- : from man thou becamest God ' : immediately follows a mystic formula that no one has satisfactorily explained : ' thou, a kid, fell into milk '. The newly-born or re-born mystes is called a kid, just as Dionysos himself was called 'E/n'^tos, and in the incarnation of a kid •^ Rev. Arch. 1887, p. 201. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 377 was at times devoured sacramentally by his votaries, who by the logic of this ritual will themselves become kids. Various suggestions have been offered by various scholars to explain the whole formula, but none are altogether con- vincing : but at least we may be sure that it alludes to the mystic union of the votary and the god whose form was often theriomorphic ; and, again, we have an example here of that to which I have elsewhere called attention ^, the bias of mystic symbolism towards theriomorphism. Further, we gain from another inscription on the Com- pagno Tablet found near Naples ^ a knowledge of two other cardinal points in Orphic eschatology : {a) the doctrine of purgative punishments whereby the soul is purified — ' I have paid the penalty for unrighteous deeds ' is the confession of the purified soid ; (6) the doctrine of reincarnation through a cycle of existences at the close of which the soul may find deliverance and rest — ' I have fled forth from the wheel of bitter and sorrowful existence'. A slightly altered version of the same formula is preserved by Proclus' Commentary on the Timaeus "", ' To be released from the wheel and to gain respite from evil ' , This doctrine of a cycle of existences as a weary round from which the soul is at last set free brings the religious philosophy of Orphism at once into comparison with Buddhism. But historical facts are against the supposition that a fifth-century poem could be touched by influences from this religion of India, and the Orphic wheel has a quite different significance from the wheel of Buddhism. There is one other eschatologic feature that these frag- ments of the mystic poem presents : the Orphic paradise is vaguely conceived and constructed on the lines of the old Greek mythology, so far as that it is to the underworld and the powers of the underworld that the soul after death belongs. We should naturally expect this : the chief Orphic god was by origin a god of the underworld, and the sects * Vide Greece and Babylon, pp. 14-16. '' Vide Professor Murray in Miss Harrison's Prolegomena, p. G68. ^ 5- 330- 378 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY practised inhumation rather than cremation. Therefore the few divine names that are found in the hymn belong to chthonian rehgion, Persephone-Despoina, Eubouleus, the Eleusinian Plouton, and Eukles, a name for the underworld god formed on the analogy of Klumenos the ' Famous ' one. We have also the striking line, ' I passed beneath the breast of the Queen-Mistress of the lower world', which is naturally to be interpreted as a poetic-religious expression of the fact of interment. We may believe, in fact, that the Orphics borrowed much from Eleusis, whose mysteries they would have captured if they had been powerful enough. And we may conclude that the idea of the blessed soul mounting into the firmament of heaven and residing in the sky is alien to true Orphism. Finally we should note an important feature in the theory of the future life presented by these fragments ; the post- humous happiness depends on the purity of the soul that demands the waters of bliss ; he bases his claim on this : 'I come from the pure, O pure Queen of the dead'. We may thus formulate, in fact, the Orphic morality on which the posthumous happiness of the soul depended, ' only the pure can be saved ' ; and the purity prescribed was in a great measure ritualistic and pharisaic, the observance of rules of taboo, fasting, and ablutions. But greatly as we are indebted to these fragments for our knowledge of the genuine and early Orphism, their eschato- logic theory and value will become clearer if we study them in the light of a few other passages in classical literature. It is not relevant to our present theme to deal with Orphism as a whole system of thought, but only with its eschatology, which, however, most who have studied the evidence will consider its salient feature and main ohjectif. Of the utter- ances in ancient literature of greatest importance for the present question are certain passages of Plato and Pindar ; the most striking is in the second Olympian ode of Pindar "", where no one can fail to recognize the influences of Orphic theory : ' When men die, the souls of the wicked pay » U. 56-77. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 379 penalty, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus [our upper earth], there is one below that judgeth, delivering the award by stern necessity. But the souls of the good enter upon a restful life, blessed with a sun that shineth night and day, no longer rending the ground or ploughing the sea with toil of hand in niggard livelihood : but those who were oath-abiders and rejoiced in truth have pastures of bliss where no tears are : but the others endure an agony our eyes would turn from. And those who through three lives, both in this world and in that, can stand fast under trial, keeping their soul wholly aloof from unrighteousness, they then fare once for all by the road of God towards the palace of Kronos, where Ocean-airs are wafted round the islands of the blest, and golden flowers gleam, some earth-born hanging from trees of glory, others fostered by the water, with garlands whereof they crown their hands and heads.' With this we should compare the interesting fragment of one of his ' Dirges ', lyric choral poems to be chanted at funerals : * Of those from whom Persephone hath taken atonement for ancient sin, in the ninth year she sendeth back again the souls into the light of the Sun : from these are born glorious kings, men excelling in strength and mighty in wisdom : and for all time hereafter they have the hallowed names of heroes.' In these and in one other passage of the Qprjvoi we see Pindar working on hints from Hesiod and Homer and emerging as the first great master of eschatologic poetry, the first of a small group famous in European literature. But our concern here is with his theory : we discern in the longer passage the doctrine of reincarnation, of a triple life of purgation both in the upper and lower world, and some such dogma with less elaboration is expressed in the dirge. Now the first passage proclaims itself as doctrine known only to those initiated in certain mysteries, ' the words I speak have meaning for the wise', and it is obvious that these are the Orphic-Bacchic. We may discern a reflection of the same ideas in the long fragment of Empedokles' Kadapjxoi, which announces three periods of ten thousand years of transmigration for the erring soul : it contains also 38o INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY the Orphic concept of the soul as an exile from the Gods. The peculiar tenet of a triple reincarnation must have had a certain vogue in Orphic circles, for it reappears in Plato's theory of the soul's career given in the Phaednts ^. Next to Pindar, Plato is our chief authority for this new lore. It is not relevant to attempt here to estimate the exact indebtedness of Plato's theory of the soul to Orphic teaching : liis debt seems to have been great, his gratitude small. There are only two passages in his dialogues that need be quoted : in the Cratylus '' he accepts for the purpose of his fanciful derivation of o-wjua the doctrine which he expUcitly calls Orphic, that the body is the prison-house or grave of the soul, into which the latter is confined as a penalty for sin in some former life. The second passage, which gives us first- hand evidence concerning the earlier period of Orphism, is the well-known description by Adeimantos in the Republic " of certain private mystery-mongers and diviners, ' who knock at the doors of the rich and persuade them that they possess a god-given power to purge away the sins of the individual as well as the sins of his forefathers by means of sacrifices and incantations, with dehghtful accompaniments of festal ritual.' He makes it clear a little later whom he has in mind : ' they parade a mass of books by Mousaios and Orpheus, which form the basis of their ritual, and they persuade not only individuals but whole communities that by means of sacrifices and festal sport they can provide deliverance and purgation from the effect of sins both for the hving and the departed soul as well, processes which they call initiations that free us from the pains of Hades, while dire penalties await those who refuse their com- munion.' We are reminded here of the protest of Luther against the sale of indulgences. With this interesting text we may associate the commen- tary of Olympiodoros on Plato's Phaedo '^, in which the later scholar illustrates the power of the Orphic hierophant to release from the pains of Hell, and quotes from an Orphic " p. 249 A. ^ p. 400 C. <= p. 364 c. "* p. 70 C ; vide Mullach, Frag. Orph. 55. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 381 poem in which the triennial Bacchic orgies are said to have as their object the ' dehverance of our forefathers who have sinned '. We have here the idea of posthumous suffering as a temporary purgation, which is briefly indicated in the Gorgias also ^. These few citations are authoritative enough to enable us to appreciate the eschatologic gospel which Orphism, a new force in Greek religion of the sixth and fifth centuries, laboured to propagate. In the first place, the enthusiastic preaching of any doctrine of salvationism is an epoch-making event in the history of Greek religion. Orphism has many aspects ; but its most salient is its bias towards other-worldliness ^\ its message of salvation based on ritual and certain sacred books which claim the authority of revelation. At once, then, it asserts itself as a new force among a people whose religion claimed no revelation, possessed no sacred books, and was more preoccupied with the needs of this world than of the next. Secondly, Orphism has a philosophic theory which affects its eschatofogy : the body is regarded as evil, as in the Buddhistic philosophy, and the soul suffers from its_imprisonment within it : t^is life is a purgation, and the only "way to avoid the contam ination of the body is_to_ practise extreme and anxious purity. Purity safeguards the divine element within us, which is further maintained by sacrificial communion. The purified soul at once, after leaving the body, enters upon the higher life, but the purgation must continue through a cycle of lives, perhaps^ three ; and the soul that emerges successfully is at last released and henceforth abides perpetually with God, and is itself a god. The soul is here conceived, so far as the conception was possible to the average mind, as immaterial, and there is in this system no resurrection of the body. The ritual wasmamiy magical-religious, but the teaching had its ethical possibilities. We note the pessimistic theory of our ' P- 525 B. ^ It is strange that Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 478, refuses to admit this : it is true that there is no reference to immortaUty in the Bacchai of Euripides ; but that play is not essentially Orphic. 382 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY bodily life, which may derive from a Thracian tradition, and which has played a leading part in Greek philosophy, and has been the basis of more than one world-religion. The reincarnation theory is not known to be Thracian, as Rohde assumes it to be. It is a special but not a peculiar characteristic of Orphism : there are gUmpses of it, as we have noted, half revealed in early Greek religion, and many minds at different stages of culture have evolved or accepted it : and when we discern traces of it in Herakleitos and Empedokles, we ought not to conclude at once that they are indebted for it to Orphic sources. ^ Of special interest is the doctrine of purgatory ; for though this is found even in savage eschatology "" and can be discerned in the Zend-Avesta, yet in no other Mediter- ranean religion save Orphism is it made the corner-stone of an eschatologic doctrine. It was evidently a central theme of the Orphic books, and Vergil, through his sixth Aeneid, imprinted it on the minds of the later ages ; and when we find it mysteriously reappearing as part of the orthodox doctrine of the early Christian Church we may conclude with certainty that this was one of the legacies bequeathed to it by the older Graeco-Thracian religion which in many essentials so nearly resembled its own '\ Also, we detect in the Orphic service the idea, prominent in the liturgy of Catholicism, that the souls of the departed can be released from penance by ritual performed by the living. Further, it seems clear that some form of belief in eternal damnation was present, though undefined, in Orphism. In Pindar's glowing picture the great sinners appear to have no pprospect of release, and we mark Plato's phrase *" : ' Dire ' penalties await the uninitiate'. But it is doubtful if the Orphic condemnation involved eternal torture and pain : * e. g. in the Malay Peninsula the belief is recorded ' the good souls bathe first in a boiling lake and then go to Paradise ', Arch. f. Religionswiss. 1906. p. 43. ^ We can discern a Greek-Orphic colouring in certain passages of Christian eschatologic literature, e. g . in ' the Apokalypse of Peter ', Harnack, Texte u. Untersuch. 9, p. 17 (1893). '^ Rep. p. 364 c. ♦ THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 383 we may find a few utterances such as Pindar's that imply it ; but the evidence of the tablets would seem to suggest that Lethe, or unconsciousness, the negation of personal indi- viduality, was the future lot of the condemned or the unprivi- leged : and Plutarch, who was himself a member of a Bacchic mystic fraternity, repudiates the idea of eternal punishment, and regards ' ignorance ', ' unconsciousness ', and ' annihilation ', ayvoia, abo^ia, cKftavKTixos, as terms that more fittingly describe the posthumous doom of the evil liver "". It is likely enough that we should not find con- sistency in all its details if the Orphic eschatology was presented us in full. The essential tenet of mysticism, the identity of the mortal with the divine, is discerned in the Orphic texts, but apparently not developed with such insistent enthusiasm as in Poimandres and the Hermetic literature of Egypt, with its frequently recurring formula, ' I am thou and thou art I, OGod'. Another trait in Orphism which marks its affinity with other religions of eschatological promise is its dogma and ritual-enactment of the death of the god. We find this prominent also in the Egyptian Osiris-mystery, which was regarded by the Greek theosophists and writers on rehgion as closely akin to the Orphic, and also in the Phrygian service of Attis and Sabazios. This latter mystery, which gained a certain vogue from the fifth century onwards, and later attracted many votaries in the Graeco-Roman world, presented the death of Attis and his resurrection as the central passion-scene of a spring-festival, which began with fasting and sorrow and closed with the Hilaria, the rejoicing of the saved, who saw in the story of the god the counterpart to the drama of the human soul. One last question arises that is of special interest for the student of ethics, whether the Orphic scheme of salvation made any moral demand. If Plato were our sole authority, we should be inchned to deny that it did so, and to suppose " ii^o K (Dejaienter vivendo). 384 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY that its means of grace were thaumaturgic and that its purification was ritualistic and pharisaic merely. This is evidently Plato's conviction, but whether based on full knowledge or not is open to question. He at least must have had grounds for the serious charge he brings against them of immoral Black-magic. Only, we should bear in mind that every mystic religion attracts its parasites and charlatans. And Pindar's account of Orphic eschatology certainly provides it with a moral basis ; but we are not sure how much Pindar has added of his own to give value and depth to his exegesis. A line in the Frogs of Aristo- phanes^, ' Orpheus taught us initiations and to refrain from bloodshed', might suggest that Orpheus preached the doctrine of peace and mercy upon earth ; and surely they mean at least a little more than Rohde would discover in them, merely an allusion to the abstinence from animal food. Aristophanes was probably thinking of the Kadapixoi, the purifications, that were the chief stock-in-trade of the Orphic rekea-Tai ; and these were frequently applied to the stain of bloodshed, public or private. He may naturally, then, have represented Orpheus as revealing to us the sinfulness of murder. But we may believe that the Orphic ritual-books only laid stress on the necessity of purification from blood, a widely different matter. In fact, Orphic morality was summed up in the commandment of purity. And this is not necessarily an ethical injunction at all. The angry Theseus in the Hippolutos of Euripides taunts his son with the pharisaic hypocrisy of his Orphic holiness, his ritualistic sanctimoniousness and the inward uncleanness of his soul. This is what the enemies of Orphism might say. But even the ardent enthusiast of this religion, who in The Cretans of Euripides proclaims the joys of the m^^steries of Zagreus and of the pure life, explains this purity merely as an affair of wearing white raiment, avoiding the taint of child-birth, death, and animal food. And the prescriptions of purity attributed to Pythagoras, the most Orphic of Greek * 1. 972 ; of which we have an echo in the lines of Horace, ' silvestres homines . . . caedibus et victu foedo deterruit Orpheus ', Ars Poet. 391. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 385 philosophers, are merely ritualistic and non-moral *. It is likely enough, however, that the idea of purity came to assume in Orphic circles the ethical and spiritual colour which at an early period it had acquired in the general thought of Hellas. And M. Reinach has tried to trace back to Orphism certain rules against sexual impurity and wrong that neither ordinary Greek morality nor the teaching of the philosophers insisted on, but which are of importance for the moral life of society and the individual ^. His exposition is not altogether convincing except on one point. The Orphic theorists stood almost alone in the Greek world in protesting against suicide S hereby anticipating Christianity. And their theory concerning the soul compelled them to this protest ; for the body being the prison-house of the soul and its place of penance, the man who tried to escape before God released him was a fugitive prisoner. We know the value and the limitations of a moral ideal based on the concept of personal purity. Greek religion and society had already gained all that it was likely to gain from this source ; and the gospel of Orphism, which intensified the concept and endeavoured to construct a system of life upon it, is not proved to have been a gain. We are told that the Samothracian mysteries made men better and juster ; and we may guess that the Eleusinian initiation had usually some moral influence for good. We are told nothing concerning the Orphic ; only we note that Pindar assumes that a man who knows the lore of Orphism concerning the future world will lead a good life in this. But, in fact, the mystic Salva- tionist morality was never satisfying to the highest ethic of Greece. And whatever moral demand conditioned the eschatological promise of Orphism was anti-social in its tendency ; and as this gospel laid stress solely on the salvation of the individual soul through purity and asceticism it appears in the sixth century as a phenomenon of religious ^ Diog. Laert. 8. i, § 33. '' Arch. f. Religionswiss. 1906 {th.e ^laioQavaT 01 KoXaupoi.). " The Orphic teacher Philolaos as early as the fifth century ; vide Plat. Phaed. 61 D. 2460 C C 386 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY individualism, the counterpart of the philosophic indi- vidualism that was to follow. The question now presents itself how far the Orphic movement prevailed in Greek society generally. The full and exact answer would demand a critical and penetrating examination of much of the higher literature, many of the monuments, and especially of the grave -inscriptions of the Greek and Graeco-Roman world : and it would embrace more than our present subject of eschatology. Nor could I attempt in a short general statement to trace the various forms of doctrine concerning the soul and its destiny in the various systems of Greek philosophy or the Graeco-Egyptian hermetic literature, so as to estimate the influence of Orphic beliefs on general Greek speculation. Fortunately the theme has been well and clearly handled by Rohde and other scholars. The remainder of this chapter will therefore be devoted to the consideration of the ordinary beliefs of the average man, and of the popular eschatology prevalent from the fifth century onwards in Greek society. And this line of inquiry is in my opinion the most difficult of all ; for the evidence is insufficient and self-contradictory. It is also growing under our hand, as more and more grave-inscrip- tions are being discovered every year, so that no final conclusion is at present possible. We must carefully estimate the value of our sources. Greek philosophic speculation is by no means a trustworthy witness, to speak for the average mind and average faith, although, owing to the free and easy diffusion of intellectual ideas in the best Greek societies, the influence of the philosopher was more likely to reach the people than has often been the case in other periods and in other communities. A more authentic spokesman was no doubt the poet, though he, too, aspiring to be a teacher, often ceases to be representative of the mass. We may assume that the sentiments of the people are to be found most articulate and most faithfully expressed in the utter- ances of the orator, the artist, and the handicraftsman ; and the voice of the community speaks in the public decrees, the THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 387 voice of the private and average individual in the grave- inscriptions. But on any particular point any one of these sources may supply evidence of value. We may first ask what evidence we have as to the number and diffusion of these Orphic societies, of which we have been endeavouring to gather the leading points of doctrine. The evidence of Plato, Pindar, and Aristophanes suggests that they were beginning to be prominent in Attica and in the western Greek world, whence Pindar may have drawn his inspiration, in the fifth and fourth centuries : their earliest apostles, among whom we may mention Onomakritos and Epimenides of Crete, had been active in the sixth century, the latter two at Athens. We can find no trace of their influence in the earlier age, for though Ibukos of Rhegium mentions Orpheus, the early lyric period of literature betrays no hint of the doctrine. Its strength in the western world of Magna Graecia was increasing towards the end of the sixth century, where it received a powerful stimulus from the extraordinary personality of Pythagoras, the philosophic counterpart of Orpheus himself. He framed a system of life that may be called Orphic in respect of its cathartic code and its soul-theory ; but it had no discover- able connexion with Dionysos. And long after the over- throw of the Pythagorean sects this region continued to be a favourable soil for Orphism, as is proved by the wide diffusion of that mystic hymn buried with the dead, and by the ' Apulian ' vases that contain scenes of the Orphic ' Inferno ', in which the blessed may be seen in the society of the deities and heroes ^. Concerning its continued career in Athens in the fourth century, the writer of the first oration against Aristogeiton— if not Demosthenes, some other leading orator of this period —is a weightier witness ; he speaks most reverentially of Orpheus ' who has instituted for us the most holy mysteries (and who declares that) Justice is seated by the throne of God watching all the actions of mankind ' "". It is somewhat surprising that a popular orator should thus address an ^ Vide Wiener Vorlegebldtter, Ser. E, Taf. 1-7. '' § 11. CC2 388 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY Athenian law-court as if all the audience were at one with him in their reverence for Orpheus and fully cognizant of the Orphic judgement to which his words seem clearly to allude. As evidence for the succeeding ages we have the various reproductions of the mystic hymn, one ^ which is found in the tomb of a Roman lady, and the nurnb&j^-^rf inscriptions and other memorials of private Bacchic societies in various parts of the Mediterranean, and notably in Italy, where they aroused the fear of Rome in the second century. We must not, indeed, assume that all these Bacchic thiasoi followed the Orphic rule of life : some may have been stricter than others in this respect ; but probably all adopted the main principles of Orphic eschatology. We know that the ordinary thiasoi of votaries of a special cult were in part burial-societies organized to provide special rites for the funeral of each member. It is probable that they attempted to secure the salvation of the votary's soul by commenda- tion of it to the deity of the thiasos ; and that thus is to be explained the anxiety of the Pythagoreans concerning the burial of one of their members in a narrative that Plutarch gives us ^. We may be sure that this was one of the objects of the Bacchic brotherhood. An interesting inscription recently found at Rome from a Bacchic burying-ground, ' it is not lawful for any save a member of the Bacchic community to lie here ', reveals the same feeling as has led to the Christian consecration of burial-places and to the jealous rule of exclusion of other sectaries. From the latter days of Pagan society we have sufficient evidence of the popularity of the Orphic-Bacchic mystery : Strabo, for instance, Pausanias, Plutarch refer to it as a familiar feature of contemporary religion ; Plutarch was himself among the initiated, and has left us valuable testi- mony concerning the efficacy of the Bacchic religion in regard to its promise of salvation : in his letter of consolation to his wife ^ on the loss of their infant daughter he consoles » De Gen. Socr. i6. p. 585 E, F. ^ pp. 611 E-612 A. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 389 her with the hopes of the future life, which as members of a Dionysiac brotherhood they had both been taught to cherish, and with the Orphic view that the soul of their dear one, having abided in her body for so short a period, had had less chance of contracting the stains of our mortality and would therefore depart purer to a higher existence. It is necessary to note the evidence of the long and late duration of the Orphic system in order to deal critically with the question of its relations to Christianity. Its influences probably travelled far beyond the actual circle of the initiated. At least there are certain facts in the religious history from the fifth century onwards that may suggest to us that the public imagination had to some extent been permeated and captured by certain ideas issuing from Orphic centres. Only, before assuming the Orphic origins of this or that phenomenon in the outside religious world, we should bear in mind the widespread influence of the Eleusinian mysteries, which though independent of Orphism had many affinities with it : also the vast increase from the fourth century onwards of private mystic societies and orgiastic initiations, devoted to the alien divinities of Anatolia and Egypt, which, as Diodorus Siculus ^ assures us, were all preoccupied with ' Salvationism ', and which bore for the most part a close family likeness to each other and to the special sect that has been occupying us. We should expect the general result of all these religious impulses to have been to familiarize the average mind with a more anxious anticipation or a more hopeful and exalted con- ception of the ultimate destiny of the soul. We now must scrutinize the evidence to see whether it clearly reveals this effect, and first the literary evidence. One may make, as Stobaeus made '\ a large selection of passages from the higher literature of the later periods that reveal the different and conflicting views taken on this subject by different writers and by different schools. But only a few of them can be trusted to express the average popular belief of a certain epoch : and it is only this that is the present * 8, Frag. 12. '' Vol. 4, p. 107 (Meineke). 390 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY concern. It is of some significance that already in the fifth century we find the term ixaKdinoi, ' the blessed ones ', used generally of the departed, by Aristophanes ; in Aeschylus it is applied only to exceptional and super-eminent souls, such as the /xaKapiVa? la-obatixMv /3ao-tXevs^, the worshipped spirit of the great Darius ; but Aristophanes speaks of it as a general appellative of the dead, and so we find it used in Menander and frequently in the later writers. The word is obviously not merely a euphemism, but seems to imply genuine belief in a happier world beyond the tomb. In the Apology of Plato Socrates discusses with the jury the ordinary views held about the after-life, and here at least we should think that Plato was giving expression to the average popular sentiment. It is to be noted that Socrates puts, the question before the jury at first as an open one : death either means annihilation of the conscious self or not : in the first case it may be even desirable, being like a dreamless sleep ; or if there is life after death, according to the popular mythology concerning Hades, it is a far preferable life to this, ' if indeed the popular report about it is true ', This confirms the evidence of the phrase jj-aKapioi. We may also quote one or two citations to show that the idea of a moral judgement in the next world, which we find occasionally in the great fifth-century poets, was at times accepted by the average man in the fourth century. At the beginning of Plato's Republic, Kephalos, who represents the plain man of virtuous life, speaks as if the ordinary person in full health despised the talk about posthumous retribution and the terrors of the lower world, but when he was approach- ing his end began to take them seriously. This suggests the situation in the Axiochos, where Socrates is summoned to comfort an old acquaintance who lies dying and who, having been healthy-minded all his life, is now terrified at the thought of death. Only, here it is not the fear of punishment that torments him, but merely the horror of dissolution. This pseudo-Platonic dialogue would in other respects be more instructive for our present purpose if we could * Pers. 633. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 391 determine its date, which must be placed much later than the fourth century ='. The vision of judgement that it contains, which is solemnly introduced as a Persian or Hyperborean mystery, is puerile trash, made up partly from Homer, partly from Pindar : there are only two points of interest in it : the belief is strongly asserted that the higher happiness is reserved for those who have been initiated, but no attempt is made to reconcile this with the moral theory of rewards and punishments ; secondly, Axiochos is reassured about his own future state on the ground that he is a yerw/rrj? T(av dfoiv, one of the divine family, ' a kinsman of the gods '. As Rohde^ rightly insists against Wilamowitz, this must mean more than that Axiochos was one of the Eumolpidai, who happened to trace their clan back to Poseidon ; but Rohde's explanation is not satisfactory, explaining the phrase in reference to the Eleusinian mysteries, in the records of which, however, we find no hint of the doctrine of the kinship of God and man. But we have found this a promi- nent feature of the Orphic gospel ; and we may suspect that the author of the Axiochos deliberately chose the phrase to give an Orphic tone to his revelation. The treatise then may claim a certain value as evidence of the diffusion of Orphic ideas, but very little as a testimony of ordinary popular belief. A more authentic and more important witness for our purpose is the author of the first speech against Aristogeiton ""j who addresses a fourth-century Attic audience in these strange words : ' This man consorts with cursing, evil- speaking, envy, faction, and strife — in fact, with such things as our painters are wont to paint as accompaniments of the guilty in hell.' And again he tells us ' the defendant is one who cannot expect to obtain mercy from the gods of Hades, but only to be thrust down among the impious on account of the wickedness of his life '. These are strong words and seem to suggest a robust faith in ' Judgement ' ; also that the people's eyes were familiar with an eschatological art that depicted the scenes of the Inferno. * Wilamowitz places it in the second or third century a. d. i* Psyche, 2, p. 423. " Demosth. 25, § 52. 392 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY There is one other genuine popular utterance of the fourth century worth quoting, the fragment of an oration dehvered at a state-funeral by Hupereides, who speaks to the people very much as Plato makes Socrates speak at his trial : ' If death is equivalent to non-existence, then we are set free from pangs of disease and other troubles . . . but if there is a conscious life in the realm of Hades and divine care (for the soul of the departed), then it is reasonable to expect that those who died defending the honour of their country's gods should meet with the lovingkindness of the divine power after death '.'-^ With the close of Greek public oratory one great organ of . the popular sentiment is silenced. Only a few other citations of evidence worth something for our purpose need be considered from the two last great writers of Hellas, Lucian and Plutarch. The treatise of the former Trepl Wvdovs purports to represent the average popular view of the period : it presents us with a picture of Hades that is still Homeric in many features, though offering more hope to the virtuous, who after judgement are received into Elysium, and more terrors to the wicked, who are consigned to torture : while the soul of the average man is a weak bodiless wraith, dependent for its nourishment on the offerings of the kinsmen at the tomb. But the treatise has much the air of a mere literary y^w d' esprit. His other treatise on the after-life, the KaTa-nXovs, is full of his characteristic banter and delicate mockery : and one might think in his picture of judgement he is only wishing to amuse himself and his readers, using a bygone mythology as we often use it now : yet one detects here and there a serious thought : the suggestion that the life after death is the reversal of this, that the rich shall weep and the poor be comforted, is lightly thrown out in a phrase that surprises us by its resemblance to more than one passage in our gospels : he conceives as Plato did, that every sin we commit in the body imprints a stain on our souls, which will be revealed before the tribunal of Rhadamanthos ; and at the close his refined imagination repudiates the crude » Stob. 4, p. 134 (Meineke). THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 393 belief in the physical tortures of the damned, and suggests that the worst sinners should be forbidden to drink of the cup of forgetfulness, so that eternal remorse might be their fitting punishment. But it is always doubtful how far we can take Lucian as an exponent of contemporary religion ; for he shows nowhere any sympathy with the prevailing popular beliefs, and scoffed equally at the mysticism of the East as at the old polytheism of Greece. More valuable therefore may be the testimony of the less brilliant Plutarch. In the closing chapters of his treatise ovhe (ijv earlv 7;8eco? /car '^ETTLKovpov ^, he maintains that the Epicurean denial of a future life is repugnant to the hopes of the majority. He adds that only a very few people are frightened by the childish stories of the terrors of Hell, and that these morbid-minded natures seek consolation in the mysteries. To this small selection of citations from the higher litera- ture we must add the evidence of the grave-inscriptions ; but it is more convenient first to consider and summarize rapidly the results we may gain from the study of the art- monuments concerning the later beliefs. In the Di pylon period of the eighth and seventh centuries in Attica, burial was the usual fashion of disposing the body, and cremation very rare ; and the Dipylon graves were plentifully supplied with the utensils of everyday life, vessels for food and drink, the ewer for the bridal bath, weapons for the warrior : showing the crude and material conception of the soul's life after death. After this period cremation becomes fashion- able in Attica, and the furniture of the grave becomes at last very scanty, only an oil-flask, for instance, being interred for form's sake. We may take this fact as a sign of the gradual prevalence of a more spiritual view of the existence of the dead, whose life is no longer regarded as a mere reflection of the earthly life. But it is rash to say that cremation was the cause that led to this change of feeling ; for in the later periods both processes, cremation and fnhumation, were indifferently practised and were consistent with the same eschatological theories : and we should remember that the • 1105 A-B. 394 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY Orphic sects, to whom we must attribute a faith and a theory concerning the destiny of the soul more spiritual than the popular were devoted to the practice of burial. The sepidchral art of Greece must reveal something of the popular beliefs on this vital concern : and we have already glanced at the evidence it offers concerning actual hero- worship. The tomb-reliefs, as we have seen, often reveal the defunct in his glorified condition, reclining at the meal and receiving offerings from his adoring kinsfolk or receiving them to his table as the divine host "". But this special group of sepulchral monuments stands apart : the other grave- scenes are usually reticent concerning the faith of the living. And the greatest of all this class of monuments, the Attic grave-reliefs of the fifth and fourth centuries, on which the hand of the humble craftsman is inspired by the spirit of the greatest sculptors, Pheidias, Skopas, and Praxiteles, do not attempt or scarcely at all attempt to show the life of the after-world, but rather scenes of the grace and lovingkind- ness of the earthly family life. But other types of monu- ments tell us more : for instance, the lekythia found in graves of the sixth and fifth centuries, showing us the helpless winged souls approaching the boat of Charon, weeping and sometimes led by Hermes ^. Except for the presence of Charon, the thought is still Homeric and no higher level of belief is yet revealed. Nor in the greatest fifth-century representation of the Inferno, the greatest attributed to any Greek artist, the scenes painted by Polugnotos of Thasos on the Lesche of Delphoi, can we find any deeper conception than that conventional one of the epic tradition ; except indeed in this that the value of mystic initiation is proclaimed by the representation of the troubles of the uninitiate. The arid description of Pausanias exposes the work to our suspicion "^ Vide J ahrb. d. d. Arch. I. 1905, p. 123 ; Das Beiwerk auf den ostgriech. Grabreliefs, by Pfuhl. '' e. g. sixth-century vase in Arch. /. Religionswiss. 1905, p. 191 : very beautiful fifth-century lekythion in Athens, Charon stretching out his hand to a young woman, Hermes and small shadowy forms of souls around, Delt. Arch. 1889, p. 77. For a general account of the sepulchral significance of these vases vide article by Curtius in Jahrb. d. d. Arch. I. 1895, P- 86. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 395 of a certain puerility or triteness of religious imagination. But art is a difficult medium for the expression of advanced eschatology ; the artist rarely attempted to proclaim the inner faith of the Greek mystery ; though a vase-painter of South Italy may have occasionally introduced a family of the initiated into the Homeric circle of heroic personages "". So also on one or two grave-reliefs the sculptor might show the heroized dead banqueting in the presence of the deities : for instance, a relief '^ from the Piraeus displays the departed hero blessed with the presence of Dionysos ; but the mode of treatment is secular and genial and not at all suggestive of mystic belief, though the motive has been no doubt given by a religious fact — namely, the close intimacy of the god with the mortal who was probably his priest and who may have been heroized by a private society. Another example is a relief that shows us a man banqueting with Herakles and certain goddesses with trees in the background and winged youths fluttering amidst them that suggest Elysium ". We may even discover among the wide and varied range of sepul- chral monuments a few instances of the representation of the dead in the actual forms of divinities. Perhaps the earliest example is the grave-relief of Amphotto '^, the work of a sculptor of Thespiai in the middle of the fifth century, showing the deceased maiden holding fruit and flower and wearing a polos, the attribute of divinity. M. Heuzey reported a rude Graeco-Thracian tomb-rehef showing two dead chil- dren under the guise of Artemis and Apollo.® An undoubted example is a statue found at Gutheion near a sarcophagus, representing a youth with the individual features of portrai- ture, but with a panther by his side and a cluster of grapes in his hand and a vine-crown : the work appears to be of the latter part of the first century A. D. ^ : and that the fashion of ^ Vide the two Apulian vases in Miss Harrison's Prolegomena, p. 602, figs. 163, 164. ^ Vide Roscher, i, p. 2539 ; Gardner, Sculptured Totnbs of Hellas, fig. 73 ; and in Hell. J., 5, 138. " Vide Conze, Arch. Zeit. 1871, p. 81. •1 Gardner, op. cit. PI. 17 : Jahrh. d. d. Arch. I. 191 3, p- 321. " Rev. Arch. 1870, p. 248. ' Eph. Arch. 1911, PI. 13, 5. 396 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY apotheosizing the deceased as Dionysos was not infrequent in certain circles of the Graeco-Roman world is proved by the Latin poem by Statins, in which Lucan's widow is praised for not deifying him as Bacchus and consecrating to him a ' deceitful thiasos ', but for worshipping his real spirit in ' the depths of her own soul ' ^. Also, as we find the figure of a Muse on graves and offerings to the Muses on behalf of the dead, so the representation on the Chigi sarcophagus appears to reveal the actual identification of the dead with the Muses''. We know that art-representations in which the mortal features were blended with the type of divinity was a common tribute to the Uving or deceased emperor or king or to their wives or mistresses. Here it is mainly flattery, the mark of a decadent and insincere religion. But where we find undoubted examples of the same phenomenon in the artistic representation of deceased people of private rank, we may take it as an expression of a religious idea concern- ing the divine status of favoured persons after death that germinated in and from Orphism. Moreover, we may point to a few monuments of the fifth and fourth centuries that suggest a more hopeful conception of death than that presented by the ancient tradition. On a red-figured vase, behind the figure of Hades, the Lord of Death, who is confronting Zeus, we see the significant name and personality of 'EAtti?, Hope, who attests the artist's view of the brighter destiny of the soul ". And through the growing tendency to identify the god of the dead with Dionysos, his type is softened and idealized, his features become more mild and benignant. Serapis, the Graeco- Egyptian deity of the world of souls, had affinities in character with Asklepios the Healer; md the best of the Serapis heads that have come down to us suggest a type such as that which Plato may have imagined in the curious account " Sylv. 2. 7. 1. 124. ^ See article by Diitschke, Jahrb. d. d. Arch. I. 1912, p. 129 ; cf. the poem on the grave-slab of Arideikes of Rhodes mentioning a sacrifice to the Muses of ixfiXia and nthavot on the occasion of his death : Bull. Corr. Hell. 1912, p. 230. "^ Gaz. Arch. 1877, PI. 6. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 397 of Hades that he gives in the Kratylos ^ ; the god of death by his wisdom and eloquence excites in our souls a longing for his presence and by this spell retains us for ever in his domain. Finally, we have to consider the grave-inscriptions, the most interesting source of our information concerning the opinions on this subject of the average Greek world. These have been well appreciated by Rohde towards the close of his second edition of the Psyche, and as his observation and critical judgement are rarely at fault there is little that at the present moment needs correction in his statement and not much that can be added. The number we possess of them is very large and is daily increasing. They exhibit the same defects as would any collection of modern epitaphs. They are often vulgar, illiterate, tasteless, affected ; but they have at least this advantage, that they cannot be suspected of insincerity or hypocrisy ; for one thing is obvious about the feelings of Greek society in regard to this matter, that any one might hold any views one liked about the question of the next world without being regarded the better or the worse therefore. The Greek sepulchral inscriptions, then, can be used occasionalFy as genuine documents of faith or unfaith. Now the opinions they express appear so various that at first sight it seems impossible to base any solid induction upon them as to the growth or diffusion of a clear belief among the masses of the people. But they suggest at least one general reflection concerning the Greek of the prime and the Greek of the decadence. Until the middle of the fifth century was passed the writing on the graves is entirely silent concerning a'posFhumous existence. The dead person Speaks only~5r"f ^ffiis Hfe, his city, his family, clan or children, and often of his \ own achievements, with pride or with love. We dare not say in the face of the evidence examined above that the men of the earlier period had no such beliefs or no such interest. We may say, if we like, that they were more modest, more reticent than the later Greek ; but a truer perhaps and more relevant explanation is that they were more closely attached to the^iyic and social existence, less insistent on the » p. 403 E. ^' 398 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY individualistic soul-theory and therefore more likely to look back than to look forward *''. However this may be . the earliest inscription that seems to offer an eschatologic idea is that interesting monument of public honour now in the British Museum found near the Athenian Academy ^, the sculptured tablet with an epitaph commemorating the Athenians who fell at Potidaia in 432 B.C.: ' the aither hath received their souls, while earth hath their bodies '. That the newly escaped soul rises and flits away into the aither was probably an old popular conception, which need have had nothing to do with the practice of cremation as has been supposed, and which is alien to the Homeric as to the Orphic conception of its destiny. It is taken up and dignified by the poetic-philosophic speculation of Euripides : and it is expressed with some frequency on the later tombstones — as we shaU see. But we may doubt if the public Potidaean epitaph has any religious eschatologic value ; it may only have expressed the quasi-physical perception that the soul escaped like a breath into the upper air : for instance, another Attic epitaph of the fourth century b. c. declares that ' the liquid aither has absorbed the soul and the powerful thoughts ' of the departed one : and the phrase suggests a physical rather than a spiritual concept. The jdeld of grave-epitaphs from the fourth and third centuries b. c. is still comparatively scanty ; and still fewer are those that convey any ardent hopes or positive con- viction concerning the future world. An Attic inscription possibly of the fourth century •" on the grave of a dead boy of Theban parentage declares that his soul has gone to the ' chambers of the righteous ' : this and ' the chamber of Persephone ' become conventional phrases for the happy abode of the pious dead. Another Attic epitaph'^, erected by a lady in memory of her excellent nurse, speaks lovingly and wistfully of her in this strain : ' I loved thee, nurse, " The famous epigram of Simonides on the Spartans who fell at Thermo- pulai promises no posthumous bhss : the dead are content to rest where they fell, even in death ' obeying the laws of Sparta '. ^ Kaibel, Epigr. Graec. 21 ; Rohde, Psyche, 2, p. 258. ^ Kaib. op. cit. 90. <> Ibid. 48. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 399 when alive, and now I honour thee below the earth. . . . And I know that even in death, if the virtuous have any higher privilege, thou wilt have the first place of honour by Perse- phone and Plouton.' But the greater number by far of these that express any eschatologic theory or hope at all belong to the~ later periods of Paganism. Some are out- spokenly sceptical and even record the satisfaction of the deceased at escaping from consciousness and the delusions of hope ■'' : a few are gloomily pessimistic and parade the conventional doctrine of the inevitableness of fate. Of those whose epitaphs attest belief in a future and a better world, by no means all speak with conviction. A master of Pythagorean doctrine, who strangely says of himself that in life his soul was as that of a little child, abstains from dogmatizing : ' I have not speculated on what is not lawful to be known, whether I existed in a former state of life and whether I shall exist in the future ' ^. JThos^hat proclaim their faith m a b lessed immortality have nothing to say con- cermngThe punishme nts ^ Fthe~wicked7and we may well "Believe^that the pious Greek did not regale himself with the anticipation of other people's damnation. One of the epitaphs, in fact, seems to convey the belief which we find in Plutarch that only the good have a future existence to look forward to at all "^ ; a view which implies the complete annihilation of the wicked, the dogma that has commended itself to certain thinkers of modern times. Now as regards the abode of the blessed soul, we find in many of these sepulchral records a striking divergence from the old tradi- tional belief of Greek rehgion and mythology. Working out the idea dimly conveyed by the inscription of Potidaia they place Paradise not in the under-world but in what we should call heaven^, where the soul resides in light among the upper gods : returning thus to its original home, whence * Op. cit. 491 : an Epicurean rejoices to leave life and rest by the side of his son who has gone before him. '' Op. cit. 615. '■ Op. cit. 559 and 268. ■^ e.g. 312, 315, 320 : the idea at times may be expressed merely in physical terms as in Ep. 156 -nvorjv aiO-qp eKafity iidKiv, oamp tbdJKtv (Athens ? first century B. c.) : C./. G. looi. 400 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY — as one phrases it — ' it was lent to the mortal as a pledge ' ". The old deities are fitted easily into the scheme of this eschatology : it is Zeus that summons the departed soul of the virtuous to himself ^ ; or heaven is won by the mediation of Hermes (Eofxeiao Xdyots), as is proclaimed by a Smyrniote of the first century B. c. ", who may have been touched by the Graeco-Egyptian mysticism. This belief in heaven may have owed something to the influence of the poetic-philosophic soul- theory of Euripides ; and in the later period to the influence of the Stoic Poseidonios '^. It clashes obviously not only with the old Greek tradition but with Orphic speculation. Whether any print of this latter religious force or of the other mystic religious systems of Greece is discoverable on the tombstones is our last question, to which the answer may be brief. They are somewhat disappointing witnesses to the hopes of the mystic societies, which from other evidence we must consider as powerful and popular in the latter period. The epitaphs are generally reserved ; their frequent references to the Isles of the Blest, the Chambers of the Righteous, may indicate the direct or indirect influence of Eleusis. But of distinctly Bacchic or Gnostic mysticism the traces are scanty enough. Only in a very few can we catch the echoes of Orphic theory or ritual : as, for instance, a tombstone found at Knidos proclaims ", ' I have not drunk of the water of Lethe that endeth all things ' ; and the prayers contained in two epitaphs of the third century A. d. found at Rome, ' May Aidoneus, the king of the dead, give thee the cold water', ' give the cold water to my thirsting soul' ^ But we should have expected the traces of this widespread mystic religion to have been more distinct on the graves. Still rarer among the epitaphs are any allusions to Egyptian theosophy and Hermetic doctrine. One verbose inscription of the second century A. d. found not many years ago at Alexandria » follows entirely the lines of the old classical religion. But a Lycian Greek buried near the beginning * Op. cit. 613. " Op. cit. 320 (Thyateira). •= Op. cit. 312. ^ See Schmekel, Philosophie d. Mittl. Stoa, p. 132, 141, 248, 258. « Kaibel, no. 204. ^ Ibid. 658, 719. ^ Bull. Corr. Hell. 1902, p. 441. THE MYSTERIES AND ORPHISM 401 of our era at Abydos, the city of Osiris, adopts the consolations of the Osiris-rehgion and the local superstition ; for he expresses his conviction that as he lies buried near the tomb of Osiris he has escaped the abode of the dead : ' Hermes gathers me with the sons of the Gods and I have not drunk the water of Forgetfulness '. We find here, what we find in the Hermetic literature, the Arcadian Hermes entering into a new position and becoming the comer-stone of Graeco- Egyptian eschatology. A mystic but not specially Orphic tone is heard in a Greek inscription found in a Sabine village '', dating from the second century a. d. ' The Soul is immortal, for it came from God . . . the body is the garment of the Soul. Honour the God in me ' (meaning the divine element) . The Orphic dogma main- taining that the released soul enters upon a status of divinity has been noted above, and certain sepulchral monuments have been found to illustrate and develop this. It is more clearly revealed still in the few of the epitaphs collected. A certain Lucius dedicates a grave-monument ^ to his four years' old child in such strange words as these : ' To my sweetest child and personal God who hearkens to my prayers'. A priest of Thasos dedicates his deceased wife as ' an in- carnate goddess ' — B(a f7Tt.(f)avris ^ Similarly a dead man at Eruthrai is glorified as ' a blessed spirit that loves man- kind, a new manifestation of Asklepios '. The fashion or the belief was taken over — as we have seen — by the Roman world ; and a lady named Pomptilla, who died in Corsica to save her husband, is transfigured by him ' under the changed name of Juno and through all the ages her fame will shine ' '^. To some extent, then, though the evidence is not abundant nor convincing, the grave-monuments confirm the testimony of the literature that a stronger interest in the posthumous life and a happier conviction concerning it was penetrating the later world of Paganism. » Kaibel, 651. " Op. cit. 314. <= Jahrb. d. k. d. Arch. Inst. 1912. p. 10, No. 6. '' Kaibel, 585. 2460 D d 402 INDIVIDUAL BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY Conclusion This treatise is mainly an attempt to trace the develop- ment and define the different manifestations of hero-cult throughout the ages of pre-Christian Hellenism and to show that this exaltation of the departed spirit in the later period is only the further working out of a tendency that we can discover in the race before the dawn of history. We must regard it as a phenomenon wholly Hellenic, although it was later quickened by ideas and beliefs derived from an alien faith. The new departure in the declining period wasjbhe apotheosis of the living ruler, an act of State-politics in- sincere and corrosive of religion, yet fraught with momentous consequences as familiarizing the world with the conception of the Man-God. But of the later period the most important phenomenon was the spread of the Orphic societies and their doctrine. It familiarized the world with the conception of the divine element in the human soul, with the sense of kinship between man and God. It quickened this sense by means of a mystic sacrament whereby man's life was tran- scendentally fused with God's. It raised the religous emotion to a pitch of ecstasy and rapture far above the Hellenic scale. It strongly marked the antagonism between flesh and spirit and preached with insistence the doctrine of purity, a doctrine mainly ritualistic but containing also the spiritual idea of the purity of the soul from the taint of sin. It divorced religion from the State, making it the pre- eminent concern of the individual soul and the brotherhood. Finally, its chief aim and scope was otherworldliness, its mission was the preaching of salvation, of an eschatology based on the dogmas of posthumous retribution, purgatory and of a succession of lives through which the soul is tried ; and it promised immortal bliss obtainable through purity and the mysterious magic of a sacrament. ' Alien in origin, alien to the earlier spirit of Hellenism, and always working in the shadow — for none of the later influential schools of philosophy adopted it — it must be reckoned as one of the forces that prepared the way for the inauguration of a new era and a new faith. REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS: ALPHABETICAL LISTS HEROES AND HEROINES OF DIVINE ORIGIN OR HIERATIC TYPE, WITH RITUAL-LEGENDS OR ASSOCIATED WITH VEGETATION-RITUAL ^ "AyXavpo's. ^ Athens : vide Cults, 5, 'Dionysos', Geogr. Reg. s.v. Attica, vol. I, Athena, R. 2^-\ R. 25^-^^, p. 289; vol. 3, Demeter, R. 109; Schol. Demosth. i^a/j. Legat. §303; Herod. 8. 53; Eur. Ion. 493 ; Athenag. Leg. i (mysteries of Aglauros and Pandrosos). ^ Salamis in Cyprus : Porph. De Abst. 2. 54 (human sacrifice to Aglauros). Cf. Cults, i, Athena, R. 25 d, ^ Aiyevs (= Poseidon, vide Cults, 4, pp. 35, 47), ancestor of the Aigeidai at Athens: Paus. i. 22, 5 (rjpiZov Atyews). Cf. Cults, 4, Apollo, R. 34C (house of Aigeus by temple of Apollo Delphinios). Heroon at Sparta : Paus. 3. 15, 8. ^ 'AKTttiW: at Orchomenos in Boeotia : Paus. 9. 38, 4 (tw 'AKTatwvt evayi^ova-iv dva Trav ctos) ; Plut. Fit. Artst. 1 1 (mentioned among the ^pwes apxy^yerai). 'a 'AAwaSai, worship in Naxos : Diod. Sic. 5. 51 ; Pind. Fyth. 4. 88; C. I. G. 12. 5, no. 56. ? Anthedon in Boeotia : Paus. 9. 22, 6. *^ "Apyrj: vide'nTTts, R. 54. * 'ApidSv-fj: vide Cults, 2, pp. 631-634, Aphrodite, ^60, 64, 104 ; Hesych. s.v. 'A8v6v' ayi/ov, Kp^res; C. I. G. 7441, 7692 ('Aptayvo? on vases); Horn. Hes. Cert. p. 24 (Rzach) '' ApiaZvua festival at Oinoe in Lokris. ^ 'Apto-Tttios : vide Cults, i, Zeus, R. 53; ib. 4, Apollo, R. 9; Pind. Pyth. 9. a In Keos : Varro, Frag. Argon. 2. i (Prob. in Verg. Gtorg. i. 14); Diod. Sic. 4. 82; Apoll. Rhod. 2. 521-528; Schol. ib. Head, Hist. Num.- p. 482, fourth-century coin of Keos with head of A. (or Zeus Aristaios) bearded : on reverse forepart of dog surrounded with rays (Seirios). b in Arcadia : Justin. 13. 7. c Syracuse : Cic. In Verr. 4. 128. 4XTr]teA77 : vide Cults, 5, pp. 94, 192 ; Hes. Theog. 940. Delphoi : feast of 'Hpwt9, 5, Dionysos, R. 66^ Thebes: Paus. 9. 12, 3; Pind. Fyth. ri. i ; Eur. Bacch. 6. Mukonos: Dittenb. Syll.'' 615, 23. ^^ Tpo^wvtos (with Agamedes): vide Cults, i, Zeus, R. 20, 137*; 3. Demeter, R. 3 ; 4, Apollo, R. 115. At Lebadeia: Paus. 9. 39, 5; Schol. Aristoph. Nub. 508; C.I.G. Sept. i. 3077, 3086. Cf. Paus. 9. 37, 7. 2« 'YaKiv^os: vide Cults, 4, pp. 125-130, Apollo, R. 19, 246; Photius s.v. UapOivoi; Apollod. 3- ^S- 7; Eur. Frag. 357 (Nauck). " "YXas in Kios of Bithynia : Anton. Liber. Trans/. 26; ApoU. Rhod. I. 1354; Strab. p. 564; Aesch. Fers. 1054; Hesych. s.v. 4o6 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS "^^ ^ot^r} : vide 'IA.aci/oa, R. 1 6. ^^ XapiXa at Delphoi: Plut. Quaest. Grace. 12, p. 293 E. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES *" Aiveias : vide Cults, 2, pp. 638-642, Aphrodite, R. 45c. Cf. C. I. G. 3606 (worshipped as God at Ihon). ^^ ' AfxQ)v at Eleusis : Hom. H. Demeter 262. Cf. Athenae. 406 D ; Plut. Vit. Rom. 29 ; vide Cults, 3, p. 94. At Athens : C.I. A. I. 274, p. 148 mentioned among the Of.01. '■^ ? 'ETTi/Aaxos, ? hero at Knidos associated with Plouton or Hermes : vide Cults, 3, Demeter, R. 52. At Eruthrai : Ditt. Syll.^ 600, 1. 61. SACRAL HEROES AND HEROINES 407 ^* Eua-yyeAos at Miletos (ancestor of the EmyyeAi'Sat) : vide Cults, 4, p. 228, Apollo, R. 2oof Cf. Vitruvius, 10. 2, 15; also epithet of Hermes, ib. 5, p. 21. ^^ Ev>/)u7rvAos, hero and apostle of Dionysos at Patrai : Paus. 7. 19, 10; vide Cults, 5, Dionysos, R. 88. *" 'loSa/xa at Boeotian Koroneia : Paus. 9. 34, 2. ^' 'iTTTToAin-os : vide Cults, 2, Artemis, R. 22; Aphrodite, R. iid, 21, and p. 658. At Troizen : Eur. Hippol. 1423; Diod. Sic. 4. 62; Paus. 2. 32; cf. 2. 27, 4. At Sparta: Paus. 3. 12, 9 (his hereon). ? At Athens: vide Cults, 2, Aphrodite, R. ii>i (cf. Paus. I. 22, I grave of H. near temple of Themis on Akropolis). ? Aphrodite €' '\^7■Ko\vT^^ in Chalkis : Eph. Arch. 1902, pp. 31 and 140. PEpidauros : Paus. 2. 27, 4; cf. ApoUod. Bibl. 3. 10, 4. ■*- 'iTTTToo-^evTys at Sparta: Cults, 4, Poseidon, R. 62 ^ ? At Megara and Byzantium : Dionys. Byz. Anapl. Fr. 24. ^"-'^ 'I^tyeVeta. At Hermione Artemis-Iphigeneia : vide Cults, 2, 'Artemis', R. 34, cf. ib. p. 441. At Brauron in Attica: ib., 'Arte- mis', R. 32. At Megara: Paus. i. 43, i. At Aigeira : Cults, 2, 'Artemis', R. 2^^ ; Paus. 7. 26, 5. Iphigeneia-Hekate : vide Cults, 2, 'Hekate', R. 4/ In Tauris : Herod. 4. 103. ^^ 'I<^tvo7/ : Cults, 2, Artemis, R. 79'^'. " KavKwv at Andania : Cults, 3, Demeter, R. 246. *■' Ke'Aeos and Meravetpa connected with the Demeter legend at Eleusis: Yiom. If. Dem. 161; Paus. i. 39, 2; Athenag. Z^^. 12. *'^ Kopwvis with Asklepios at Titane in Sikuon : Paus. 2. ir, 7. Cf. the KopcuvtSes in Boeotia, daughters of Orion, piacular offerings to them : Anton. Lib. 25. ^" MeXa/xTTous : Herod. 2. 49, cf. 9. 34; ApoUod. Bibl 2. 2, 2 Athenae. p. 45 D (Melampous, a Dionysiac hero). Cult at Aigosthena Paus. I. 44, 8. Cf. C.I. G. Sept. 207. At Arcadian Orchomenos Bull. Corr. Hell 19 15, p. 55. *' OivoTTtW. ? In Chios: Paus. 7. 15, 13. ^* Orpheus: vide Cults, 5, 105-106, Dionysos, R. 49, 76''. Dedication to him and (?)Sabazios, at Maroneia: Hell. J. 1896, p. 321. At Sena in Italy: C.I. G. 5970. ?Te/A€vtos at Sparta: Cults, 4, Apollo, R. 27a (vide Tsountas in Eph. Arch. 1892, p. 21). *^ IlaTpevs and IIpevyeVTys at Patrai (founders of cult of Artemis Limnatis : vide Cults, 2, Artemis, R. 2). ^" IJeAapy*/ at Thebes: Paus. 9. 25, 8; foundress of the Kabeiroi mysteries. 408 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS ^^ Skephros, Apollo's apostle at Tegea : Paus. 8. 53, i. ^^ T^yi'epos, Apollo's prophet and son at Thebes : Schol. Lykoph. 1211. ^^ TptTTToAe/xo? : Cults, 3, Demeter, R. 228. ^^a ^va-Koa in Elis : Paus. 5. 16, 6. " 'Qttis with "Apyr] and ''E.Kaepyq : Cults, 2, Artemis, R. 79^ ; Eilei- thuia, R. 4. 'Apyiy at Miletos : vide Rehm, Das Delphi /no?t /;/ Milet, no. 31, circ. 500 b. c. HEROES OF EPIC AND SAGA ^^ 'Aya/Ae'/AvtDv in Laconia : Lyk. Xass. 11 22; Schol. Lyk. 1369; Athenag. Leg. i (Zeus- Agamemnon). Tarentum ; Arist. p. 840 ^ {De Mir. Aus. 106). Chaironeia, sceptre of Agamemnon worship- ped : Paus. 9. 40, II. Klazomenai : Paus. 7. 5, 11. ^® "ASpao-Tos. Sikuon : Cults, 4, Apollo, R. 133^; 5, Dionysos, Geogr. Reg. s.v. Sikuon; Herod. 5. 67. Megara : Paus. i. 43, i. Attica at Kolonos : i. 30, 4. " AittKos and the KlaKilai in Aigina : Herod. 8. 64, cf. 5. 80. Shrine of Aiakos : Paus. 2. 29, 6; Pind. Nem. 5. 96; Schol. Pind. 01. 7. 156 ; cf. Collitz, Dialect- Inschr. 3417. Athens : Herod. 5. 89. Worship of Aiakidai at Tarentum : Arist. p. 840 a. "a Kla.vt]wv at Corinth: Cults, 2, Aphrodite, R. i6k In Lycia : Quint. Smyrn. 10. 162. " rXavKo? in Lycia : Quint. Smyrn. 10. 158-166; cf. Steph. Byz. s.v. TXuvKov 8^/Aos ; cf. R. 105. 410 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS " AtofxySr]^. ? At Argos : Kallim. Zav. Pall. 35 (shield of D. carried in procession). Tarentum : Aristot. p. 840 ^\ In the Adriatic : Find. Nem. 10. 12; Schol. ib.; Strab. pp. 214, 215 (cf. Cults, 2, Artemis, R. 24^); Strab. pp. 283-284; August. De Civ. Dei, 18, 18. In Umbria: Skyl. Peripl. 16 (Miiller, Geog. Min. p. 24). Cyprus: Porph. De Abst. 2. 54 (cf. Cults, i, Athena, R. 2%^). "a Ai/3K7? at Thebes: Plut. p. 578 B {De Gen. Socr. 5) (grave known only to the Hipparch ; nightly ceremonies performed secretly). '* "E/cTwp at Ilion : Athenag. Leg. i ; Clem. Recog. 10. 25 ; Luc. Deor. Concil. 12; Philostr. Her. p. 3. On the coast of the Troad, a sacred grove of H. : Strab. p. 595. At Thebes : Paus. 9. 18, 5 ; cf. Schol. Ven. A. B. Horn. //. 13. i ; Lyk. Kass. 1204. ^^"^ 'EXivrji Eur. Hel. 1667; Or. 1636. » In Sparta: Paus. 3. 15, 3 ; cf. Hesych. s.v. 'EAevaa and KdwaOpa. ^' At Therap- nai : Herod. 6. 61; Paus. 3. 19, 9. ° In Attica : Eustath. Od. ^- 399 (P- 1425, 62), Trittuia sacrifice to the Dioskouroi and Helen. J Ilion : Athenag. Zeg. i. e Rhodes : Paus. 3. 19, 10; cf. Theokr. Id. 18. 48 (Helene ' Dendritis '). f ?In Egypt : Plut. 857 B {De Herod. Malig 12). '^ Evpva-dKr]<; (son of Aias) at Athens : Paus. i. 35, 3. In Salamis : C.I. A. 4. 596'! (fourth-century inscr. mentioning the Eurysakeion) ; Soph. Aj. 575 ; cf. Hesych. s. v. 'ASo^airroi'. "^^^ 'HpaKXeiSai, children of Herakles, at Thebes : Pind. Isthm. 3. 79. At Prasiai in Attica: Ath. Mitth. 1879, p. 358. At Sparta, shrine of Kleodaios, son of Hullos : Paus. 3. 15, 10. '•^ ©r/o-cus in Attica (vide Cults, 2, Aphrodite, R. ii^, 14^'; 4, Poseidon, R. 66^1; 5, Hermes, R. 56). At Kolonos : Paus. i. 30, 4 (heroon of Theseus, Peirithoos, Oidipous, Adrastos); Plut. Thes. 36; C.I. A. I. 273, p. 148 (Theseus mentioned in the list of Qf.01); ib. 2. 445, 467 (the festival ©rjo-eia) second century B.C. ; cf.^ Schol. Aristoph. Pint. 627 (lampadephoria, distribution of food); Plut. Thes. 27 (sacrifice to the Amazons before the Theseia). In Delos, festival of ©T^o-eta with lampadephoria: Bull. Corr. Hell. 191 2, p. 425 (inscr. 147/6 B.C.). " 'lao-wv in Abdera : Strab. p. 531. At Kuzikos, cult of Athena 'Iv^o-ovia : Apoll. Rhod. i. 958. In Kolchis : Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 4. 1217. In interior of Asia Minor: Strab. p. 45. ■"* "I^wv at Herakleia Pontik^ : Apoll. Rhod. 2. 847 ; Schol. 1. 843. HEROES OF EPIC AND SAGA 411 " 'iSo/Acver's with Meriones at Knossos in Crete : Diod. Sic. 5. 79- «" 'lo'Aaos : Plut. Defrat. amor. 21. * At Thebes : Paus. 9. 23, i; Schol. Find. 01. 7. 153; Isthm. 4. 33; Plut. Pelop. 18 e. ^ At Athens, with Herakles at Kunosarges: Paus. 1. 19, 3. « At Agyrium in Sicily : Diod. Sic. 4. 24 ; cf. 30. In Sardinia : Paus. 10. 17, 5; Diod. Sic. 4. 30. " 'lcf}LKXrj^ at Pheneos in Arcadia : Paus. 8. 14, 9. *^ Kao-o-aVS/aa. ^ At Leuktra in South Laconia : Paus. 3. 26, 5. b At Amuklai : 3. 19, 6. Cf. Cauer, Z>e/.^ Inscr. 32. *- At Thalamai in South Laconia : Plut. Agt's. 9. "^^ In Apulia : Lyk. J^ass. 1128. *^ MeXaViTTTTos at Sikuon : Herod. 5. 67. ^* MeAeay/aos in Aitolia : Pind. Isthm. 4. 39. ^^ Meve'Aaos at Therapnai : Isokr. Hel. Eiicom. 61 ; Paus. 3. 19, 9 ; Athenag. Leg. 14; Euseb. Prep. Ev. 5. 28. ? In Egypt: Plut. De Herod. Mai. 12, p. 857 B. «« Mev€o-^cvs at Elaia in Aiolis : Steph. Byz. s. v. 'EAai'a ; Head, Hist. Num.^ p. 555 (Menestheus as founder on coins, Rom. Empire). *^ Mv^Sei'a ? in CiHcia : Athenag. Leg. 14. ? At Corinth : vide Cults. I, pp. 201-204, Hera, R. 31 (cult of Medea's children). ^*' M7]pi6vrjiXokt7;t7;s in Lemnos : App. Mithr. 77. At Makella in Sicily: Lyk. Kass. 927. At Sybaris : Arist. p. 840 ». CULTS OF MYTHIC ANCESTORS, EPONYMOUS HEROES, AND MYTHIC OEKISTS '"* "ApS-qpos at Abdera: Philostr. Imag. 2. 25. "* 'AyKatos in Arcadia: Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 1. 164. "^ 'A^aV, eponymos of the Azanes in Arcadia : Paus. 8. 4, 5 (an 'agon' held in his honour); Lact. Plac. ad Stat. T/ied. 4. 292. "^ AtaKos in Aigina : vide supra, R. 57. '" AtytaXeu's (son of Adrastos) at Megara : Paus. i. 44, 4. "■' Aiytvs at Sparta (ancestor of the Aigeidai) : Paus. 3. 15, 8. "* At^tdXas and NtKoo-rpaTos at Sparta (son of Helen) : Schol. Horn. //. 3. 175. ""»■ AiTTUTo?: Paus. 4. 27, 6 (invoked to aid restoration of Mes- senia). Cf. Cults, 5, ' Hermes ', Geogr. Reg. s. v. Arcadia. "^ AiToAds at Olympia : Paus. 5. 4, 4. "^ 'AKa87;Kos at Athens: Meineke, Frag. Com. Graec. 2, p. 437 (Eupolis). "^ 'AKot/Atts at Athens (inscr. on altar): C.I. A. 2. 1664. '-° 'Afcpto-ios at Argos : Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 4. 1091 (grave in temple of Athena on Akropolis of Larissa, Clem. Al. Protr. P-39P)- '^' 'AX$aiixivr]<; at Rhodes, colonizer from Crete : Diod. Sic. 5. 59. '^- 'AXKtt^oo? at Megara : Paus. i. 43, 4. Cf. Schol. Pind. JVem. 5. 84 {to. 'AXKaOola games). '^ "AXfci/aos, "AXk(dv, and other sons of Hippokoon at Sparta : Paus. 3- i5> I- '■-* 'AXK/A171/77, ancestress of Herakleidai, at Sparta and Thebes : vide R. 62. ^^^^ 'AiJicfiiKTvwi', eponymos of the 'A/>t<^iKTi'oi/€s at Thermopulai : Herod. 7. 200 (temple of A. associated with Demeter). '^^1^ 'Afi(fiiwvr] invoked in the oath of Dreros in Crete: Cauer, £>e/. no. 121. PAncestress — heroine wife of orvt^ : vide infra, R. 201. "® 'Avdyvpos, eponymos of Attic deme * Anagurous ' : Suidas s. v. 'Avayvpdcno<;. ^^ 'AvSpoTrpoLTrjs, Acvkwv, TletcravSpo^, Aa/Aoxparr/s, 'Yij/iwv, 'AKraLwv, lEoXviSos, ^pwc's apxrjyeTaL at Plataiai : Plut. Fif. Ari'si. 11. Cf. Clem. Al. Fro^r. p. 35 P. 414 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS '" 'AvTT/vopi'Sai at Kurene : Pind. Pyth. 5. 109. ^"''^ 'Ai/Tii/077, mythic oekist of Mantineia, daughter of Kepheus, buried in the Koii/^ 'Eo-rta : Paus. 8. 9^ 5. '-*' "ATTxepos or IlTcpas, eponymos of Aptera in Crete : Paus. ro. 5, 10. As hero-oekist on coins of Aptera : Brit. Mus. Cat. 'Crete', p. xxxi, PI. II. 5. '-' "Apas, autochthonous hero of Phliasia : Paus. 2. 12, 5 (invited with his sons to the sacrifice to Demeter). '■'° 'Apa(f>yv, hero of the Attic deme ' Apacji-^vios : Herodian rrcpt /xov. Xe^ews, 1 7. 8. "^ "Apyos, eponymos of ArgoUs, sacred grove: Paus. 3. 4, i. Cf. altar called "Apyo? on Hellespont : App. Syr. 63. ^^^ 'Arapvevs, eponymos of city Atarneus in Mysia, temple men- tioned in fourth century: Dittenb. Sy/l.^ 122, 1. 31. ^"^ Avyeas in Elis, ritual established by Oxulos, surviving down to time of Pausanias, 5. 4, 2. '^* Avt6Xvko<; as oLKia-T-q's at Sinope : vide R. 68. '^^'■^ 'A(f)ap€v'; of Messene : Paus. 4. 27, 6 (invoked to aid in the restoration of Messenia). "5 BaTTos at Kurene : Pind. Pyt^. 5. 88. '^^ BovTr)<; at Athens, eponymos of the Boutadai, altar in the Erechtheion : Paus. i. 26, 5. Priest, himself called Bovtt;?, inscrip- tion on seat: C. LA. 2. 1656. Cf. ApoUod. Bibl. 3. 15, i ; Suidas and Hesychios s. v. BovTri<;. '" PAavao's, ? cult at Argos : Strab. 371 (grave in middle of the agora). "** Atop,os, eponymos of Attic deme : C. I. A. 2. 603. '"' \6Xo\l; in Thessaly : Apoll. Rhod. i. 585 (nightly sacrifice). '^" Apu'oi/', eponymos of Druopes in Messenia : Paus. 4. 34, 6 (mystery-ritual). '" ? Awpos in Knidos : Paton and Hicks, Inscr. Cos, no. 104 festi- val called Awpeta. Cf. festival called to. 'Ap^r/yeo-ia in honour of the Archegetes at Halikarnasos : ib. no. 105. '''" 'YjKok-q, eponymos heroine of deme (near Marathon ?). Heroic honours awarded her by Theseus: Plut. Vit. Thes. 14 (quoting Philochoros). '^^ 'EXt/cr; in Attica: C.I. A. i. 523 (early fifth-century inscr. mentioning terminus of chapel ?) (? wife of Ion, cf. Paus. 7. r, 3), "^ 'Epe;!^6evs at Athens : vide Cults, i, 'Athena', R. 17 ''^'j 35°''S CULTS OF MYTHIC ANCESTORS 415 p. 270 n. a. and p. 271, note a.; Cults, 4, 'Poseidon', R. 45'; > Apollo', R. 1336, pp. 47-55. '^^ Emi'Spos of Arcadia at Pallantion : Paus. 8. 44, 5. '" EvfjL-rjXo'i at Naples, eponymos of the Eu/xT/AciSai (worshipped as Oeo<; TraTpwos) : C. I. G- 57^6. "■^ Et"/3UT09 in Oichalia of Messenia : Paus. 4. 3, 10; cf. 4. 27, 6 (? connected with the mysteries of Demeter at Andania). "* "E^cAos in Attica, eponymos of deme 'E;^eAt8at : Et. Mag. s. v. p. 404 (vide Eph. Arch. 1893, p. 130 liiv. 9 and 10 relief found between Athens and Peiraieus showing two figures in chariot inscribed "ExcAos and BacriXt], circ. 400 b. c). "^ 'Ex€<^pwj' and Tip6^axo. 390 ; Schol. /^. ; Harpokrat. s.v. Sexa^wv; Suidas s.v. U Avkov Se/cas; Pollux, 8. 121. "^ AvKovpyo<;, Arcadian hero associated with festival called fjLwXeia : Schol. Apoll. Rhod. i. 164 ^■'^ MapaOwv, eponymos of Marathon, local cult: Paus. i. 32, 4. "■^ MeXavtTTTTo?, cult in Attic Melite, son of Theseus : Harpokrat. s.v. MeXavt'iTTreior. "* Mea-a-yji/r], eponymos heroine of Messene : Paus. 4. 3, 9 (heroic ritual). Specially invoked at the restoration of Messene: 4. 27, 6. Shrine and statue of gold and marble in city of Messene : 4. 31, ir. "^ MeVa^os, eponymos of Metaponton : Strab. 265. "" Movvuxo<;, eponymos of Mounuchia : Fji/i. Arch. 1884, p. 192 (dedication fourth century b. c). "^ M.tvvaA. Arch. 1902, p. 30 (fifth century b.c.) (vide Class. Rev. 1906, p. 27). "^ "OXvvOos, eponymos hero, a fivrj/xeiov at Apollonia in Chalkidike connected with a yearly miracle : Athenae p. 334 E-F. ^*® OtySttXos, dynastic hero at Sparta, pre-Dorian : Paus. 3. 15, 10 (heroon near theatre). "^ OioXvKTos at Sparta: Paus. 3. 15, 8 (hero of Cadmeian line introduced by the Aigeidai ?). "^ IlaXAas, eponymos of Arcadian Pallantion : Paus. 8. 44, 5 (temple and statue there). "" IlavStW, cult by the Pandionid tribe at Athens : C. I. A. 2. 553. 554^ 558-559- At Megara: Paus. i. 41, 6. 2460 E e 4i8 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS '«" neAoi/^atOlympia: Find. 01. 1. 146; Schol. ib.; Paus. 5. 13, 1-3. "^ ncpya/xosjeponymosof Pergamon: Yti.v^Q[,Inschr.v. Perg.2..2'^(^. "' Iltovts in Mysia, founder of the state Iltoi/tat : Paus. 9. 18, 4. "^ ITpo/taxos in Arcadia : vide R. 149. "* 'P^o-o5 at Amphipolis : Polyain. 6. 53. "^ TeVi7s in Tenedos: Plut. <2««^^^- Grace . 28, p. 297 D ; Cic. De Nat. Deor. 3. 15, 39. ^^•^ Tt^Acc^os at Pergamon : Paus. 5. 13, 3. "^ Tt^pctj's at Megara : Paus. i. 41, 9 (pebbles used instead of barley-meal in the sacrifice). '^^ TiaA>7pos, eponymos of Attic Phaleron : Paus. i. 1,4. ^°- ^oLVL$ in Crete, invoked in oath of Dreros : Cauer, JDel no. 121. '°^ $op/3as at lalusos in Rhodes : Athenae. p. 263 A (from Dieu- chidas) ritual forbidden to slaves, pre-Dorian oekist of Rhodes. ^°* 4>opwi/6i;s at Argos : Paus. 2. 20, 3 (aboriginal ancestor and culture-hero). -'"^ ^vXovoT}, daughter of Tundareus, at Sparta: Athenag. Leg. i. '°^ XdpfjivXos in Kos : Paton and Hicks, no. 349 (family-hero of the ' Charmuleis '). FUNCTIONAL AND CULTURE-HEROES ^^ ?'Ayp€i;s on coins of Korkura: Head, Hist. Num? p. 328 (bearded figure with cornucopia). ? Hero akin to Apollo 'Aypatos. ^"^ 'A/cparoTTOTr?? at Mounuchia : Athenae. p. 39 F (from Polemon). '^'" 'AAe|ai/wp, physician-hero at Sikuon : Paus. 2. ir, 6. ■■^" 'AAwaSai, heroes in Naxos : Diod. Sic. 5. 51; C. I. G. 2420 (boundary inscr. of shrine). "^ "A/xwos, physician-hero in Athens : Ath. Mitth. 1896, p. 295, inscription found on Akropolis, fourth century B. c. ; of. inscription of opyeoii'es, ib. p. 299. FUNCTIONAL AND CULTURAL-HEROES 419 -'-' 'Apio-To/Aaxo? : Bekker, Anec. i, p. 262, at Marathon, called the 7/pw? tarpo's (cf. Schol. Demosth. 19, §249). At Rhamnous with Amphiaraos inscribed on statue, third century B.C. : Kutsch, Attische Neilgotter, p. 53, no. 6. -'^ BXavVr; and 6 eVi BAavrr/, heroine and ? hero at Athens : Pollux, 7.87 {(ikavTrj a kind of sandal, the i/pcos eTrt fiXavnj) ; C. I. A. 3. 411, late inscr. from Akropolis, mentioning chapel of Blaute and Kourotrophos ; cf. relief found on Akropolis (south) showing serpent and sandal, fourth century B.C. -'^ ro'/ayao-os and NiKo'/xaxos, physician-heroes at Pharai in Mes- senia, sons of Machaon : Paus. 4. 30, 3 ; cf. 4. 3, 10. -'^ AatT?/? in Ilion ) heroes of the banquet : Athenae. p. 59 F AeiTTvevs in Achaia ' and 173 F. -'" 'ETTtreytos at Athens: C.I. A. 3. 290, inscr. on seat in heatre, mentioning priest of the Anakes and of the hero Epitegios = hero- guardian of the roofs; cf. Kaibel, Epigr. 841 the 'hero before the Gates '. '^'^ Em/AcptW at Titane in Sikuon : Paus. 2. 11, 6 daimon or hero in the circle of Asklepios. -'* EwocTTos atTanagra : Plut. Quaest. Graec. 40, pp. 300 D-301 A. Cf. Et. Mag. and Hesych. s.v. "'•' ?Ei;8po/xos, hero of the running-contests at Delphoi, inscr. found on stadion-wall, circ. 480 b, c. : Bull. Corr. Hell. 23, p. 61 1 (for- bidding wine to be brought into his shrine) ; but vide Eph. Arch. 1906, p. 165. --" 'ExerXato?, hero of the plough at Marathon : Paus. i. 2)-^ 5- "'-' 'larpos 'Hpws at Athens : Demosth. De Fals. Leg. § 249 (cf. De Cor. §129); C.I. A. 2. 403 (decree of Boule, third century B.C.), cf. 404 (called ^to's as well as ^pws in both). At Eleusis: Bekker, Anec. I, p. 263 (his personal name 'Opeo-tVios) ; cf. inscr. Eph. Arch. 1890, p. 116 (fifth century), called also 'A//^iAoxos in late inscr., Kutsch, op. cit. p. 52, no. 4 (?son of Amphiaraos, cf. R. 63). "^'^ 'larpo? HeVos at Athens, ? the Scythian Toxaris : vide Luc. Scyth. I (sacrifice of white horse ?). "^ Kc'pa/xos, hero of the Potters' Guild at Athens : Harpokration s.v. (from Philochoros). "^ KXaiKo(ji6pos, T7pws, inscr. on architrave at Epidauros (= /(A?;- So^xos), ? hero of grave near temple entrance : Cavvadias, Fouilles d'Epidaure, r. 245; cf. Bull. Corr. Hell. 1900, p. 202. --* Kva/uTT/s : Paus. i. 37, 4, shrine near Athens on the sacred £62 420 REFERENCES FOR HERO-CULTS way to Eleusis. Cf. Plut. 837 dj Phot. Lex. s.v. Kvafj.iTr]'; : hero of the bean-culture or bean-market. ^^^ Malawi', physician-hero, son of Asklepios, at Gerenia in Mes- senia : Paus. 3. 26, 9. At Epidauros : £p/i. Arch. 1883, p. 151 dedication to ' sons of Asklepios '. At Athens : C. I. A. 2. 1447 dedication to Asklepios, Machaon, and Podaleirios. At Heraia in Arcadia: Bull. Corr. Hell. 1879, p. 190 (private dedication to 'sons of Asklepios '). At Kos altar to Machaon, Helios, Hemera, and Hekate: Class. Rev. 1904, p. 189. Cult of Podaleirios in the Daunian territory: Strab. p. 284; Lykophr. Kass. 1047. "" Mvtaypos, ' the Fly-chaser ', at Aliphera in Arcadia : Paus. 8. 26, 7. At Elis : Plin. N. H. 10. 75 (cf. Cults, i, ' Zeus ', R. 63). ^^ Navo-t^€09 and ^dla^, heroes of sea-craft at Phaleron, shrines instituted by Theseus : Plut. Thes. 1 7 from Philochoros (Salaminians chosen by Theseus to sail his ship). Cf. the 77^(05 Kara Trpv/j-vav worshipped at Phaleron : Clem. Al. Protr. p. 35 P. Attic festival Kv/Sepvya-ia attached to cult of Nausitheos and Phaiax : Plut. il>. '^^ NtKo/Aaxos : vide R. 214, hero-physician. ^^° 'Opeo-iVios : vide R. 221, hero-physician. ^^' IloSaXctpios, son of Asklepios, hero-physician, R. 226. ^^" TIoXe/j-oKpaTr/s, son of Machaon, hero-physician, cult in the Thureatis: Paus. 2. 38, 6. '^^ ^Te(f>avrjcf)6pos, hero at Athens : Harpokr. s. v. quoting Antiphon. '-^ "Hpws SrpaTT/yo's at Athens: Eph. Arch. 1884, p. 170 (inscr. first century b. c). "^ Tapu^iTTTTos at Olympia and on the Isthmus of Corinth : Paus. 6. 20, 15-18. Cf. Tzetz. Lykophr. 42-43. ■-"' "l(.v)(p^v\a^ at Murrhina : Hesych. s. v. -*■' TeXecriSpo/xos at Eleusis, hero of the Eleusinian games : Ath. Mitth, 1899, p. 253 (inscr. early fifth century): vide Cults, 3, •Demeter', R. 176. "-^'* ?^LOvpo^ at Lindos, ? oracular ' wliispering' hero, shrine erected by Seleukos, Arch. Anz. 1904, p. 1S5. ?Hero of same name at Athens : Hesych. s. v. ^lOvpa. CULTS OF REAL AND HISTORIC PERSONS {a) Cults of Groups. ^' The Lacedaemonian kings heroized : Xen. Resp. Lac. 15. -" The 'Logades' in Phigaleia : Paus. 8. 41, i. CULTS OF REAL AND HISTORIC PERSONS 421 '■'" Worship of Athenian dead at Marathon: Paus. i. 32, 4; C.I. A. 2. 471, 11. 71-73. "*'- Worship of the fallen Greeks at Plataiai : Thuc. 3. 58; Plut. Aristid. 21. ?0f the Megarians fallen in the Persian wars at Megara: C.I.G. 105 1. -^^ Worship of the murdered Phocaeans at Agylla : Herod, i. 167. 243a piacular yearly rites to the slaughtered children at Kaphuai in Arcadia: Paus. 8. 23, 7. {b) Cults of Individuals. '-" } ' Ky7](Tl.Xao- 762. 'AvTtoxos VI called ^eo's : Joseph. Antiq. 13. 7, i. %Tpa.TovlKy], wife of Antiochos I, deified after death : C. I. G. 3137 ; cf. Abhandl. K. Preuss. Akad. 1909, p. 43 ' Nord-Ionische Steine '. Seleukos hymned as son of Apollo in hymn to Asklepios. -^* 'AttoAAwvis, mother of Attalos II and Eumenes II, of Perga- mon. Temple to her erected at Kuzikos by them : Anth. Pal. vol. I, p. 57 (Jacobs). Altar erected to her to commemorate her landing at Teos (^ca ei-o-e/J^s dTroySarr/pta) : Frankel, Inschr. v. Perg. I, p. 107 ; cf. Ath. Mitth. 1902, p. 176. ^•" "Aparos of Sikuon : Plut. Vit. Arat. 53 (festival almost wholly joyous, two sacrifices, corpse buried in agora as ' founder ' and 'saviour'); cf. Polyb. 8. 14 (heroic honours voted). "^® 'Ap/x.o8ios and 'Apio-ToyeiVwv : Demosth. 19. 280; Pollux, 8. 91 (heroic cult). '^^' 'Apto-TOKA^s and Tt/xo/cA^s heroized on Spartan relief. -®^ 'ApL(rT0fj.4vr]<; at Messene : Paus. 4. 32, 3. Invoked at the restoration of Messene : id. 4. 3, 9. •-■''■' ' Apia-ToreXrjs at Stageira : Ammon. F/V. Aris/. (Westermann, Biogr. p. 400). -"" *Apo-tvo>/ near Alexandria : Strab. Soo. Shrine of Arsinoe Aphrodite : cf. Athenae. p. 318 D. At Thera : C. I. G. Ins. Mar. Aeg. 3. 462, votive inscr. third century b.c. At Delos dedication to Arsinoe Philadelphos, Apollo, Artemis : Mahaffy, Empire of Ptole- mies, p. 161. ■-'" 'ApTttXttt'r/s the Persian at Akanthos : Herod. 7. 117. -^^* 'A(rKXTpnd8r}L ii. -" Ev^/Dwv at Sikuon : Xen. Hell. 7. 3, 12 (fourth century rt.c) buried in agora and worshipped as ' Founder '. '^^- ?'Ho-toSos at Orchomenos in Boeotia : Paus. 9. 38, 3 (a plague stayed by the acquisition of his bones^ in accordance with Pythian oracle). "^^ 'HcftaicTTiwv : Arrian, Ana/j. 7. 14 (heroic honours and sacrifice ordered by Alexander, apotheosis forbidden by oracle of Amnion. Diod. Sic. 17. 115 contradicts this (Alexander ordered his apotheosis, in accordance with oracle of Amnion, as a ^eos TrapeSpos). Luc. De Cal. non Cred. \ 7 (oaths taken in his name as of a new god : Samian captain threatened with death for weeping at his tomb). '-^ ©eayeV?;? in Thasos (Olympian victor, fifth century) : Paus. 6. II, 8 (divine sacrifice; miracles of healing worked by his statues elsewhere). '^^ ©e/xicrcov of Cyprus : Athenae. p. 289 F (sacrifices to him in his lifetime as 'HpaKA^ ©e/xio-wv), circ. 300 B.C. '*" &€o4>dvr}<;, historian of Mitylene, friend of Pompey, Tac. Af/». 6. 18. Cf. Head, Jlist Nnm? p. 563 &eo(f>dvr]s ©cos on coins. -" ©lypwv of Akragas : Diod. Sic. 11. 53. '^^ 'lepwv of Syracuse at Katana : Diod. Sic. 11. 66 (worshipped as Founder). '*'•' ? 'iTnTOKparr]^ : Plin. JV. H. 7. 37; cf. Bioypd^oi (\\'esterniann, p. 452; Luc. Philopseud. 21. ^"° Ki'/Acov of Athens, cenotaph and worship at Kition : Plut. lit. a VI. 19. -■" KAco/ai^St^s, athlete, fifth century, at Astupalaia : Paus. 6. 9, 7 (cult instituted by Pythian oracle). -"- Ki'SpoyeV?;? on relief from Smyrna, lying on couch before table of offerings, with ten worshippers : Jahrbuch d. k. d. Arch. Inst. 1905, PP- 135, 137- -■'•' KvvLo-Ka at Sparta: Paus. 3, 15, i (daughter of Archidanios, woman who won chariot-race at Olympia). -'^^ Aa/Aia and Ae'aim, hetairai of Demetrios Poliorketes, worshipped as Aphrodite at Thebes and ? Athens : Athenae. p. 253 A-B. -'^ Acoi'Ttxos and 'PaSu'i? at Samos : Paus. 7. 5, 13 (lovers prayed at tomb) ; their death and love-story treated by Stesichoros, Fr. 44 ; cf. Strab. 347. ^•'■^a AvKofipyo?, Spartan legislator: Herod, i. 65; Strab. 366; CULTS OF REAL AND HISTORIC PERSONS 425 C. I.G. 1256 ; Ann. Brit. School, 1907, pp. 107-123 (called h Qf.otAa, wife of Demetrios Poliorketes : Athenae. p. 255 C (shrine at Thriai, near Athens, called ^iXalov to Phila Aphrodite). C. I. G. 507 dedication to her. ^"° ? t AiTTTTos I of Macedon : Stob. F/ori/eg. vol. 3, p. 233 (Meineke) styled ' the thirteenth god '. • °-' 4>tAt7r7ros, athlete of Krotona (circ. 520 b. c ), fell in battle against Egesta with Dorieus— heroized by Egestaeans : Herod. 5. 47. "^^ ^Xa^ian.vo'i (Titus Quint. Flamininus) worshipped at Chalkis in Plutarch's time: lit. Tit. c. 16. ■'•'■■' ? (i>v\aKo<; at Delphoi : Herod. 8. 38 (one of the iTnxMpioi v/poies-, his cf>d(rij.a aided Delphians in repelling the Persians). °'-^ ? \'ap(oi'8a?, legislator of Katana : Iambi. />'/. PytJiag. ch. 30, § 172 (divine honour vaguely attributed to him and other legislators). "2° Xci'Aoji' at Sparta : Paus. 3. 16, 4 (heroized for his wisdom). INDEX NAMES OF PERSONS, PLACES, AND FESTIVALS FOR PAGES 1-402 A Abdera, 145 336. Abia, 97, 114. Abydos, 401. Aciaaia, 72, 209. Acheloos, 285. Achilles, 11, 14, 15, 199, 285-9, 309. Actium, 55, 92. Adonis, 27, 168. Adranon, 262. Adrasteia, 324. Adrastos, 332-3. Agamemnon, 83, 118, 1G3, 321-2, 341. 353- Agathos Daimon, 73, 88. Agaue, 35. Agesilaos, 368. Aglauros, 22, 291. Agrippina-Demeter, 91. Agullai, 362. Agurion, 139. Aiakidai, 196, 309, 328. Aiakos, 289. Aias Oiliades, 293-305, 369, 372. Aias Telamonios, 282, 304-9. Aigeus, 86, 337. Aigimios, 103. Aigina, 4, 71, iii, 259, 287. Aigle. 245, 252, 253, 264. Aigosthena, 64. Aineias, 55. Ainianes, 315. Aiora, 30. Aison, 43. Aithra, 337. Aitolia, 290. Ake.sis, 81. Akeso, 260-1. Akragas, 133, 222. Akrai, 225. Akratopotes, 72, 87. Aktaion, 27. Aktor (sons of), 207, 224. Aleuadai, 105, 106. Alexander, 368. Alexandra, 330-2. Alexandria, 400. Alexandres, 331. Aliphera, 92. Alkaios. 99. Alkathous, 57, 73. Alkestis, 77. Alkidai, the, 75. Alkinoos, 325. Alkis, the, 176. Alkmaion, 326. Alkmena, 106, 109, no, 358. AUaria, 124. Allen, Mr., 58*. Aloades, the, 51, 52, 224. Alpheios, 363. Althaimenes, 124. Amazons, the, 339. Ambrakia, 55, 105. Amisos, 188 ». Amphiaraos, 58-62. Amphidromos, 72, 87. Amphion, 212-17. Amphipolis, 363. Amphissa, 188, 204, 217. Amphitruon, 98, 106. Amuklai, 197, 223, 330. Amunos, 236, 364. Anaktes, 203, 204, 210, 211, 218, 220. Anaktes Tlaldts, 217. Anaphe, 367. Anaxagoras, 364. Andania, 53. Androgeos, 339. Andromache, 358. Andros, 96. Anios, 53. Anthesteria, the, 10. Antilochos, 309. Antinoe, 356*, 358. Antioch, 217. Antiope, 213. Antony, sons of, 226. Aphaia, 92. Aphrodite, 17, 34, 39, 48, 55, 65, 69, 70, 86, 168. — a-qKtia, 17 ''. 428 INDEX Aphrodite ndi/S?;/iof, 338. — 'S.Tpania, 147. Apollo, 25, 26, 28, 47, 49, 50, 57, 75, 86, 117, 119, 121, 124, 135-6, 146, 251-6, 261, 264, 350, 364"^, 395- — 'A-yinevs, 29. — 'A(Tye\aTas, 238, 255. — Aekipivtos, 339. — AvKHOs, 144. — MaAedras, 252-6. — '^apirrjSuvioi, 17, 308. — 'Tirararos, 254 ". Aratos, 348, 367. Arcadia, 73, 74, 129, 135, 209, 251. Archemoros, 41. Ardalos, 25. Ares, 29, 281, 291 Arete, 147. Argos, 4'', 26, 27-9, 48, 60, 61, 63 ■'', 97, loi, 107, 109, 113, 114, 123, 124, 144, 186, 202, 203, 290, 350, 356, 364 ^ Argurippa, 290. Ariadne, 46, 47, 48-9. Ariadneia, the, 48. Aristaios, 49-50. Ariste, 85. Aristogeiton, 363. Aristomachos, 236. Aristotle, 367. Arne, 4''. Amis, 26. Arsinoe, 251, 358. Artemis, 29. 31, 50, 54, 55, 57, 65, 69. 85. — 'EfoSia, 149. — 'I(j)iyevfia, 56. — AvKfia, 66, 370, 395. Arthur, 200, 282. Asklepios, 66, 69, 81, 118, 196, 210, 234-79. 342. 364- Astupalaia, 365. A^vins, the, 175, 177. Athamas, 38, 42, 43, 45. Athene, 17, 75, 85, 86, iii, 117, 118, 146, 195, 290, 294, 305. — AIuvtU, 17, 55, 308. — 'iKids, 305-6. — 'iTOJVia, 356. Athens, 64, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 83, 85. 88, 91, 98, 150, 154, 155, 186, 236. 239-40, 241, 244, 258-63, 268, 277, 307, 344-8, 363-4, 387, 390-1, 393. Attica, 90, 96, 97, 107-10, 151-2, 166, 204, 205, 210, 211, 212, 259, 333. 337-40. 348, 354-5. 357. 358- Attis, 77, 383. Auge, 135. 141-2. Augeias, 112, 130. Aulis, 57, 58. Auxesia, 21, 71. Baghavati, 158. Balagrai, 263. Barleycorn, John, 23. I Basile, 85. I Bellerophon, 9. Bethe, Dr., 329. Blaute, 72, 88. Boeotia, 61, 62, 74, 96, 106, 132. 1 151-2, 153 ^ 154. 155. 186, 212, I 217, 243, 248, 356, 367. I Boiotoi, 104. Bormos, 23, 27, 140. I Boukolos, 30, 89. ' Boulis, 84. i Boura, 154 ^ [ Bragi, 25. Branchidai, the, 54. Branchos, 54. Brasiai, 45, 188, 286. Brasidas, 363. Brauron, 55, 58. Britomartis, 34, 39, 45. Byzantium, 61, 132, 227 ''. Caere, 37, 46. Caria, 46, 47. Carter, J. B., Dr., 79. Chadwick, Mr., 59, 306, 312, 325. 329- Chaironeia, 38, 40, 83, 322. Chalkedon, 132. Charila, 32—4. Charon, 394. Charondas, 361. Cheiron, 310. Cherson, 349. Chersonese (Thracian), 361. Clermont-Ganneau, M., 44. Cook, Dr., 317-18. Corinth, 40, iii, 112, 210. Crete, 4 i', 5, 34, 45, 46, 47, 50, 66, 98, 99, 112, 124, 125, 127, 128, 227, 240, 325. 339, 375. CroeSus, 169. Cyprus, 48, 168, 188*. D Daidalos, 339. Daites, 72, 87. Daktuloi. the, 102, 128. Damia, 21. INDEX 429 Daphnis, 23 *. Darius, 77. Daulis, 352. Daunii, 237, 290, 330-1. Deianeira, 170. Deipneus, 72, 87. Delos, 46, 47, 53, 74, 109, 187, 212. Delphinios, 86. Delphoi, 73, 135-6, 185, 218, 248, 314-21. 364, 370. Demeter, 17'', 47, 57, 89, 91, 118, 125, 126, 128, 18S, 220, 246, 255, 268, 320, 334, 347. Demetrios, 368. Demophon, 21. Deneke, Dr., 280. Despoina, 85. Dewa-Deli, 175, 177-8. Dexion, 364. Dexithea, 364 ''. Diktunna, 39, 45. Diomedes, 65, 284, 289-93. Diomedon, 122. Diomeia, 108. Diomos, 166. Dion, 265. Dionysos, 16, 31, 34, 36, 48, 53, 54. 57. 63. 64, 67, 87, 91, 157. 232. 345. 346. 357. 370. 37^7. 395-6. Dioskorias, 220. Dioskouroi, 11, 15, 175-228. Dipoinos, 112. Doreus, 132. Dorsey. Mr., 80. Drakon, 16. Druopes, loi, 105, 151. Dumanes, the, 121. Echetlaios, 77, 88, 89, 371. Eileithuia, 37, 74, 117. Elateia, 218. Elea, 36. Elektruone, 360. Elera, 232. Eleusis, 72, 73, 74, 83, 89, 108, 210, 236, 244''. Elieus, 30, 89. Elis, 54, 126, 129, 130, 149, 207, 288. Elpenor, 9. Elpis, 396. Empedokles, 76. Epeios, 327. Epeiros, 287, 313-14, 316. Ephesos, 149. Epidauros, 65, 72, 114, 210, 239-43, 244 *", 251^-6, 264, 267, 270-2, 273- Epidauros Limera, 256. Epidotes, 71, 73, 87. Epikteta, 353. Epimachos, 73, 90. Epimedes, 126. Epimenides, 350, 359, 387. Epione, 258, 264. Epitegios, 72, 77, 88. Epopeus, 13. 73, 213. Erechtheus, 11, 89. Eretria, 352. Ergatia, the, 1 16-17. Eriboia, 71, 91. Erigone, 31, 370. Erinus, 9, 74. Eros, 81, Eruthrai, 90, 138, 148, 151, 160. 161-4, 263-4, 265, 401. Esmun, 241. 'EaTiovxoi {5aifxoves), 72. 1 Eteonos, 334. 1 Etephila, 73. i Euanassa, 367. I Euangelidai, the, 54. Eubosia, 91. ! Eubouleus, 21-2, 86. 378. i Eudamenoi, the, 74. Eudromos, 73, 89. [ Euhemeros, 89, 236. I Euippos, 356 *. j Eukles, 378. , Eumenes, 258 ^. ! Eumenides, 39. j Eunostos, 22, 30, 31, 51, 71, 88, 89. Europa, 47-8. Eurupulos, 53, 120, 342. Eurusakes, 308. Eurustheus, no. 113. Eurutos, 53, 208. Euxine, 220, 221. Evans, Sir Arthur, 4^, 83. Fick, Dr., 68, 100. Fletcher, Miss Alice, 82 ". Fowler, Warde, Mr., 81. Frazer, Sir James, 262. Friedlander, Dr., 104^, 105' Gadeira. 144, 145, 162, 166, 167- Galen, 269. Galinthias, 107. Gambreion, 350. I Ge, 346. 347 \ I Gela, 134. I GenetuUides, the, 73. ! Gerenia, 237, 250. 430 INDEX Geruones, 102, 145. Girard, M., 307 '>■. Glaukos, 36, 284. Guinevere, 200. Gukia, 349. Gutheion, iig, 192, 195, 255 '', 395. H Hades, 62 », 83. Hagia Triada, 4 '", 5 Hagnon, 363. Halia, 46. Harma, 62. Harmodios, 363. Harmonia, 33. Harris, Dr. Rendel, 176, 179, 231. Harrison, Dr., 102 ''. Hartland, Mr. Sidney, 283 ". Hebe, 109, 121, 163, 163. Heinreich, Dr., 364 •'. Hekaerge, 57, 66". Hekate, 29, 37, 56, 75, 107, 241. Hektor, 328-g. Helena, 31, 178, 210, 214, 323-3. Helios, 124, 210, 226, 255'. Helios- Apollo, 279. Helle, 45. Hellotia. the, 48. Hemera, 214. Hemithea, 35, 39, 46. Hera, 18, 97, 100, loi, 105, 118, 119. Herakleia, 124^, 131, 152, 336. Herakleidai, the, 109, no. Herakles, 15, 23, 95-174. 354. 395- — ' AKf^iKaHiis, 148. — 'AKf^is, 121. — ' AiroTpoiratoi, 149. — '^pxvyf'Tv^ {'Apx^iyos), no, 116, 143, 144 B. — revapXTjs, 117. — AiojxeSuvTfioi, 122. — ^EpiSavaras, 133*. — 'Hyffiwv, 147. — 'UpaTos, 100. — ISatos, 117, 125-131. — iTTOKToyos, 1 5 T . • — 'InnoSfTTjs, 147. — KaWivmos, 149. — Krjpa/^WTTjs, I49. ■ — Kopvomwv, 151. • — Kparepocfypovo?, 134. ■ — MavTiK\os, 17,. 54. — MtjKoju, 109, 151-2. — Miaoyvvos, 163. — 'Oir\o(pv\a^, 14J. — naXaiixasv, 4I, 154. — liapaaraTrjs, 1 26, 148. — TlfVKfvs, 145, 167''. 1 Herakles n/Jo^ayos, 146-7. — ^WT-qp, 147-8, 153. I — Xapoi//, 153*. I Herakles, finger of (phallic cult), 2,57 "■ I Hermes, 10, 37, 75, 261, 345, 346, 394, 400-1. Hermione, 210, 246, 278. Herse, 22. Hesiod, 12-14, 16, 35, 63, 98, 171, 364- Hestia, 90 '', 91, 350. I Hiawatha, 25. i Hilaeira, 229-33. i Himeros, 81. Hippokoon, 112, 118. ■ Hippokrates, 238, 269, 270, 369. i Hippolutos, 64-70, 163. Homer, 5-12, 16, 35, 98, 113, 364^. ; Huakinthides, the, 22. Huakinthos, 2.1, 27. Huampolis, 218. Huettos, 151. Hugieia, 60, 245, 250, 254'', 255 ^ 258, 259", 260^, 264, 269. Hulas, 23, 27, 140. HuUaeis, the; 103, 121, 128, 134. Hullos, 111. Humbert, M., 113". Hupsipule, 41. Huriai, 213. Hyper laorean maidens, the, 57. Hyperboreans, the, 130. I lalemos, 24. lasios, 126. laso, 81, 245, 260, 261, 264. lason, 336. 'larpoi {ijpwfi), 90, 236. Ida, Mt.. 55. Idas, 178, 206, 230. Idmon, 336. Idomeneus, 325. Ikaria, 370. Ikarios, 18, 31, 370. 'iKtatos, 86. Ikos (Euboia), 310. Ileus, 302. Ilion, 72, 287, 294-305. Illyria, 292-3. Im-hotep, 236. Ino-Leukothea, 11, 27, 33'', 35-4; lodama, 53-4. 356. lolaeis, the, 139. lolaos, 109, 139. Iphigeneia, 18, 55-8. Iphikles (Iphiklos), 135, 212, 224. Iphinoe, 57, 66 ". i INDEX 431 Ischepolis, 356*. Ischus, 235. Isodaites, gi. Istros, 220. IsuUos, 231-3. Ithome, 96, 115. K Kabeiroi, the, 54, 186-S, 209, 217 220. Kadmos, 35, 50, 360. Kaineus, 14*. Kalligeneia, 72, gi, 92, 225. Kamarina, 134. Kameiros, 123. Karneia, the, 29. Karpo, 71. Kassandra, 293, 329-32. Kastor, vide Dioskouroi. Katana, 222, 361. Katharoi (Theoi), 74. Kaukon, 53. Kekrops, 360. Kenyahs, the, 80. Keos, 50, 263, 350, 339. Kephalai, 211. Kephallenia, 218. Keramos, 72, 87. Keraon, 72, 87. Kinuras, 25. Kios, 23, 137. K\aiKn(p6poi, 72, go. Klazomenai, 322. Kleitor, 187, 209. Kleomedes, 365. Kleonai, 113, 208. Klotho, 43. Knidos, 73, go. Knossos, 4 ^, 274 '=. Kolchis, 336. Koliades, 73. Kolonos, 333. Kopreus, 113. Kore, 85, g2, 125, 243, 2b8. Korkura, 218, 323. Koroil)os, 136. Koroneia, 356. Koronides, the, 243. Koronis. 235. 243, 245, 250, i-:,!-^. Korubantes, the, 77, 188. Kos, 47. iig-22, 155, i6o, ib3, 237, 239. 240. 256-8, 267, 270, 273, 274. Kouretes, the, 126, 127, 129, 131, 188, 217. Kourotrophos, 72, 91, 92. Kronos, \zo. Kroton, 138, 288. Krotopos, 20. Kteatos, 208. Kuamites, 71, 89. Kuchreus, 360. Kuklopes, the, 14. Kuknos, 46. Kunophontis (festival), 26. Kunosarges, 108, 165. Kiirene, 49, 199, 222. Kuthera, 197 ''. Kutsch, Dr., 62 ''. Kuzikos, 137, 225, 336. Laconia, 40, 53, 74, 181, 191-2, 193-5. 276, 321-2, 326-7. 357 ''• Laertidai, the, 328. Lakedaimon, 19, 359. Lampsakos, 364. Larissa, 219. Las, 198. Leaf, Dr., 20"', 38, 296*, 302. Learchos, 38, 42. Lebadeia, 245, 246. Lebena, 240, 263, 272. Leda, 200. Leimon, 29. Lesbos, 71, 91, 221, 367. Leukas, 92. Leuke, 286. Leukippides, the, 37, 178, 194, 200, 2 29-33- Leukippos, 68, 231-2. Leuktra, 329. Libya, 168, 326. Liguria, 138. Likumnios, 122, 123. Lindos, 123, 156. Linos, 23-30. Lituerses, 23 ", 27. Lokris, 48, 74, 96, 217, 248, 293- 303- Lokroi, the, 222. Loxo, 37. Lukos, 213. Lukourgos, 348, 359, 361. Lunkeus, 178, 206, 230. Lyall, Sir A., 89. L3'cia, 347 *, 400. Lydia, 140. Lysander, 368. M Macedonia, 104, 2ig. Machaireus, 314, 318. Machaon, 234, 237, 264. Mainades, the, 63, Makaria, no ". Maleatas, 261. 432 INDEX Malos, 251-3. Mamurius Veturius, 33. Maniai, the, 39, 357. Mantiklos, 54, 115. Mantineia, 209, 358. Marathon, 71, 72, 88, 108, 236, 363. Maron, 363. Massilia, 139, 223, 227. Mastaura, 268 <=. Matton, 72, 87. Medeia, 18. Mc7aAoi Weoi', 206, 209. Megalopohs, 276, 357. Megara, 30, 46, 57, 64, 7.5, iii, 132, 195. 308, 349- Mfytaros (Seos), 84. MeiAiyjoi (&(oi), 86. Melampous, 61, 63-4. Melanippos, 335. Melikertes, 36, 39-47. Mehte, 97. Melos, 221, 278. Melqart, 44-5, 138, 142-4, 167. Menelaos, 11, 118, 322-3. Menestheus, 211. Menidi, 5. Meriones, 325. Meropes, the, 120. Messene, 19, 97, 11 207, 229-30, 243 Messenia, 54, 114, 251 Metaponton, 85, 290 Miletopolis, 137. Miletos, 40, 45, 84 I', 286. Milyas, 221. Minos, 34. Minyas, 45. MoHone, 267. Molionides, the, 113, 130, 207, 208. Moloch, 43. Molpadias, 34, 39. Molouris, 38. Muiagros, 73, 92-3. Mukalessos, 126. MuXavrfivi (a«)i), 74. Murray, Prof. G., 67. ]\hirtis, 88. Muses, the, 25, 30, 6; Mysia, 141-2. N 191, 205, 206, 358. 360- 137, 153, 221, 39(J- Naples, 75. Narkissos, 352. Naupaktos, 207, 248 '. Naxos, 48, 49, ^2. Neleus, 17 i*. 130. Nemea, 41. Nemesis, 352. Neoptolemos, 310-21. Nephele, 37, 38. Nereus, 36. Nesos, 263. Nessos, 170. Nestor, 237. Nikaia, 140. Nike, 81, 86. Nikias, 367. Nukteus, 213. Ochna, 30-1, 89. Odysseus, 326. Oidipous, 9, 17 ^ 332-4. Oileus, 302. Oinoanda, 263'=. Oita, 141, 150, 170-3. Olbia, 221, 286. Olympia, 73, 91. 129, 147, 225, 353. Omphale, 141. Onomakritos, 387. Opheltes, 41. Opis, 66 *. Orchomenos (Boeotia), 38, 217, 243. Oresinios, 236. Orestes, 32, 357. Orion, 213. "0()/cios, 86. Oropos, 60, 61, 84. Orpheus, 25, 67, 387-8. Oschophoria, the, 48. Paionaios, 126. Palamedes, 336. Pallas, 74. Pamphaes, 202. Pamphuloi, the, 121 Pan, 33. Panakeia, 8 269. Pandora, 22. Pandrosos, 22. Pantikapaion, 36. Paros, 228 ^ 263, 330 *. Parthenos, 34, 35. 39. 47. 8 Pasiphae, 330. Patrai, 53, 54. Patreus, 54. Patroklos, 309. Peitho, 81. Pelasgos, 17 *>. Peleus, 199, 310-11. Pehas, 43. Pella, 310. Pelops, 43, 353. 357 % 360. Penelope, 62. 245, 260, 261, 264; INDEX 433 Pentheus, 67. Perdix, 339. Pergamon, 239, 264, 278-9, 353. ntpptvs, 337. Persephone, 37, 231, 378, 398. Perseus, 114, 144, 337. Petelia, 376. Peter, St., 236 ». Pfister, 48 «, 367 <■. Pfuhl, Dr., 353 -. Phaeton, 17. Phaidra, 66-70. Phaistos, 124. Phalanthos, 361. Phaleron, 72, 90. Pharai, 209. Pharmakides, the, 74. Pharsalos, 90. Pheneos, 135. Philadelphia, 173. Philoktetes, 284. Phleguai, the, 13, 236, 242, 247-9, 251-3- Phleguas, 235, 248 », 251-3. Phlious, 114, 210. Phoibaia, 232. Phoibe, 229-33. Phokis, 163, 217, 218, 247-8. Phorbas, 254 *. Phoroneus, 356, 360. Phrixos, 45. Phrygia, 84 '', 91, 151, 357. Phulakopi, 4 ^. Phuskos (Lokris), 304. Pindar, 364, 372. Plataiai, 362. Plouton, 37, 86, 378. Podaleirios, 234, 237, 264. Polemokrates, 236. Polieus. 86. Polites, 369 ^. Poludamas, 367. Poludeukes, vide Dioskouroi. Polueidos, 64. Polugnotos, 67, 394. Pompeii, 149 ". Poseidon, 75, 86, 218, 281, 338. Pothos, 81. Potidaia, 398. Praisos, 124. Praxidikai, the, 74. Preugenes, 54. Proitides, the, 63. Proitos, 63. Prosumnos, 357. Protesilaos, 61, 336. Protogeneia, 22. Prousias, 23. Psamathe, 26, 29 ». Ptolemaios, 265. Puanopsia (festival), 338. Pulos, 63. Purgoi, 37. Puthionike, 358. Puthios, 86. Pyrrhos (king), 17 ''. Pyrrhos-Neoptolemos, 310-2 Reinach, S., M., 67, 68, 385. Reinach, A., M., 298 *. 301 ». Rhamnous, 236. I Rhea, 43, 128, 129. i Rhesos, 289. I Rhodes, 46, 104, 122-4, I59. 221, 323. 360. Rhoio, 46, 47. Rohde, Dr., 6-7, 12, 280, 343, 391. Rome, 240, 264, 265, 272, 388, 400. Sabazios, 383. Sagra, 222. Salamis, 306, 307, 360, 361. Salmoneus, 13, 17. Samothrace, 186, 327. Sandan, 140, 144, 168-9. Sappho, 367. Sardanapalos, 170. Sardinia, 139. Segesta, 147. Selene, 226, 255 '', 324. Selinous, 132, 222. Semele, 15, 35, 36. Semnai, the, 333. .Serapis, 396. Shu and Tefnut, 227. Sicily, 91. •StyTjKos, 84, 352. Sikuon, 73, 96, 112, 335, 34S, 354, 372. Sisuphos, 13, 14. Skephros, 27, 29-30, 370. Skias, 30. Skulhs, 112. Smyrna, 147, 264, 367. Solon, 361. Sophokles, 259, 364. I Sosipolis, 42. ' Sparta, 66, 71, 72, 100, 115-ig, 146, 189, 222, 229-33, 333. 365- Spenser, Herbert, i. Spoudaion, 73, 87. Stageira, 367. Stephanephoros, 73. Stoboi, 220. Stumphalos, 124. Subaris, 376. Summachos, 90. 434 INDEX Suros, 187. Syracuse, 133, Syria, 47. Talthubios, 301, 326-7. Tammuz, 27, 36. Tanagra, 71, 85, 88, 132, 217. Taraxippos, 73, 90. Tarentum, 133, 190, 195, 222, 361 Tarsos, 144, 168-9. Tauropolis, 46. Tegea, 209, 361, 370. Telamon, 106 ^, 306. Telephos, 142, 353. Telesidromos, 73. Tenedos, 40, 46, 341. Tenes, 341. Tennes, 46. Teos, 157. Thalamai, 330. Thargelia, the, 338. Thasos, 131, 142, 149 '^j 365, 368, 401. Theagenes, 365, 367. Thebes, 38, 47, 74, 96, 146-7, 152, 212-16, 329-30, 332-4. Thelpousa, 276. Theoklumenos, 63. Thera, 86, 197, 221, 353 Therapnai, 184, 191 Thersites, 15. Thermopulai, 102 ', 151, 363, 398 Theseus, 48, 49, 61, 108, 178, 21 337-40, 370- Thespiai, 165, 217, 357. Thessalos, 119. Thessaly, 50, 106, 120, ziq, 241, 265, 287. Thetis, 288. Thourioi, 133. Thrace, 72, 160, 219, 291-2, 395 Thuiades, the, 32. Thureatis, 236. Tiruns, 104, 106'^, 114. Titane, 240, 242 '", 249. Tithoreia, 216, 247. Tlepolemos, 119, 122-3. Tomoi, 188 ^ Trachis, 104, 141, 162. Trikka, 234, 235, 239, 257. 265. 153. -263, 106, 3^6, 23^- 227 Tritopatores, the, 3.55-6. Troad, the, 285, 309. Troizen, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 163, 232, 337, 339. Trophonios, 21, 245-6. Tudeidai, 328. Tudeus, 332. Tundareus, 118. Tundaridai, the, 182-3, 196-8. Tundaris, 207, 222. Tyre, 138, 142-3, 164, 167. U 243*. 250, I Umbria, 290. ! Usener, Dr., 17'', 19, 78-94, 280' I 313 '. 317. 318. I "T^iffTos (0eos), 84 ^ Valens, 245. Virbius, 66. Volgraff, Dr., 114. Vurtheim, Dr., 298. W Weizsacker, Dr., 39. Wide, Dr., 15, 16. Wilamovvitz-Moelleiidorff von, 62 100, 103. Wilhelm, Dr., 296*, 297,''. X Xanthe, 84, 85. Xanthos, 84, 85. Xenophanes, 36. Xenophon, sons of, 226. Z Zagrens, 384. Zethos, 212-17. Zeus, 47, 146, 195, 212, 400. — 'AyafX(fj.v