RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE A SKETCH IN OUTLTNE BY LEWIS CAMPBELL, M.A. LL.D. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK, AND FORMERLY GIFFORD LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS ) KCL\I) SOPH. (Ed. Col LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATEKNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1898 All rights reserved GENERAL C3 PREFACE AFTER my retirement from the Greek chair at St. Andrews I was appointed by my former colleagues to the Gifford Lectureship in that University for the years 1894, 1895. I chose for my subject the Religion of the Ancient Greeks, and delivered two courses of twelve lectures each, besides several intermediate lectures. In venturing to bring before the public some part of what was then put forth, I have limited myself to the portion of the subject which was most familiar to me, and which at present perhaps receives less attention than it deserves. Recent researches into the culture of prehistoric times have tended rather to obscure the abiding interest of the age of classical literature in Greece. While endeavouring to carry out the intention of the Gifford bequest, I have sought to emphasise the element of religious feeling and reflection which pervades that litera- ture and is a possession which forms part of the inalienable heritage of mankind. Of late years much has been written on the subject of Greek religion, and in revising my work I have availed myself, as far as I could find opportunity, of the books which have recently appeared. I would mention specially Theodor Gomperz's ' Griechische Denker,' vol. i. ; Foucart on the 104734 VI RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE ' Eleusinian Mysteries,' the writings of Wide, Immerwahr, and Berard, Farnell's ' Cults of the Greek States,' and Frazer's ' Pausanias.' In quoting from Plato and Thucydides, I have availed myself of Professor Jowett's translations. And I am specially indebted to the kindness of two other friends- Mr. Peter Giles, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who read the work in MS., and Professor Menzies, of St. Andrews, whose criticism and encouragement have been of great assis- tance to me in revising the proofs. LEWIS CAMPBELL. LONDON : October 5, 1898. CONTENTS CHAPTEE I INTRODUCTORY PAGE General remarks Limitation of subject Previous factors Archaeology and folklore The Greek spirit Eeligion and statecraft Worship and mythology Superstition Divination Stages of culture Morality . 1-26 CHAPTER II ANTECEDENTS AND SUEVIVALS Aryan and Semitic elements Adumbration of the earliest phases Pre- ceding civilisations The Mycenaean age The Aryan stock Contact with aborigines Foreign influences Survivals Eecapitulation 27-52 CHAPTER III RELIGION IN THE ILIAD From central Greece to Asia Minor The religion of a conquering race Different aspects of the Divine The Homeric pantheon Hero-wor- ship absent, why ? Limitation and extension of polytheism Zeus and Fate The Homeric Hades Custom and morality Inevitable in- consistencies --"I 53-83 CHAPTER IV RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY Obvious differences from the Iliad Growing civilisation Vindication of domestic right Not sentimental Modes of worship Mythology Heroic legend Moral principles Ethical reflection . . . 84-101 viii RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE CHAPTER V CENTRAL GREECE HESIOD : ' WORKS AND DAYS ' J ' THEOGONY '- THEOGNIS ELEGIAC AND LYRIC POETRY HOMERIC HYMNS PAGE Period of unsettlement Transition towards the Age of Solon Ionic Civilisation . 102-121 CHAPTER VI PERIOD OF TRANSITION HERO-WORSHIP Period of transition Bloodguiltiness Hero-worship-^Herakles Pan- hellenic influences Universalism and particularism Beligion and policy General features Minor deities 122-147 CHAPTER VII TRANSITION PERIOD CONTINUED THE DORIAN STATES MAGNA GRAECIA BEGINNINGS OP PHILOSOPHY Sparta : worship of Achilles Laconian worships Greater Hellas : Gyrene, Barca, Naucratis Mixtures of race Birth of Philosophy: isolated speculations : Pythagoras : Heraclitus .... 148-168 CHAPTER VIII PINDAR AND HERODOTUS Pindar : Immortality : Moral notions Herodotus : the divine nature : Law and custom : Panhellenic loyalty Foreign influences : Phoeni- cian : Egypt : Phrygia Prehistoric conditions .... 169-194 CHAPTER IX EFFECTS OF THE PERSIAN WAR ON GREEK RELIGION TRANSITION TOWARDS THE ATHENIAN PERIOD Effects of Persian War Athens after Salamis Idealism in art Simonides and Bacchylides Purification and atonement The fifth century B.C. 195-208 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER X ATHENIAN WOKSHIPS PAGE Zeus Apollo Athena Poseidon Festivals The Panathenaea The Peplos Consecration of art Attic heroes Sepulchral monuments Asclepius Medical schools Public and private worships . . 209-237 CHAPTER XI THE MYSTEEIES Thesmophoria Dionysus Eleusinian mysteries Greek mysticism The Orphics Orphic religion Importance of Orphism The Eleusinia and the Homeric Hymn 238-266 CHAPTER XII ATTIC RELIGION IN THE EARLIER FIFTH CENTURY The Dionysiac worship Origin and growth of tragedy . . ;. 267-290 CHAPTER XIII PHILOSOPHY AND SCEPTICISM Early philosophers Age of Pericles Keligious reaction Euripides The Sophists 291-321 CHAPTER XIV SOCRATES AND THE SOCRATICS The historical and the Platonic Socrates Keligion in Xenophon Aristippus Antisthenes 322-341 CHAPTER XV PLATO AND PLATONISM The Moral Ideal Stages in Platonic thought Plato's theology . 342-360 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE CHAPTER XVI RELIGION IN ABISTOTLE SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENTS CONCLUSION PAQB First and Final Cause Stoic and Epicurean Pausanias Plutarch Lucian Popular religion The Higher Humanism . . . 361-385 INDEX 387 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE CHAPTEE I INTRODUCTORY General remarks Limitation of subject Previous factors Archaeology ' The Greek spirit ' Eeligionand statecraft Worship and mythology Superstition Divination Stages of culture Morality. IN answer to one who remarked, ' my chief desire is to leave the world a little better than I found it,' the late Lord Tennyson replied, ' my chief desire is to have a new vision of God.' That was the aspiration of a poet, who had some- thing also of prophetic fire. Another thinker of our time once said, ' the deepest want of our age is to have a new definition of God.' Such indeed is the ever-recurring want of humanity in passing from one stage of enlightenment to another, and this is a cause of the perplexity which inevitably haunts the mind in approaching a subject such as that which is here proposed the religious element in Greek literature. The acceptance of each new form of belief implies that our predecessors were mistaken, and if we look back far enough their leading thoughts assume an air of grotesque or even repulsive absurdity. However firmly we may rely upon our convictions, there is something in this discovery which is not comforting, and is apt to shake the foundations of re- ligious belief. Some minds are led to doubt if there be a supreme reality at all, and so to question the existence of any binding rule of life. They are tempted to think that, through a B 2 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE series of phantastic impressions, our race is being lured onward to the * dark tower ' of nonentity. Others would tell us that God teaches through illusion, that error leads the way to Truth : but the * husk ' has no meaning unless the ' kernel ' is already there in germ. The words of St. Paul at Athens, * that they should seek the Lord if haply they might feel after him and find him/ suggest a more satisfactory solution. In the wildest aberrations of the reli- gious consciousness there is yet a groping after the supreme, a craving desire to realise what is more and mightier than man, and to find a support whereon his weakness may rely. There would be no progress if there were no shadows to be done away. Our aim should be to bring out from amidst their grosser surroundings those broken lights of higher things which come to us refracted through the thoughts of men : Which all touch upon nobleness despite Their error, all tend upwardly, though weak, Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, But dream of him, and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb and get to him. The late Dr. Hatch, in his able course of Hibbert Lectures, unfortunately posthumous, has drawn out in detail what has long been known, the fact that historical Chris- tianity owes much of its intellectual form to Greek tradi- tions ; as it is no less certain that its ecclesiastical organisa- tion is largely due to the influence of Imperial Kome. But it is not to be supposed that the value of the ideas thus historically assimilated has been exhausted in a process which was to a great extent accidental. It is at least worth while to trace the course of the stream from which so much has been derived. The Hellenism which became absorbed into Christian theology was Hellenism already in its decline : a form of culture from which, in the endeavour to systematise it, and to reconcile tradition with contemporary thought, much of what was originally essential had disappeared, or had been modified by a fresh influx of Orientalism. The know- ledge that an Hellenic element enters into our actual inheri- tance should rather stimulate us to look back upon the times INTRODUCTORY 3 from whence that element came down, to study it as it was in its prime, and try to understand the living minds in which the conceptions that were essential to it first arose. If in the earliest articulate utterance of the Hellenic spirit we discern a profound conviction that the Power which is supreme sends down inevitable redress of wrong, guards jealously the family bond, protects the suppliant and the stranger, and tempers even just vengeance with deep human pity ; if as history advances the conviction of the divinity of justice and of the nobleness of self-devotion clears and widens more and more ; if a yearning after religious purity springs up unbidden, and suggests a brightening hope of future blessedness ; if, as thought awakens, the human spirit, weary of the play of imagination, and prompted by some divinely kindled spark, begins consciously to reach after ' the One,' ' the Whole,' ' the True ' ; even if we stopped here and went no further, shall we be told that this strug- gling of noble hearts and minds to live and think aright is all in vain, that they were pressing towards no goal ; or that because about the same time, or a little earlier, another race of whom the Greeks knew nothing, by a sort of parallel evolution, were developing out of an old tribal worship other modes of consciousness, under holier inspirations and amidst a fiercer furnace of affliction, can we therefore afford to dis- card the ' thoughts that breathe and words that burn ' of the Hellenic race, or rest contented with some feeble and distorted imitation of their works of decorative art, and not rather accept as part of our inheritance, to be inwrought into the Christianity of the future, ' whatsoever things are venerable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise ' ? In that familiar catalogue, which is correctly rendered on the margin of the Authorised Version, the Apostle, for once at least, is not hebraizing, but is employing terms which are characteristically Greek. * There is a spirit in man ; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.' That does not mean that progress is by any means con- B 2 4 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE tinuous. All growth is liable to interruption and temporary declension ; and the question, what is the culminating point, is not always easy to determine. Every forward step leaves, something fair and good behind it, not to be recaptured. The history of religion, to be at all faithful, must take account of checks and drawbacks. For nations, as for indi- viduals, there are moments when custom presses on them with a weight Heavy as frost and deep almost as life. The stream while growing fuller does not always become clearer as it advances ; but it would be in the highest degree irrational to infer that there is no goal of perfection towards which aspiration, enlightened by experience, tends. If this were denied, the task we propose to ourselves would be im- possible ; any record that covers a long period makes it manifest that the path of human development is onward on the whole. This ' weight of custom ' presses deep, but life is deeper yet eppur si muove. And the later stages may often throw back light upon the earlier, and win for them a more favourable interpretation. Thus the worship of a cruel deity may be interpreted as a sort of dumb pleading with a severe but merciful creator, and in the deepening gloom of the Greek Hades there is an earnest of something better in reserve than that other world, a faded duplicate of this, which to the men of the stone age had been a vivid and satisfying reality. The * new definition ' still awaits the hour and the man. The present generation can only prepare the way for it ; and to have done so in however humble a degree will be the chief honour of Lord Gifford's bequest. My predecessor in the Gifford Lectureship, Professor Caird, now Master of Balliol, has put forth a comprehensive survey of the Evolu- tion of Religion in universal history. Professor Tiele, from a different point of view, has expounded, with equal knowledge and ability, the elements of a Science of Religion. And Mr. Andrew Lang, the first St. Andrews Gifford lecturer, in his recent volume on ' The Making of Religion,' has put forth an independent hypothesis, supported by his extensive INTRODUCTORY 5 study of savage tribes. But in every such widely sweeping theory some things must inevitably be left out of view, and while the comparative treatment of religions is pregnant with important results, it is necessary as a previous condition that the religious development of the chief races of mankind should have been separately studied and delineated. I do not propose, however, in the present volume to give anything like a complete account of Greek religion. Mr. Parnell's learned work on the * Cults of the Greek States ' supplies a want which has long been felt in England, and deals with the subject of Hellenic worship on lines that are more rational than those followed by many Continental writers. But there is still room for an attempt to exhibit in a continuous treatise the way in which the ritual and mythology reacted upon the higher minds in Hellas, as this is clearly reflected in classical Greek literature. The aim of my endeavour is to trace, not origins chiefly, but rather tendencies not whence, but rather how and whitherward the religious consciousness in Greece was moving. What were the ruling thoughts in each successive age respecting that which was conceived as higher than man ? How were those thoughts limited or frustrated, and what germs of further development were contained in them ? What in the most general outline was the Hellenic contribution to the spiritual inheritance of humanity ? If in order to strengthen the foundations of religion and morality, we are to gather out of every civilisation what it contains of good, it is necessary in each case to go back to the period, not of crude beginnings (which explain little), but of originality and bloom to learn the secret of the great masters from themselves. This is not less true of Greek culture than of Hebrew prophecy or of the great Oriental religions. But the attempt in this case is in some ways more difficult ; partly because of the comparatively slight predominance obtained in Hellas by the priesthood, who, being mostly elective, and in any case local and unorganised, formed no separate caste, and had no interests apart from the other citizens. Freedom and consequent variation in development are marked characteristics of spiritual life in 6 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE V Greece. Hence the phenomena to be studied are extremely diverse, and a process of distillation is needed in order to bring out any clear result. Opinions thus obtained must always be given with an understood reservation. In speak- ing of the forms of thought, feeling or imagination belonging to an age, it is impossible to avoid giving to them a distinct- ness which they could not have for those who were under their immediate sway. Such statements, therefore, so far as they are justified, must be accepted as affording an incite- ment to the fresh study of the literature in itself, else they are apt to become a sort of caput mortuum, and to lose all suggestiveness and value. In what follows I shall refer but rarely and from & distance to other religions. 'Analogy,' it has been said, ' is a broken reed, which may often serve to point the way, but should not be used as a staff to lean upon.' The air i& full of generalisations gathered from a wide and various field , many of which may serve to guide and enlighten observa- tion, but none of them can be regarded as exhaustive. The student of a particular culture may be grateful for their help and guidance, but to bring them prominently forward would only lead to confusion. It is unavoidable, however, to refer briefly at the outset to recent speculations concerning prehistoric religion. For in all religions there are survivals from primitive times, and Greece is no exception to the rule. But in considering these, our desire will be to distinguish what is characteristic of the Greeks, as we know them, from the accidents of their inheritance, and to appreciate the fertile ingenuity of the Hellenic genius in adapting obsolete elements, whose mean- ing had faded, not only to new forms of beauty, but to the expression of deep thoughts of undying significance. 1. Primitive man, they tell us, felt himself to be sur- rounded by living powers akin to him yet other than him- self, and fearing harm or seeking help from these, looked wistfully to inanimate objects which he endowed with life as having struck his fancy or inspired him with terror. There are not wanting traces of this, the simplest of all forms of worship, in Greek ritual and mythology. PREVIOUS FACTORS 7 Whether it were really the earliest form or a subsequent undergrowth fortunately does not concern us. 2. A further stage hardly less strange to us, which the Greek of historic times had largely outgrown, is the worship of plants and animals. Of this there are many traces in Greek culture, yet hardly in the primeval forms of which our generation has heard and read so much. Some isolated phenomena (the names of the Sicyonian tribes for instance) have been thus explained, but such a mode of interpretation is apt to be extended too far. The absence of any clear remains of ' totemism ' may be due to the fact that the tribal system had long since been supplanted by larger organisa- tions, or to the original prevalence of patriarchal government. But it is still open to doubt whether the attribution of a mystic power to animals must of necessity in every case be associated with the assumption of blood relationship between the animal and the tribe. In another sense the theory here referred to is suggestive of an important truth which has been recently made popular through the writings of the late Mr. Robert son- Smith. That man in society, whether the unit were the family or the tribe, was not moved to religious rites by fear alone, but that amongst the powers with which he imagined himself to be surrounded he selected one in whom he placed his confi- dence and hope, claiming him as an ally ; that this power became to him the symbol of a common life, a rule of conduct, a preserver from the public enemy ; and that his most solemn act was one of communion with his god and with his kindred, is a conception which throws a flood of light on the inmost spirit of early worship. It explains the joyousness which attended every act of sacrifice, and reminds us that even in the earliest religion, which is thus distinguished from magic and superstition, there is an element not of fear only but of hope and love. But to return to animal worship. That either in the hunting or the pastoral stage of culture, an intense interest should be felt in the animal life with which the people were associated for good or evil, is easily intelligible, and when no abstract expression has been found for ideas and attributes 8 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE whose importance is notwithstanding felt, a rude symbolism is the most obvious vehicle of expression. The very simplicity of such symbolism, lending itself to various interpretations, is a fruitful source of misunderstanding. So with regard to tree worship, which may either be referred to the time when men lived on acorns or beech nuts, and so literally depended on the bounty of the tree, or may be connected, as it has often been, with another set of notions altogether (see below, section 3). Some instances, however, are too obvious to be mistaken. The power of water permeating all things, now as a torrent coming down with destructive force, now renew- ing the face of nature with generative influence, found its concentrated symbol in the bull, whose onset was irresistible, while he was the father of the herd. Earth, the genial mother of all living, whose kindly produce nourished youth and age, was thought of by an agricultural people as the sacred Cow : the god of light, in the imagination of a nomadic people, on similar grounds might take the form of a ram, and so on. On the other hand, those creatures who are the enemies of mankind, or of their works, the wolf that ravages the flocks, the boar that wastes the produce of the ground, would be sometimes propitiated as divine powers and sometimes sacrificed to the protecting deity. There were other ways in which wild animals had impressed the human imagination. Thus the lion, as the type of strength and courage, was the favourite symbol when these virtues, so important to a primitive race, could not otherwise find an adequate expression. However this may be, it is clear that the worship of animals and the strange rites attending it had an important influence on the growth of religion. There appear to have been acts of faith in which the worshippers sought to identify themselves with their god and to partake of his attributes, by donning the skins of lions, bulls, foxes, goats, and even asses. Such rites as these, whether in- digenous or imported, left undoubted traces on Greek culture. 3. But animal worship is only one of many concurrent sources of religion in Greece ; another is that strange phase of enthusiasm which appeared early at so many centres, and PKEVIOUS FACTORS 9 "became so ineradicable, which arose from a sense of the mystery of continuous life, or, as Professor Jowett expressed it, ' from man's wonder at his power of producing another in his likeness.' Whether this came in from the north, south, east, or west, from Thrace, Syria, Egypt (as Herodotus thinks), or Libya (as Mr. Flinders Petrie suggests), makes little difference to our study of it in historic times. There are yet other forms of worship closely akin to this, involving the idea of sex and procreation, such as those which assume the opposition or parallelism of male and female powers, the primitive philosophy of a marriage between Heaven and Earth, and all its consequences. There is the whole range of phenomena having to do with the productiveness of cattle and of the ground, with seedtime and harvest, with the vintage and the winepress ; all these are inevitable factors in early religion, and enter largely into the foundation of which Greek religion is the superstructure. The worship of Demeter, of Dionysus, and of Cybele, though coming from different centres, yet if traced back far enough seem to intertwine their roots in the tendencies thus arising, and were accordingly amalgamated in later times. 4. A higher influence also enters in, perhaps from the east, but yet to some extent probably operative in pre- historic times, the worship of the elements : the over-arching sky, the sun and moon, the constellations, the dawn, the cloud, the storm, the wind, the sea. Solar mythology has been somewhat discredited of late, and there is perhaps a danger of this factor being too much ignored. It is creeping in again, however, at another entrance, through speculations on Babylonian and Egyptian influence. In actual worship attributes derived from various sources were combined. Apollo is certainly a god of flocks and herds, but is not the shepherd also a watcher of the sky ? Who is to assure us that a nomad people were insensible to skyey influences ? Artemis is the patron of all wild creatures and of the chase. But may not the imagination of a tribe of hunters have been stirred by the sight of the moon, walking in brightness among the trees of the forest? Even if we must travel back to Chaldea for the origin of such impressions, are we 10 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE not daily finding more evidence of very early contact between distant peoples ? A theory has been maintained according to which not only the orientation of Greek temples, but many features of Greek mythological tradition are due to the existence among the priestly caste of a knowledge of stellar pheno- mena, derived ultimately from Chaldea. These notions appear to me as yet to be very imperfectly substantiated, and, if the fact were so, it has had little perceptible influence on religion in Greek literature. This religion was not made by any priesthood, but by the singer whose motive was poetical and artistic, and the question for us is, not what traditions about the stars may have been held in a mystery by those who built the temples and fixed the seasons of great festivals, or impressed various emblems upon coins, but what thoughts, imaginations,, and emotions were awakened in the minds of those who worshipped and who went their way relying on the priestly arrangement of the ceremonial, but thinking their own thoughts, and guided by the imagination of their poets. It must be owned that the priesthood kept their supposed secret well. The names of certain constellations are known to Hesiod and even to Homer, and the Prometheus of Aeschylus is said to have taught mankind the risings and setting of the stars. Arc- turus and the Pleiads were allowed to mark certain seasons of the year ; but it is strange if astronomy and practical religion were from the first combined that it should have been left for Aratus in the Alexandrian time to divulge the fact, in versifying the science of Eudoxus ; and that the Lion Gate of Mycenae, if it symbolised the sun in Leo, should have faced north-west. It may be questioned whether the belief in stellar transformations, which became rife in Alexandrian times, is at all clearly traceable in Greek literature before Euripides ('Helena' 140). 5. Some persons find the origin of all religion in the worship of ancestors or of great men, who in their lifetime, for good or evil, had dominated a family or a tribe. There can be no doubt whatever that this element entered largely into Greek religion, although strangely enough there is hardly PREVIOUS FACTORS 11 a vestige of it in Homer. But neither can this be taken as an exclusive principle from which everything can be deduced. Mr. Lang, in the volume above mentioned, has argued with considerable force, that the conception of a supreme creator, the author of good and redresser of wrong, arises quite in- dependently of animism and ghost worship, at a very eavly stage of human culture. All the factors I have mentioned are really present ; they are all true causes, and they have acted and reacted on one another. It requires great caution, in dealing with phenomena so complex, to avoid tracing each of them to one of these various sources, and also when we consider the sameness of human nature not unduly to connect developments on Grecian soil with similar appearances in Babylonia, Phrygia or Egypt. There is a weighing of souls in the Egyptian * Book of the Dead,' and there is a weighing of destinies in Homer. A favourite vein of specu- lation would regard the image of the balance in the Iliad as derived by tradition from the sacred writing of another people, some thousand years or so before. But it is surely conceivable that so natural a figure may have occurred inde- pendently at long intervals to different minds. The study of savage races is very useful as a caution against the rash identification of similar phenomena. But this caution also may be pushed too far, and we still wait for clearer evidence upon the subject. The fascinating study of ' origins ' is made more difficult, as I have hinted above, by the freedom of the growth of religious ideas in Hellas as compared with Egypt, or Palestine, or Persia, or any other land in which the priest- hood obtained a dominant ascendency, and succeeded in stereotyping tradition. But this only renders the progress of religious ideas in Greece more interesting. No doubt if we could interview the priests of Delphi or Eleusis, as Herodotus professes to have conversed with the priests of Memphis, we should learn many things which neither poet nor philosopher has cared to record. But what we should gain by this would be less to our immediate purpose than what lies actually before us. For Greek religion as an 12 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE historical fact the contribution of Hellas to the spiritual life of humanity has been transmitted, not through priestly tradition, but by the living voices of poets, historians, orators, philosophers. This is itself, of all the facts, the most char- acteristic. Greece was from first to last, beginning with the fathers of epic poetry, the home of spiritual freedom. The singer was himself a sacred person, owing allegiance prin- cipally to the muse and comparatively independent of other observances. Priest, soothsayer, king, herald, and warrior, were all contemplated by him with disinterested objectivity. He reflects the mind of his age ; he has also inspirations which reach far beyond it. Homer, in point of human feeling, was as untrammelled as Plato in philosophic thought. The Greeks had no period in their historical development corresponding to the age of Ezra among the Hebrews, or to the predominance of the Theban priesthood in Egypt, or to Indian Brahmanism, or the late revival of Zoroastrian ritual in Persia. Such periods have given to those civilisations an appearance of immovable uniformity, which is probably very different from the reality if the whole were known. But if the scope of the present work forbids our dwelling at any length on questions which absorb the interest of Hellenic archaeologists, or on the discoveries of Egyptology and Assyriology, the importance of these studies is not for a moment to be ignored. So much at least is gained from such discoveries, that we are not burdened at the outset with a body of speculative disquisition which the investiga- tions of our contemporaries have proved to be baseless. The background recedes into greater distance, the whole is seen in more just proportions, and while many new possi- bilities have been suggested, experience warns us against making too rash use of them. One general truth seems to result from the inquiries which have made such rapid progress of late years namely, that in their primitive forms all the religions of mankind are strangely alike. To express it in the terms of a current philosophy, homogeneity attends the earliest phases ; evolution brings differentiation, and this again inevitably precedes the final integration. It is with growth that humanity, whether in nation or individual, AKCHAEOLOGY AND FOLKLOKE 13 assumes its characteristic form. There is much wise sug- gestiveness in Professor Tiele's distinction between the origin of religion and its earliest phase. The germ of life is less apparent in the first green lobe which the seed puts forth than in the full-grown tree. There is a widespread fallacy on this subject analogous to that which has sometimes prevailed about the meaning of words. It is a common idea that words are sufficiently explained by their etymology, which is no doubt some help, but such crude analysis has very little to do with the state of diction at an advanced period of any language, and still less with the realities corresponding to it. An extreme stage of the fallacy to which I refer is reached when it is imagined that by tracing the verb 'to be ' in several languages, an approach may be made towards unravelling the secret of existence. The attempt to interpret bymeans of etymology has often led to ridiculous mistakes, and the same is true of attempts to explain the nature of religion by bringing some advanced phase of it into immediate connection with real or supposed primitive phenomena, which are illus- trated by surviving customs of remote peasantry. Suppose that a stranger, in describing Scottish religion, were to say that our temples open generally to the west, though with less precision than that observed in some other lands ; that we have abjured hero worship, but still keep the vigil of the day that was formerly sacred to all the heroes, and that on this occasion certain rites of divination are maintained, such as that of burning hazel nuts on the hearthstone and of dipping a garment in a stream and looking backward, with other strange observances which are described by the poet of the nation ; that horse-shoes are hung outside doors as a protection against evil spirits or the evil eye ; that offerings are made at sacred wells, to which the sick .and infirm are carried for miraculous cures ; that in some districts if a pig is met with in the road the person who encounters it must immediately touch cold iron ; that on the vigil preceding the first day of the year, a time sacred to a local Bacchus whom the inhabitants call John Barleycorn, a custom has been introduced from over seas of lighting up a pine tree on 14 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE which offerings are suspended, and round which the children move ; (that this remnant of tree worship should have come from abroad is more remarkable, because fir-trees are so common in the land) would this be an adequate description of Scottish religion ? Would it help us to understand that power which arouses and also calms our passions, controls our energies, purifies our homes the power that has wrought out our liberties and made us a nation? Such phenomena as those I have alluded to are inseparable, it may be, from what may be roughly described as popular religien ; they afford material for endless investigation on the part of the students of folklore ; but they do not con- stitute religion in the sense in which the term is here employed. They form rather the leaf-mould out of which it springs, whose quality is indicated by the weeds that grow i*pon it ; but they have little to do either with the deeper roots or the spreading branches. To suppose, for example, that any light can be thrown upon the spirit and meaning of Euripides by connecting the action of the Bacchae with some ritual of which the traces remain, say, amongst the Russian peasantry though the process may be ingenious, and some such far-off connection may have a real existence is a mode of commentary which confuses more than it enlightens. For it ignores a whole history of feeling and reflection, of action and reaction, of thought and imagination, that has come between. Such speculations have an absorbing interest, an indubitable value, but they provide no answer to the questions which concern -us here viz. first, What were the religious motives which actuated the Greeks in historical times ? and secondly, What did the Greeks or any of them contribute towards the religious inheritance of humanity ? Was Hermes a god of winds or of boundaries, or a Phoenician culture-god ? Was Apollo originally the sun-god, or, as Usener thinks, only the warder-off of ill (a7ro-7rsX\c0v) ? To us it matters little, so long as we know how the Greeks of historic times conceived of them. Athena and Artemis as well as Aphrodite have been traced by some to the Babylonian Ishtar, while others (countenanced by Plato) would identify Athena with the 'THE GEEEK SPIRIT' 15 Egyptian or Libyan goddess Neit. But such speculations have no bearing on what an ordinary Athenian felt or believed. The Christian seasons of Christmas and of Easter have till lately been supposed to have some relation to Pagan festivals of the winter solstice and of the return of spring, and there is no doubt that the orientation of churches is remotely derived from the east. But does it therefore follow that there is a close and vital connection between the religion of Babylon or of Egypt and that of modern Europe ? Or because the Feast of Pentecost coincides with the Jewish Feast of Weeks, do Christian worshippers at Whitsuntide remember that it is harvest time in Judaea? A German critic has made the suggestive remark that the complete personification of divine names was only possible when their original meaning had been forgotten. When the Spartans delayed their coming to meet the Persians on the ground that it was not yet full moon ; or when they opposed the Pisistratidae in obedience to the oracle, because as Herodotus expresses it they chose to obey God rather than men ; or when they allowed Mardonius to over-run Attica because they were bound to keep the festival of the Hyacinthia, on which they imagined that the safety of Sparta depended ; or when at Plataea they refused to move until in answer to the prayer of their king the omens were favourable, they gave evidence of the indubitable reality of one aspect of Greek religion ; it was the same clinging to the letter of tradition which led a small minority of the Athenians to trust in the wooden wall on the Acropolis. But the majority of the latter people, who sent their wives and children across 'to Salamis while they manned their fleet, deserting the family hearths and the public temples alike, and according to Plutarch formally entrusting Athens to the keeping of Athena, evinced a nobler faith and were obedient to a higher law, to which Themistocles gave an expression that still lives on British soil, when he told them that by the wooden wall they must understand their fleet. It is to the consciousness of such higher impulses, and of a divine power directing them Athena still caring for her people, though her image was destroyed that the world owes immortal 16 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE utterances of religious thought which are still working and must ever work for good. The higher mind of Greece was gradually evolved ; and although it shone most brightly in dark hours, was never thoroughly recast or moulded anew out of the furnace of a great national affliction, such as the Captivity was to the Hebrews. Hence the Greek cannot be said to have learned the lesson of the blessedness of sorrow, although at moments he came very near to the revelation of a divine being suffering for man. Yet if Greek religion left us nothing sofusile, if I may be allowed the expression, so- penetrated with the fire of inspiration and of holy zeal as Hebrew prophecy, our religious inheritance would be the poorer if we had not also the serener light of Hellas, in which the heavenly and earthly are blended in one clear vision. The clouds of mythology which imagination had illuminated still hung about their most aspiring thoughts, and blurred their outlines, and yet without relinquishing the past, the Greeks, or rather an exceptional Greek here and there, saw further into divine truth in some directions than men of any other race have seen. In this process of gradual evolution, especially at certain points in it, different strata of religious culture are found existing side by side : traditional obser- vances, new rites and doctrines and speculative ideas. While the national worship was maintained with extreme care, that which was most essential to it was not the understanding of its origin, but the fact that it was national : the expression of a common feeling of piety towards the state, and to the power that upheld the state. But even the popular or national religion was no longer precisely what it had been ; for through the influence of successive priests and legislators, the public ritual had undergone many modifications, although these were in a manner disguised by being represented as revivals of the past. Each victory or defeat brought new gods or heroes into prominence ; an earthquake or a famine gave fresh stimulus to certain worships, often at the direction of an oracle. The dynastic importance of particular families gave precedence to the deities whom they worshipped, and the struggle between progressive and conservative in- stincts within the same people resulted at once in the per- 'THE GREEK SPIRIT' 17 petuation of old customs and in their transformation or the infusion into them of a new spirit. In this secular process, which cannot be followed into minutiae, some inborn tendencies of the race were sure in the long run to make themselves apparent. Thus the ob- servances of a particular age, while they have the appearance of fixity and of being merely a deposit from the past, are really, so far as they are alive, the expression of present needs, desires, emotions, and, like that which they express, are in a state of transition. This continuous growth may be interrupted by some violent convulsion, but when the trouble is past it ' will close and be itself again/ and to the popular consciousness will seem to have been always the same. This appearance of identity is illusory, as I have said ; but that which is really the same and yet not the same, because ever developing, is the mind and spirit of a people, which, while cherishing old traditions because they are national, interprets them according to its own stage of thought and culture. Thus we return again to the same point. The origin of a religious rite or ordinance is one thing, its significance for those who observe it is quite another thing. What in a religious sense are we to understand by the Greek spirit? That is the question to be solved. And before attempting to answer it through an examination of Greek literature, some superficial generalities and rhetorical commonplaces have to be swept aside. 1. Since the renaissance of art, the Greek has been commonly regarded as purely and simply a worshipper of beauty. Mr. C. H. Pearson sums up what most men think, in saying that modern civilisation owes its principles of beauty to the Greeks, of law to the Komans, and of religion to the Hebrews ; and Mr. William Watson, at once a refined poet and a critic of uncommon insight, says that the Greek race was 'simply intoxicated with beauty.' We shall find that that is after all a partial view, and it is apt to be associated with another impression that is still more misleading. Many persons imagine that the one point in which the Greeks excelled other races was the power of enjoying life ; and it is supposed that the way to imitate them is to take everything c 18 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE lightly and not seriously. It needs not to enter at all deeply into Greek culture, to see that there could not well be a more strange perversion. It is simply ludicrous when ap- plied to the fifth century B.C., and can only be accounted for by supposing that some of those flowers which bloomed around the ruins of Hellenic culture in its decay, such as the epigrams of the Anthology, and the songs of the pseudo- Anacreon, have been mistaken for the original substance. The Greeks made life beautiful, not because they were self-pleasers, but because they believed in gods who cared for human perfection for perfect bodies, perfect minds, perfect works, and splendid actions. Not unfrequently the religion of the Greeks, so far as they are credited with religion, is supposed to be identical or co-extensive with the significance of the remains of ancient art. But this supposi- tion leads to impressions which are to some extent mis- leading. As in the Italy of the Renaissance, where the artist often failed to share in the devotion to which he gave expression, so that the beauty of a work is not always com- mensurate with its pious intention, while the devotion of the worshipper often rested upon associations quite distinct from artistic perfection (Titian is often less religious than Bellini or Cima da Conegliano), so we cannot doubt that the sculptor of an archaic image, whether in wood or stone, may often have been more simply devoted to the god whom he sought to represent than the great masters who came after him. And when the art of sculpture was at its height, we may well believe that the pious worshipper was often more impressed with the sacredness of some formless wooden idol than with a masterpiece of Pheidias or Ageladas. Eeligion gave the impulse to art as its handmaid, and the temples which crowned each height, the shrines by the wayside with the altars before them, and the low-reliefs representing mythical scenes, were the monuments of collective or national religious feeling, to which they gave continual nourishment, and which they informed with nobler thoughts and wider conceptions. But the handmaid could not command the mistress, and the sacredness which attached to some square pillar with the head of Hermes by COMMONPLACE VIEWS 19 the roadside had not much to do with the beauty of the workmanship. Greek art was rooted in religion, but the unsurpassable height which it attained was due to the independent working of the Greek spirit, freely idealising the human form in association with the conception of the divine. Meanwhile the religion to which it owed its life and to which it ministered had other workings, of which, as Oedipus says of his own destiny, mere beauty were an inadequate exponent. 2. Since the revival of letters the Greeks have been regarded by many thinkers as the type of pure reason : not Pheidias now, or Polycleitus, but Aristotle, is the prominent figure, ' the master of those that know.' But in studying the religious life of Hellas, as shown in the literature from the seventh to the fourth century, we shall find much that is discordant with such a view, and side by side with clear thinking we shall become aware of vague mystical yearnings and unreasoning emotions. In this connection it is to be remembered that Greek literature, as we have it, is but a fragmentary reflex of Greek thought and feeling. 3. Another literary commonplace is that which speaks of the serenity (Heiterkeit) of the Greek. In this again more account is taken of the form than of the spirit of Hellenic culture. The conception of Serenity gives but a poor account of Aeschylus or of Demosthenes, though it has .a true application to Pindar ; and in him, too, there is often an under-current of sadness beneath the persistent euphemism. 4. Once more, the Greek ideal is thought to be summed up in the word ' moderation ' the Delphic fj,rjSsv dyav, the Aristotelian JJLSCTOT^S. Moderation is a great word, and enters largely into all that is best in the Greek philosophic temper. But it is not to be forgotten that it is moderation supervening upon intensity, that ' beneath the marble exterior there is a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion.' The history of religion cannot be separated altogether from secular history least of all in Hellas. Religious im- pulses have in all ages and countries been apt to become c 2 20 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE the instruments of policy, and in the case of no people is this more obvious than amongst the Greeks. It is a nice question how far this subordination was conscious or uncon- scious, and how far in either case it may have been consistent with the sincere acceptance of the religion. The great importance that was attached to Delos in the fifth century was intensified by the necessity of having a centre for the confederacy within reach of Athens, provided with a religious sanction ; and when the Athenians added emphasis to this by cleansing the island, and removing the bones of those who had been buried there, they were guided by a strange combination of sagacious policy with superstitious feeling. When Themistocles restrained the Athenians from the pursuit of Xerxes by saying, ' this deliverance is the work of the gods, whose jealousy would not suffer the pride of an impious man. Let us not provoke them by following our advantage too far, but let us rebuild our ruined temples, and restore our homesteads and our family hearths,' he availed himself of religious sentiments which were alive in every Athenian breast. But how far did he share them himself while making use of them : especially if, as Herodotus calmly says, ' he was providing a refuge for himself, in case his countrymen should turn against him, by establishing a claim on the gratitude of Xerxes ' ? The most obvious answer is that he was not sincere. Yet it may not be the true answer ; and it is only fair to remember that in their earlier forms religion and public life were the same thing. This case affords an illustration of the mixed condition of human affairs, in which the ideal is blended with the actual so inextricably as to appear unreal. Yet its reality remains when all attendant circumstances have vanished. Human imperfections cannot permanently cloud the aspira- tion after the divine, and even the shadow of a divine authority may long outlive the faults of its ministers, as in fact the influence of the Delphic oracle survived in spite of acknowledged mystifications and deceptions, and even the well-supported imputation of bribery. The example of Themistocles may further remind us that in speaking of Athenian religion in the present volume KEL1GION AND MYTHOLOGY 21 we shall have less to do with the religious attitude of the many than of the few. For it is this last which gives its main importance to the subject, and while it is interesting to know what the average Athenian felt about Ajax or Theseus or Athena, this interest is largely due to the gratitude, we owe to those select spirits who soared above the level of their age and have left to succeeding times deep thoughts and great imaginations couched in perfect words, which belong eternally to what is highest in man, and are constituent rays of that harmonious truth which is ' the light of all our seeing.' The Greeks partook of many faults which were prevalent in the ancient world : it is often said, for example, that they were sensual ; so were the Hebrews, as their own prophets bear witness ; so were other Asiatics in a super- lative degree. But there were men amongst the Greeks, and not one or two only, who learned to govern their own lives for the good of others, to strain after perfection, and to realise in human nature a noble conception of the divine, ' filling up,' as Aristophanes puts it, ' the image of virtue.' It is with these that we concern ourselves, not with the common herd. But it may be truly said of the Greeks as a people, that the sheer activity of mind continually tended to raise and purify those elements of human nature which in less gifted races are left to grovel in the mire. Even their best men long looked indulgently on some things which we have learned to execrate, but about these also their greatest clearly saw the truth at last ; and it had been anticipated in the divine silences of Homer. A distinction to be continually borne in mind is that between religious feeling and mythology : the attitude of the worshipper is often different from that of the hymn-writer or the religious poet. The one is prepossessed and absorbed in the act of worship, the other has a free and unembarrassed mind. The worshipper looks up in all simplicity to the power that is able to help or save, and is anxious to omit no jot of the required ceremonial, as he is instructed in it by the exegetes or the priest. If he is a learned man some part of the legend of his god may occur to his imagination, but he 22 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE will dwell upon it only for immediate edification and with a reverence which precludes wild thoughts or strange inven- tions. The mythologist, on the other hand, is nothing if not inventive ; his role is to entertain and please. He too is guided by religious feeling : he is eager to engage the minds of his hearers with thoughts about the great being of whom his own imagination is full ; and there are limits conventional and spiritual which he may not pass ; but in the hour of festival the gods too are imagined as being in a festive mood, and as not disdaining to have told concerning them what in the licence of their divinity they have not been ashamed to do. Thus the religious feelings of men in their moments of distress and difficulty are not to be gauged by the representations of divine action to which in times of ease and festivity it was their delight to listen. The belief of man in powers that are ready and willing to help him, especially in times of anxiety or suffering, and still more his belief in spiritual enemies, is always liable to be confused with traditional or arbitrary notions imposed upon him from without, to which, in his ignorance and im- maturity of thought, he lends too willing an ear. The wonder is, not that so much of blind faith in groundless imaginations should have entered into Greek religion, but that Greeks without ceasing to be religious should have worn so lightly the burden which descended from an im- memorial past. Vague spiritual presences, uncertain whether friendly or hostile, had haunted human spirits before the family or even the state was a reality, that is before the existence of religion in any true sense at all. Such influences were only too ready to revive, especially in weaker minds. There was, moreover, the bondage to impressions, words, observances, which had a living reality for some past genera- tion of mankind, but continued to exercise their ascendency over a generation that had lost the clue to them and had outgrown the stage of incipient thought and reasoning in which they originated. Here the fertility of invention native to the Greeks was of great service to them. We sometimes speak of the religion that is learned at a mother's knee, and SUPERSTITION 23 Plato in like manner argues that the existence of the gods cannot be doubtful to those who have seen their parents sacrificing and offering libations. The same motive of filial piety gave strength to rites and ideas handed down from primitive ages, accepted without question, and trans- mitted with less and less of understanding. As thought from time to time awakened, or emotion roused imagination, new meanings were read into the old forms, and in these new meanings the spirit of the age revealed itself. Things which it was impious to question, it became a moral neces- sity partially to explain. The following were some of the chief modes in which superstition entered into Greek religion : 1. The notion of divine anger became ultimately the occasion of much that was most valuable in Greek thought. But the crude form of it, which saw in each disaster an outcome of divine revenge, or of the envy of the gods at human prosperity, clung persistently to the popular religion, and effectually overclouded such glimpses as reflection had opened of the nature of God. Even in historical times occasions arose in which the panic or despair of a people could only be appeased by rites of hideous cruelty, which were supposed necessary to pacify the wrath (prfvipa) of an angry god. (Such recrudescence of disused religious forms in times of stress is found in all religions see Jeremiah xliv. 15-19.) The ministers of religion in counselling such rites are not to be accused of heartless hypocrisy. They acted under an impulse in which they sincerely shared, or at worst followed the dictates of tradition, in the hope of satis- fying the craving for religious peace which seemed otherwise unattainable for their countrymen. Thus the human mind, by its natural working, contributed to its own enslavement. It is hard to say how long the custom of human sacrifice was continued in Arcadia, but it would seem to have still existed in the time of Plato, and there is little reason to doubt that Themistocles, however unwillingly, yielded to the clamour of the Athenian populace for the slaughter of Persian prisoners in honour of Hellenic gods, an act only less barbarous or less inconsistent with general Greek usage 24 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE than that of the Persians of the same period, in burying their prisoners alive. Yet Greek religion in the time of Plato and even of Themistocles was a deep reality, and in the higher minds was already penetrated with moral enlightenment. 2. So far men's thoughts were guided by the natural conviction that the * curse causeless cannot come.' But the belief in gods suggested not only fear but hope : the hope, namely, of communication between man and God. The powers which closely surrounded human life could not be imagined as altogether silent. Hence the constantly recurring belief in omens and signs, a belief that prevailed especially among women. What is here most noticeable is the persistence of the belief, side by side with an ever- returning scepticism. The scepticism is almost as old as the belief. Penelope is evermore seeking to diviners, but Telemachus is tired of listening to them. The wise Noemon interprets aright the augury of the eagles, in accordance with the secret wish of his heart, while the bold Eurymachus scouts every omen that thwarts his purpose. In this he may be thought to speak out of the naughtiness of his rnind, but his disbelief is shared by the patriotism of Hector, who declares that the best augury is to defend one's country. The diviner is, notwithstanding, a constant figure in Greek life ; and his influence, though often suspected of corruption, was none the less important. This general tendency found its main support in the great oracular seats, of which Dodona in the earliest times, and Delphi through- out Greek history, stood out pre-eminent among a host of less important centres. The divining well mentioned by Pausanias, into which you dropped a mirror and took it out and read your fortune, is only a particular instance of a widely spread phenomenon. What led originally to the singular importance attaching to Dodona and Delphi on the mainland, or to Branchidae in Ionia, is a point of great obscurity, in which mere accident may have had a large share. The only thing to be here insisted upon is the fact that the human desire for divine communication in the crises of private or public life maintained the ascendency of those institutions FIVE STAGES 25 which had the sanction of primeval reverence, and of asso- ciation with the immediate presence of a god. The period of Hellenic culture which I propose to con- sider has five chief culminating points. 1. The prehistoric age, vaguely described as Mycenaean, of which we know very little, but of which scattered hints have lately been gathered by archaeological investigation. It was, in fact, the bloom of an advanced civilisation which had a very real existence, whether to be called Achaean, Danaan, or Pelasgian. It is necessary to refer to this period, but I shall only touch upon it in so far as it appears to me to throw some light on subsequent developments which are manifested in literature. 2. The Homeric age, apparently the product of this Achaean culture transferred to the coasts of Asia Minor, and there again developed in new forms. 3. The growth of the great cities, and the first rise of philosophy in the sixth century before Christ. Side by side with this we shall have to study the main features of the post-Homeric religion, preceding the specially Attic period. 4. The period following the Persian war. In this, while the Attic genius takes the lead, we have also to include the reflection of a wider Hellenism in the histories of Herodotus. 5. The development of philosophy, chiefly on Athenian soil. But the division of our subject cannot be made to turn thus simply upon considerations of time. We have to con- sider also, especially in the earlier period, distinctions first of race, and secondly of locality. Throughout Hellenic culture, there is a general community of type underlying all distinctions. But every city, whether small or great, had its own peculiarities (Herodotus tells us that there were four pronounced differences of dialect amongst the lonians of Asia Minor), and above all, there was a marked diversity between Dorian, or at least Spartan, institutions and those of the rest of Greece. Nor was it a matter of indiffer- ence whether the Dorian city was planted at Sparta or in 26 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Ehodes or Crete, at Syracuse, or mingled with Achaean and perhaps barbarian blood at Tarentum or in Gyrene. These separatist tendencies proved stronger in the end than the nobler impulse to pan-Hellenism. But it is not to be forgotten, that while this last was rooted in an essential community of race, it was also encouraged and supported by great religious institutions. Amongst these the Delphic oracle and the Olympian games were the most prominent. It is a common observation that religion and morality sometimes move on separate lines, and that in their gradual approximation consists the elevation of humanity. In one sense, of course, religion is ethical always, and never more so than in primitive times, for it is a rule of life which enters into the minutest details of conduct ; but when not enlightened by reason, it is a blind guide, often leading to the most monstrous perversions. The awakening of reason and of true moral feeling has often taken the form of irreligion ; but there is a weakness inherent in such a negative attitude, which prompts a counter movement towards the purifying of religion from within. In each successive stage of the long history, the measure of advance is registered through the free action of individual minds ; and it is because the best minds in Greece could always freely act, that the expression of their inmost thoughts has an imperish- able interest for mankind. The form which that expression took was relative to the conditions of popular belief and custom ; this detracts nothing, however, from its charm and freshness, but rather enhances the touch of nature which proves the kinship of the great minds of Greece to the wise and good of other lands and times. 27 CHAPTEE II ANTECEDENTS AND SURVIVALS Aryan and Semitic elements Adumbration of the earliest phases Pre- ceding civilisations The Mycenaean age The Aryan stock Contact with aborigines Foreign influences Survivals ^Recapitulation. ALTHOUGH the subject of this volume is religion in Greek literature, it is necessary to premise some observations on the time before the literature begins. But in the case of Greek religion this is especially difficult. Greek culture stands out before us as an independent fact, self-developed out of previous elements which are imperfectly known. Yet our idea of it is inevitably modified as we gain some fragmen- tary perception of preceding civilisations, and of the con- stitution of the races surrounding the Aegean and Ionian seas, in ages before the earliest date that can be assigned to the Homeric poems. Speculation and enquiry are still active about the pre- historic age in what was afterwards called Hellas. Between those who refer everything to an Aryan or Indo-Germanic origin, and the supporters of some theory of early Semitic elements, whether coming in through Egypt and Libya, in the third millennium B.C., or through Phoenician commerce towards the end of the second millennium, or through Hittite and Phrygian influences at an indefinite time, there is a con- fused noise of battle that is distracting to the ear. First the discoveries of Schliemann .seemed to revolutionise the whole subject. And now those of Mr. Flinders Petrie and Mr. Arthur Evans are threatening to open a new region from which other cross lights enter in. The comparison of late authorities with newly found inscriptions of uncertain date has given rise to a crop of ingenious theories, which it 28 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE is difficult either to assent to or refute. Another Lobeck seems to be required, who should sift out the more question- able evidence, and determine the residuum of demonstrated fact, however fragmentary it may prove to be. Instead of dogmatising in the present state of knowledge, it may be well to put into the form of queries some considerations which are suggested by recent investigations. Are similar names, traditions, customs, in Arcadia, Boeotia, Thessaly, or in Elis and Aetolia, to be accounted for by a southward or a north- ward migration, or by common tendencies approaching from east or west? Was the gap which separates Hellenic culture from the remote past now partly known to us, a period of declension or of development? Are the traces of Semitic origin, some of which are indubitable, to be referred to a Libyan infusion in the third millennium B.C. or to Egyptian domination in the second millennium, or to Phoenician enterprise, or to contact with Phrygia by way of Thrace or across the Aegean ? And are we to suppose that ideas, symbols, or rites, which came in from the east, retained much anywhere of their original meaning ? The persistence of tradition under all changes is indeed surprising, and there is something disquieting in the circumstance (if Pausanias was rightly informed) that a shape so un-Hellenic as that of the Phigalian Demeter should have lasted into Roman times. But that which is at once difficult and desirable to ascertain in the study of Greek origins, is the blend of diverse influences meeting in one wide channel. How strangely composite, for example, was the religion of Delphi : the navel of the earth, the grave of Dionysus, and his nocturnal haunt, the seat of magic rites analogous to those of South Sea Islanders, yet under the Apolline priest- hood a source of mental and moral illumination spreading far and wide ! As we look steadily at the welter of facts and opinions still awaiting settlement, some dim forms begin to look forth upon us from the backward abysm of time. 1. Out of the vagueness of Polydaemonism, there emerges here and there the conception of a male and female power, supreme over all at first unnamed : it is enough to specify the god and goddess mentioned amongst more recent ANTECEDENTS 29 deities in the Eleusinian rites : also the powers worshipped as Pan and Selene in Arcadia, and at Dodona the mysterious divinities who in historic times assumed the names of Zeus and Dione. 2. There is the power of Earth, beneficent, mysterious, associated with the nether gloom. She is the author of fruitfulness and barrenness ; she is the Great Mother hence identified with Khea and with Cybele ; she has a child who appears and disappears hence the twofold image of the Great Goddesses, recognised in later times as Demeter and Persephone, Damia and Auxesia, or the like. Earth worship passes readily on the one hand into Chthonian religion, and on the other into the power of divination. 3. Sometimes pairing with the Earth, there is a god of the great deep : known in historic times chiefly as Poseidon. And it is observable that his earliest seats are not upon the seashore, except at Corinth and Troezen, but far inland : at Mantinea, at the Minyan Orchomenos, and in the hollows of Thessalian hills. 4. There is also the power that rules in high places, identified sometimes with Cronos, more commonly with Zeus. He gives the rain, he rules the clouds, he wields the lightning, and lives amidst the brightness of the sky. If 2 and 3 remind us of some Babylonian worships, in Zeus (Dyaus, the bright one) we confidently recognise the Aryan stock. 5. Again there comes in the eternal Feminine in various forms : Aphrodite, Urania, Hera, Artemis. In some regions this class of worship becomes confused, but it is throughout associated with marriage or virginity, with childbirth or widowhood and bereavement. Aphrodite has Phoenician affinities, while Artemis sometimes passes into an almost Phrygian phase, and sometimes assumes the attributes of Persephone. 6. Less mysterious and remote, more familiar but not less reverenced, are sons and daughters of the highest who are also comrades and helpers of mankind. Some of these are ever immortal ; others die and are lamented, they are born again and men rejoice. The chief among them are 30 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Apollo and Athena, the enlighteners, guides, and defenders of the race who pray to them. Attending on them are various ' culture deities,' patrons of the arts of life: Hephaestus, Triptolemus, Asclepius, the Graces and the Muses, the Dioscuri, Hermes, Dionysus, Herakles. That in some regions, as in Thrace or Crete, Dionysus was originally the supreme god, or that the universal hero to whom the name of Herakles was attached came to be identified with a Semitic sun-god, need not trouble us in this general survey. 7. Rumours of contention between divine powers, as between Apollo and Herakles at Delphi, Athena and Poseidon in Attica and elsewhere, have been variously accounted for ; the most plausible explanation on the whole, though not universally applicable, is the introduction of a new worship by a conquering race. Tales of contention of the human with the divine, always ending in disaster, may sometimes be mere moral apologues, but may also indicate the gradual triumph of an unfamiliar worship, as in the legends of Lycurgus and Pentheus, of Niobe and of the daughters of Proetus. 8. Persistent amidst all changes in lands which can be called Hellenic, was the sacredness of Hestia, the family hearth. And here at all events, whatever may be thought of other religious phenomena, we are on the firm ground of Aryan tradition. Both word and thing belong to the peculium of the Indo-Germanic race. The tribes that in historic times inhabited the region, and tended gradually to become one people, had probably never been quite homogeneous, and their civilisation, includ- ing their religious rites, was composed of elements derived from different quarters. The extended seaboard, especially of the Peloponnesus and the neighbouring islands, gave large opportunity for contact with foreign influences. To what extent these had been operative in the earliest times is a question as yet undetermined. We know for example that Cyprus was successively occupied by Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors and became an important centre for the wide ramifications of Phoenician trade. In the reign of the Egyptian king Akhenaten about 1400 B.C., it was PRECEDING CIVILISATIONS 31 already, as a dependency of Egypt, the main source from which copper was imported. A small carved work in ivory, found in that island by Professor A. S. Murray and assigned by him to the eighth century B.C., affords a striking example of the effect of mutual contact. The subject, a griffon over- dome by a god in human form, is identical with that of a similar work in the Assyrian collection, but the spirit of the execution, conveying so powerfully the dominance of human over brute nature the same motive, by the way, as that in Botticelli's Minerva and the Centaur is essentially Greek, and not less so is the perfection of naturalistic art with which the chase of the wild bull and the disasters attending it are represented on the Vaphio gold cups, to which a much earlier date has been assigned. The discoveries of Mr. Arthur Evans go far to prove that well-nigh 2000 years before our era religious rites closely akin to the Egyptian had found their way to the south-eastern coast of Crete. And the dominance of Crete in early times over the islands of the Aegean, asserted by Thucydides, receives a striking con- firmation from the recently discovered poems of Bacchylides, from which it appears that the island Ceos, no less than the city of Miletus, claimed to have been colonised by Ecphantus, a descendant of Minos. Such isolated points do not warrant deductive inferences, but they are very suggestive. It may therefore be worth while to resume, in the merest outline, what we may take for known about these earlier civilisations. At a time not far removed from the date which used to be fixed for the creation of the world, the Semitic power of Babylon had risen and subdued an earlier race, known to archaeologists as Sumerians, whose religious ideas became incorporated with those of the conquering people. The original seat of this religion was Ur of the Chaldees, near the mouth of the Euphrates, on the Persian Gulf. About the middle of the second millennium (1500 B.C.) the power of Babylon was held in check by the dominance of Egypt to the south-west and by the rival power of the Hittites to the west. After the victories of Thothmes III., the king of Egypt was suzerain over parts of Syria, and governed them through native princes with whom he held 32 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE communication in the Babylonian language. Before 1200 B.C., if we may trust Egyptologists, the inhabitants of the shores of the Aegean and of the Mediterranean were known to the Egyptians under names which are perhaps equivalent to Achaean, Ionian, Sardinian, Tyrrhenian, Danaan, Carian, Lycian. These last are believed by some to be included amongst the allies of the Hittite power gathered together at the great battle of Kadesh in the fourteenth century B.C. From about the year 1300 B.C. the Assyrian power is extending, while that of Egypt is shrinking. A strangely vivid light has been thrown on its decline by the famous Tel-el-Amarna letters which are condensed in Mr. Flinders Petrie's * Syria and Egypt.' l If the Khabiri, there associated with the Amorite and Hittite powers, were the stock of the people afterwards known as Phoenicians, we have here the first clear indication of their arrival on the north Syrian seaboard. Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos are wrested by them from the suzerainty of Egypt in the later fourteenth century. We should therefore be justified in placing the period of the Phoenician sea power in the five centuries between 1300 and the end of the eighth century B.C. Those who have raised a doubt as to the existence of Phoenician 1 These letters afford some curious indications of the international work- ings of religion in an early time. 1. A Babylonian viceroy asks the king of Egypt for ' much gold ' for the decoration of a great temple which he is building (to a Babylonian god ?) 2. A Babylonian princess writes to her sister who is dwelling at the Egyptian court, ' May the gods of Burraburiash (Babylon) go with you ! ' 3. The king of Alashia (Cyprus) sends a vial of sacred oil for the anointing of the king of Egypt on his accession. 4. The governor of a city near Damascus complains that the Hittites have carried off Shamash, his father's god. He asks the king of Egypt for gold to ransom him. 5. Dushratta of Mitanni (Northern Mesopotamia), in writing to his son-in- law Amenhotep III., not only says, ' May Istar bless you ! ' but sends a statue of Istar, goddess of Nina (Nineveh ?), to be worshipped by Amenhotep and returned. 6. Similarly Eibaddi, the faithful tributary, writing from Gubla (Byblos) says : ' May the goddess of Gubla give power to the king ! ' 7. On the other hand the people of Dunip in their touching appeal for help say : ' The gods of Egypt dwell in Dunip ; but we no more belong to Egypt.' 8. And, similarly, the treacherous Akiyyi, in asseverating his loyalty, appeals ' to the king's gods, and the Sun.' ASSYRIA AND EGYPT 33 domination object to it on the ground that the Greeks borrowed no terms of navigation from that people ; but it now appears that Mediterranean shipping had a much longer history, and that the Lycians were a sea-going people at a still earlier time. The great conquerors Sennacherib, Sargon and Assurbanipal swept over the Asiatic continent during the eighth century before Christ, leaving traces of their power even in Cilicia and Cyprus. Soon afterwards there intervened that strange incursion of Cimmerians and Scythians from the north, reaching as far as Ascalon, and resulting in a temporary alliance between the Lydian and Assyrian kingdoms. Assyria fell before th^ Mede, through the conquest of Nineveh, 605 B.C. About this time the power of Egypt again asserts itself under Psammetichus and his son Necho, the conqueror of Jerusalem; but the military strength of Egypt was now decaying and they employed Greek mercenaries. The intercourse of Greece with Egypt, hitherto indirect and intermittent, is from this time constant and increasing. The settlement at Naucratis, which had succeeded to the camp at Daphne, was now completely recognised, and a race of half-breeds called the * interpreters ' became intermediaries between the two peoples. After the fall of Nineveh, Babylon again comes to the front under Nebuchadnezzar, and the Mede who had destroyed Nineveh was in his turn supplanted by the Persian under Cyrus the Great ; but the religion of all these peoples retained an influence from Chaldean tradition, latterly modi- fied, to what extent is not yet clear, by the great mind of Zoroaster. It appears to be very doubtful whether the direct pre- dominance of Egypt ever passed effectively beyond Cyprus and the southern coast of Crete. The assumption of Foucart that Minos was an Egyptian viceroy has no confirmation in Hellenic traditions, which represent him as the son of Europa, a Phoenician princess. And the Argolic legends which make Danaus the brother of Aegyptus may have grown up in times long subsequent to the eighteenth dynasty. The rapid growth of legend is sufficiently exem- 34 KELIG10N IN GKEEK LITERATURE plified by the myth concerning the end of Croesus, which in little more than a century assumed for Bacchylides and Herodotus two wholly different forms. The belief of Hero- dotus that the Thesmophoria were introduced by the daughters of Danaus is contradicted by the association of this village festival with marriage rites, which have more an Aryan than an Egyptian complexion. The references to Egypt in the Homeric poems imply only such acquaint- ance as would come from distant rumour, and rank with the mention of Libya and other regions having no proved contact with Greek life. The Assyrian did not force his own religion upon those he conquered, but took tribute from them and left them to themselves. Thus from the sixteenth to the seventh century B.C. there was ample room for the separate growth of tribes inhabiting the region afterwards called Hellas, whether Achaean, Danaan, or Carian. At two centres, one on the mainland of Greece and one in Peloponnesus, arose the great king- doms of Orchomenos and Mycenae. But during the greater part of this period they could only have a limited command of the sea. For until the eighth century, the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, pioneers of adventure, commerce, and manufacture, were practically the only sea power, and became the natural channel through which the lands between the Aegean and Ionian seas must have received most of the influences which reached them from without. The decline of this maritime empire is nearly as obscure as its rise, but may be accounted for by the loss of its principal base of operations, through the weakening of the power of Tyre by Assyria. Phoenician factories studded the seaboard of the Levant and the Aegean and the other shores of the Mediterranean, as far as Gades and beyond it. Wherever there was mineral wealth they came, and came to stay as in Cyprus, Thasos, and Euboea ; wherever there were purple fisheries in south Laconia and the Corinthian Gulf, at the Euripus they established themselves. If M. Berard is right in a tenth part of his conjectures, they penetrated far inland. But according to Mr. Arthur Evans ' Semitic ' influence in THE PHOENICIANS 35 Greece had dated from a much earlier period, coming in from Egypt by way of Libya. These and similar theories, if once established, might help to explain the readiness with which, in later times, oriental symbolism and magic obtained so wide a hold on the Hellenic mind. But the disappearance of the Phoenician power, as I have said, is not less remarkable than the proofs of its existence. This people seems to have withdrawn gradually from the Aegean, as Greek mariners from Samos, Thera, and elsewhere became more adventurous ; and as Tyre declined. They left their mark, however, in Cyprus, over which they long retained some hold ; in Crete, where the legends of Minos and Daedalus indicate their pre- sence ; at Cythera, Thasos, Samothrace, and even at Rhodes, which appears as Eodanim amongst the sons of Javan in the genealogy of Genesis X. German antiquarians have lately thrown doubt upon the constant Greek tradition of a Phoenician settlement in Thebes. ' Was ever a Phoenician settlement so far from the coast ? ' asks one of them. But Thebes is not further from the coast than Tamasus in Cyprus, the town of Thammuz, where the Phoenicians cer- tainly had lodged. The name of Chalcis, ' Copper Town,' suggests Phoenician occupation whether as a commercial depot or for mining purposes, in Euboea ; and as the power of Orchomenos increased, the Phoenicians, to secure their hold on Chalcis, might naturally plant a strong fortress, the Cadmeia, on the slopes of Onchestus, somewhat further from the sea. It is perhaps significant that there was a Chalcis also on the Aetolian coast. The fact that the Phoenician alphabet was differently adapted in different parts of Hellas shows that Thebes was not the only centre where such learning was obtained, but does not prove the Greeks to be wrong in asserting that Cadmus brought the alphabet to Thebes. Herodotus says expressly that Mem- bliareus, a companion of Cadmus, remained at Thera ; and that the Phoenicians mingled with the Greek population there. The question is an important one, for if the Phoenicians brought with them any seeds of Chaldean worship or mythology, the way from Thebes to Delphi would afford one obvious inlet for these. The Delphic fable D 2 36 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE of a contest between Herakles and Apollo is especially significant in this regard. It is interesting at least to specu- late on the possible connection between a Semitic strain thus insinuated into Hellenic life, and the presence here and there of an intensity of personal feeling, a fiery earnestness of mood, more in keeping with our conception of Semitic than of Aryan life as in the motive for the attempt of Aristogeiton, and the persistent vindictiveness of Pheretime. Another people who early found their way into the Aegean were the Tyrrhenians, who made a settlement at Lemnos, and whom Herodotus identified with the Pelas- gians. Thus there are several channels through which foreign, that is mainly oriental, influences might find their way : first the doubtful Libyan infusion ; then Phoenician com- merce and intercourse, especially where a city once Phoeni- cian was occupied by Greeks ; then Egypt (with which, however, direct intercourse was infrequent, until towards the close of the seventh century B.C.), and lastly Asia Minor, where religious impulses, perhaps reinforced from further east, had taken a determined bent, especially in Phrygia. The similarity of manufactured articles discovered in tombs ranging over a wide region has led to the inference that a race or races owning common tendencies and elements of civilisation must have occupied the lands round the northern shores of the Mediterranean at a time extending far into the second millennium before Christ. The sub- stantial uniformity of this ancient culture, whether implying identity of race or not, bears witness to the fact that in those early days there was more communication between distant parts of the world than was formerly imagined. The traditional connection of Arcadia with Crete and Cyprus, for example, recalls a state of things which in historic times had passed away. Lines of commerce existed both by land and sea, extending from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic, and from the Delta to the shores of the Baltic. The previous question naturally returns : What was the main stock that being exposed to all these influences THE ARYAN STOCK 37 reacted on them so powerfully as to create the complex phenomenon known as Greek culture ? The evidence tends to show that the race, whencesoever it came, was mainly Indo-Germanic, or Aryan, although modified through inter- course with aboriginal tribes and with Semitic merchantmen. And it is important to observe that through all modifications it retained its identity. The religion of the family in the patriarchal form was its essential core, which might be over- laid from time to time, but could never be supplanted. The institutions of marriage and of inheritance which had come down from immemorial times were never obliterated ; and the religion of the hearth, appearing for example in the ceremonies following upon birth, persisted through all changes of public ritual. If we now imagine the first arrival of one branch of this Aryan race in what was afterwards called Hellas, we cannot but suppose that its career of conquest was gradual, and that the extermination of the previous holders of the soil would be by no means complete. The conquerors brought with them at least one sacred name (Zeus = Dyaus) which comparative philology has shown to be derived from the old Aryan speech. But to judge from analogy, the religious rites which they found existing amongst the con- quered people would naturally react upon the conquerors, and become incorporated with their own ritual. For ex- ample, as they over-ran Arcadia they made their way with difficulty to a mountain fastness, perhaps the last refuge of the conquered people ; the summit was occupied by the native god, on whose altars that people had offered human sacrifice in their extremity, with magic ceremonies supposed to bring down the blessing of the rain. Was this a purely savage rite dating from immemorial times, in honour of some wolf-god, himself originally a wolf, and now the pro- tector of the flock ; or had Semitic strangers instituted the rite in worshipping some Baal-Ammon, to whom, like the priests on Mount Carmel, they cried aloud in time of drought ? The form of the precinct and the absence of a statue, two pillars being the only sacred objects, point strongly in the latter direction ; and this hypothesis is also rendered probable by the analogy of the cult of Athamas in Northern 38 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Greece, of Artemis Brauronia on the Attic shore, and of Artemis Laphria at Calydon, near the opening of the Corin- thian Gulf. However this may have been, the conquerors accepted the ancient worship under a new name ; the altar was consecrated afresh to Zeus, the god of the sky, to whom mountain tops were especially dear. But the new deity retained the ancient attributes as Zeus Laphystius, and was worshipped with some part of the old ritual. By some such means it came to pass that the same deity had different attributes in different localities. Perhaps the most singular of such survivals was the worship of the Dodonaeaii Zeus. In that highland retreat, the Greek invaders had found a primitive tree worship combined with veneration for a male and female deity, whom the newcomers named Zeus and Dione. The priests, a sort of Druids, still in Homer's time lay upon the ground, no doubt watching over the life of the tree, not taking time even to wash their feet, and were the objects of a special reverence, which made Dodona the centre of oracular wisdom. According to the fable in Herodotus, the oracle itself was in some way related to that of Ammon in Africa, and to the Hyperboreans, whose tokens were annually sent also to Delos. The sacredness of Styx (a duplicate of the Arcadian river), of Acheron and Cocytus found acknowledgment in the same region. How this is to be interpreted is obscure ; but it seems to imply that the oracle was at some period, of which a dim tradition remained, superinduced upon an earlier ritual. Some secret corre- spondence between priests and soothsayers at distant centres is a possibility that is not to be ignored. What mainly concerns us here is the conception, without which the whole subject becomes a hopeless tangle, of what may be termed the contamination of worships. The Aryan invaders may be supposed to have given to the nature-deity the name of their own supreme god, while they did not venture to disuse the primeval barbarous rite which had engrained itself in the minds of the inhabitants. The cult of Artemis presents another example of the variety superinduced upon Greek worship through the Hellenic tendency to identify the gods of alien races with ABOEIGINAL RITES 39 their own. The cruel Artemis of Brauron was identified with a goddess of similar propensities on the Tauric Cher- sonese ; while her namesake at Sparta was satisfied in historic times with the blood of young men effused in scourging their endurance being thus tested, like that of American Indian braves, on the threshold of manhood. The divine huntress, sister of Apollo, presiding over birth and death and maidenhood, was at Ephesus again identified with a great Phrygian or eastern nature-power which never became completely Hellenised or humanised. And yet how beautifully the Greek spirit shines forth in the work of the artist who has represented the restoration of Alcestis from death, after her self-sacrifice, on one of the pillars of the temple dedicated by Croesus, the first letters of whose name are still upon the basement ! Nor could the Athena wor- shipped at Barca and Cyrene, and associated with the Lake Tritonis in Libya, be more than accidentally connected with the daughter of Zeus, the mistress of Athens. It need therefore not surprise us if when we come to treat more at large of some of the most prominent forms of Greek worship, such as that of Herakles, of Aphrodite, or even of Poseidon, we find Phoenician and other foreign elements inextricably (blending with native conceptions. Many isolated ceremonies noticed by Pausanias as still connected with local cults in his own time have a complexion that recalls primeval religion. For example, at Triteia, an inland city of Achaia, he found a sacred place of the ' Greatest Goddesses,' as they were called, probably identified by the Greeks with Demeter and Persephone, whose annual festival was of an orgiastic nature. The images of these holy powers were, as they had always been, of clay, symbolising, perhaps, the fertility of the ground. Such magic symbolism, similar to what Herodotus and Pausanias describe as existing in Aegina and Troezen in the age before the Persian war, where it was thought necessary that the images should be of olive wood from Athens, might, of course, originate afresh at almost any period, but it is natural to suppose that, like the use of white poplar- wood and of the water of the Alpheus at Olympia, it may be a survival of primitive tradition. These 40 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE examples may suffice to indicate a general phenomenon 'namely, the effect produced by the reaction of primeval local ceremonies upon the Aryan deposit. This may be assumed as one of the many causes of an almost infinite variety in the popular worship of deities, who throughout Hellas were called by the same names. From the Great Goddesses of Triteia, or the Troezenian Damia and Auxesia, to the Demeter of Eleusis or of Cnidos, there is a greater gap than can easily be filled by the progress of a purely Hellenic culture. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his treatment of the legend of Merope, has shown a fine appreciation of the mode in which the Greek imagination remoulded the fragments of animal worship that survived in their ritual. In alluding to the fable of Callisto, that is, of Artemis transformed into a bear, he beautifully suggests the persistence of human feeling under the rugged disguise. But his mother, Callisto, In her hiding-place of the thickets Of the lentisk and ilex, In her rough form, fearing The hunter on the outlook, Poor changeling ! trembled. Or the children, plucking In the thorn-choked gullies Wild gooseberries, scared her, The shy mountain bear ! Turning, with piteous, Distressful longing, Sad, eager eyes, Mutely she regarded Her well-known enemy. Low moans half uttered What speech refused her ; Tears coursed, tears human, Down those disfigured Once human cheeks. With unutterable foreboding Her son, heart-stricken, eyed her. The Gods had pity, made them stars. That is the manner in which Greek poets dealt with the bull Achelous, the heifer lo, the equine Demeter, Philomela y EARLY CENTRES OF CULTURE 41 Procne and the rest : accounting for what was really the earlier form by a theory of metamorphosis. In like manner they were able to assimilate and to transfigure the monstrous types of griffin, sphinx, chimera, harpy, siren, &c., often giving quite a new significance to the borrowed form. In trying to imagine the religious condition of any tribe or community within Hellenic limits, in what is vaguely known to us as the Mycenaean age, we have thus to take account not only of Aryan tradition, and of the originality of the Achaean race, but (1) of immemorial usages clinging to each several locality, especially amongst herdsmen and tillers of the soil ; and (2) of foreign influences operating chiefly at great centres, such as Argos or Thebes, which, although their effect was mainly visible in art, yet coloured in a less degree the tissue of religious sentiment and imagination. Many opportunities of dealing with the former point will occur in the sequel. Some remarks upon the latter topic may fitly find place here. There is good reason to suppose that the dynasties which successively prevailed in Hellas and in the islands, Siphnos r Paros, Naxos, Aegina, Argos, Thebes, imported much not previously existing amongst their countrymen. The islands had the start in civilisation, not to mention Crete and the legendary fleet of Minos, which put down piracy and instituted a reign of comparative peace ; the islanders, even when raiding one another, had more intermission from peril and disturbance than the tribes on the mainland. The wild beasts were more easily subdued; the wealth which the island chief amassed was more securely held, since to pass a boundary and drive a neighbour's cattle was easier than to cross the narrow seas in twenty-oared galleys. Living in comparative tranquillity, the islanders had more opportunity for cultivating the ground, and for developing the special resources of their land. Thus Siphnos in very early times had gold and silver mines which made the island important and envied. The Siphnian treasury at Delphi, if rightly so identified, gives evidence cf this. Paros from its marble quarries, and Naxos from its fertility, had each a long career of prosperity. But above the rest Aegina long 42 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE exercised a predominant power. Her prowess, which Greek tradition dates only from Aeacus, must have had a yet earlier than that imaginary source. The prevalence of the Aeginetan talent before the time of Pheidon leads to the natural inference that the commerce of a very early time was dominated by the Aeginetan power. Some time afterwards the Achaeans of the mainland came under the predominance of the dynasty which Hellenic legend recognises as that of Pelops. According to the story they brought their wealth from Phrygia to Argolis, and found a secure treasure-house for it, not in an island, but amongst the fastnesses of the hills. To Atreus, as to the Kenite, it might be said : ' Strong is thy dwelling place, and thou makest thy nest in a rock.' Whether they found or brought with them that religion of Hera, which long prevailed in Argolis, is impossible to say. Nor can it be confidently determined whether the association of this worship with that of Epaphus, a Greek form of the Egyptian Apis, and the legend of the daughters of Danaus connected with it, was earlier or later than the seventh century B.C. But it is manifest that here again we have a contamination of cults. The bovine goddess of an agricultural race, the patroness of marriage rites, is identified with the Eastern lady of the sky, while the transparent symbolism of the fable of the wandering moon watched by a thousand cruel eyes, till the watcher is transfixed at dawn, has been superinduced upon the original worship. A still further modification, prevalent at Gyrene in Alexandrian times, was embodied in the ' Aetia ' of Callimachus. One feature in the Perseid legend is singular, and points to some early conflict between endogamous and exogamous customs. The daughters of Danaus, instructed by their father, regard as unholy and unnatural the proposed marriage with the sons of their uncle Aegyptus. Perhaps a distant light is cast on this obscurity by a sentence of Sir Richard Burton's : * From the very beginning of his history the Jew, like his half-brother the Arab, always married, or was expected to marry, his first cousin.' To recapitulate briefly some of the views advanced in the RECAPITULATION 43 preceding pages. Our materials for constructing an image of prehistoric Hellas, although more abundant than what lay before Thucydides, are fragmentary in the extreme. There are no monuments as in Egypt even of isolated periods in a long line of kings ; nor even such obscure accounts as have lately been deciphered respecting Babylonian conquests and achievements in culture : little more indeed than bits of decoration on broken potsherds, personal adorn- ments chiefly of gold and bearing marks of foreign influence, and the structure of their tombs. The most definite clue to such knowledge as is still attainable is afforded by the evidence which archaeologists have collected of the wide- spread prevalence of a uniform scale of weights and measures, some of which have been identified with those of Babylon. Kecent discoveries have inevitably awakened curiosity, and imagination is stimulated to fill in the outlines with some help from comparison and conjecture. The tribes who lived about the shores of the Aegean seem to have been of the same kindred and much of the same stage of culture with those who lined the coast of the Mediterranean, as far westwards as the Gulf of Lions. They belonged to what is designated the Neolithic age, or are in transition from this to the age of bronze. The prevailing race was Aryan, mingled with some inferior aboriginal stock. Phoenician settlements were scattered along the seaboard, but few of them (unless Tiryns is Phoenician) remained so distinctively Semitic as those at Carthage, Eryx, or Panormos. What religious elements distinguished the communities or the sparse and scattered populations thus circumstanced we can only conjecture, but we may be confident as to some isolated points. It is fairly certain, for example, that to the Aryan race in all their wanderings the fire of the central hearth, with the enclosure surrounding it, was permanently sacred. In the Homeric ' Hymn to Aphrodite,' Hestia is the daughter of Kronos, i.e. the sister and contemporary of Zeus. And in the ' Laws ' of Plato, Hestia, Zeus and Apollo guard the citadel. A striking survival of the primitive tradition is the Spartan custom mentioned by Xenophon, or whoever 44 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE is the author of the treatise ' de Rep. Lac.,' to the effect (xiii. cc. 2, 3) that whenever the king went forth to war he performed a sacrifice in his own house, and the fire from that altar was carried with him to the frontier. There he sacrificed anew, and the fire of this second sacrifice went on before him, and was never extinguished until his safe return. Nor can there have been absent some recognition of the sacredness of other elemental powers. The fruitfulness of earth, the force of the winds, the incalculable movements of the sea must have demanded worship even apart from foreign intercourse. Some cave whose dark profundity men feared to penetrate lest it might usher them into the lower world, or some deep well whose crystal clearness imaged the sky and the surrounding scenery as in a Camera Lucida, stimulated imagination to suggest means for communicating with the divine. Nor could the race have entirely lost that reverence for the supreme brilliance of the sky (Uranus = Varuna)or for the sun in his strength, and the moon walking in brightness, which are among the oldest inheritances of Indo-Germanic peoples. The name of Zeus, the giver of light, came with them from their first abodes, and was identified with the local god who was generally imagined as inhabiting the summit of some lofty mountain. The path of migration from Thessaly to Boeotia, from Boeotia and Aetolia to Arcadia and Elis, is marked by similarities of worship and of divine attributes which permanently remained, as for example those of the Itonian Athena. That kings and chiefs at least were worshipped after death we learn from the construction of the beehive tombs, in which the ante-chamber was clearly intended for the commemorative feast. But neither Zeus nor the forefathers of the conquering race could supplant or ex- tinguish local sanctities, native to each region. The depth of the forest, the darkness of the cave, the living waters of springs and rivers, the fire of the volcano, were animated with airy superhuman presences which from time immemorial had been feared and propitiated. We have further to imagine the effect on an impression- VILLAGE COMMUNITIES 45 able, keen-witted people of casual intercourse with strangers. Before they had themselves learned to go in quest of mer- chandise the Phoenicians came and brought commodities from alien shores. If we suppose a crew of those eager adventurers, storm-stayed in some port amongst the Cyclades, compelled to fraternise for a while with those who bartered with them, what tales of wonder might they not pour into the all-receptive mind of the Achgteans ? Through some such channel Babylonian and Egyptian elements may have entered even into primitive Greek religion, alth.ough the factors were probably reinforced through the actual fusion of Semitic and Aryan elements at Thebes, and perhaps at Tiryns. The bright Achaean intelligence may have thus early received a tinge of oriental sadness as in borrowing the Linus-song, and learned to conceive dimly of a world beyond the grave, in which the perjurer and the parricide would be punished for their sins, or even of a judgment of souls, of which the rumour reached them out of the ' Book of the Dead.' They learned to name the constellations, the Bear, Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades and Hyades, so important for mariners. (The name Sirius, however, is undoubtedly Aryan.) We know not how early they may have been taught to conceive of a superhuman conflict between good and evil powers, of the rebellious Typhon, of dragons subdued by gods in human shape. The mystic power of prophecy so prominent in Babylonian worship might also thus impress itself from afar off in echoes borne from distant shrines, such as that of Branchidae, which some adventurous chieftain might visit with gifts in the hope of gaining further advantage. The oracle of Dionysus in Thrace, of Zeus at Dodona, of Apollo at Pytho, became established in places which had probably been held sacred from a still more remote antiquity, but those who worked the oracles borrowed some of their methods from elsewhere. Social relations between individuals and families, and even between tribe and tribe, were in process of formation. Some kind of patriarchal bond held together their village communities, while here and there, as in Lycia, some trace of a quite different phase of family life, holding not of the 46 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE father but of the mother, seems to have survived. A sense of kinship, even with strangers, must have sprung up between men who understood each other's speech. They would compare worships and recognise the same divinities under different names. Civic life was not as yet, unless that were to be called a city where some great and wealthy lord had built his fastness, round which his retainers clustered ; still less can many villages have been united under one settled government. They might combine for purposes of defence or even aggression : the inhabitants of the plain to resist the mountaineers, and the like. Or many tribes might tem- porarily coalesce to repel the advance of some great conqueror. But we can hardly suppose that there were great assemblies to which many tribes resorted at once, as at the Delian festival in later times. Yet this is not impossible. What an opportunity it would be for the display of such ornaments as those lately discovered in Aegina, as well as for feats of strength and speed ! The fact that Troezen and the Boeotian Orchomenos both belonged to the Amphictiony of Calauria, worshipping Poseidon, seems to carry us back to a very early time. All is conjectural, but to let one's fancy play about the chasm of ignorance may at least serve to counteract the fallacy of supposing that times of which we know nothing were necessarily vacant of activity or altogether rude. External influences, however, do not act equally upon art and on religion. People at an early stage of culture, how- ever receptive, are too entirely steeped in the awe and reverence which has descended to them from their fore- fathers to adopt heartily or entirely a system of worship coming from abroad. The imitative faculty may be active in grafting foreign features on native religion, but the in- herent force of that religion will always prevail over such adjuncts, which to begin with are but imperfectly understood. The art itself appears principally at a few centres where it was encouraged by reigning dynasties ; and here a fresh element of uncertainty comes in. Were the beehive tombs at Mycenae and Orchomenos, for example, the genuine pro- ducts of Achaean or Pelasgian invention, or did some wealthy chieftain, to begin with, bring over architects and master- ANTECEDENTS AND SURVIVALS 47 masons from abroad? However this may have been, the burial custom, which is here involved, implying the worship of ancestors, was of native growth. The minor remains bear evidence, not merely of imitation, but of the independent originality of the Achaean race, and evince a keener interest in reproducing the forms of the surrounding world and the activities in which men took delight, than in expressing religious feeling or adumbrating a world unrealised. In- cidents of war and the chase have more fascination for the Mycenaean artist than traditions of the past or the conven- tional reproduction of foreign prototypes. And to speak more generally, had Egyptian or Assyrian priests been never so generous in communication, it was impossible for a Greek of any age simply to assimilate Egyptian or Chaldaean ideas. That Cadmus brought letters with him to Thebes, and with letters perhaps the elements of arithmetic, or even the signs of the Zodiac and other secrets of navigation, or that as Aristotle maintains the elements of geometry were first known in Egypt and communicated to some enquiring Greek, are important statements and may possibly be true. But except in so far as these scientific principles may have been necessary to the mechanical training of the architects of the early temples, or the sculptors of archaic statues, they have little direct bearing upon the growth of Hellenic religion. Art reacts on ideas but does not create them. Those who have seen both Egyptian and Hellenic monuments are aware that the religious sentiment which guided the hand of the artist in either land was largely different. The pious Egyptian thought less of the present world than of a future state of being ; his principal gods were judges of the dead rather than guides of the living. His highest skill was spent in the adornment of colossal tombs. The divine powers whom the Greek chiefly worshipped were the sources of Life and of Light, to whom the tribe, the household, or the village owed its yearly prosperity, and on whom depended its great- ness or its decay. The noblest temples were built in token of thanksgiving for some signal mercy and declared the people's sense of the actual presence of their god, whom they delighted to represent in a form of perfected humanity, 48 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE not only in eye and brow immortal, but in every lineament, joint, shape, and limb. The tombs of great men were wor- shipped, because the dead man was imagined as having power over the life of his successor ; but although burial was so important, no man, however wealthy, in times characteristically Hellenic and in central Greece, thought of spending elaborately on the preparation of his tomb. Greek law-givers expressly forbade great pomp in funerals. The Mausoleum in Lycia, though adorned with splendid works of Greek art, had an essentially barbarian cast. Another differ- ence here comes in : from an early time a sense of equality, or at least of moderation, went hand in hand with the idealism which was the inalienable portion of the Greek. The Assyrian sought to deify the individual conqueror, whom he represented of colossal stature, and perhaps with wings, but otherwise with realistic fidelity in form and habit as he lived, surrounded as in life with servants and tributaries, each bringing his appropriate offering. Notwithstanding hieroglyphic symbolism, something of the same kind is true of the Egyptian monuments : they also sought to deify man ; the instinct of the Grecian worshipper was to humanise deity. The image of Pausanias, king of Sparta, that stood by the altar of Athena of the brazen house, forms an apparent exception. But the fall of Pausanias, not long after this act of Asiatic pride, proved him tainted with barbarism, and it will be remembered that his attempt to inscribe his own name at Plataea was frustrated by what may be described either as the jealousy or the sense of equality that prevailed amongst his allies. That his image should have remained in situ is a characteristic touch of Greek moderation and conservatism. The Roman senate would have abolished it. The Persian porch at Athens, in which the historian Pausanias saw the marble forms of distinguished Persians, including Mardonius and Queen Artemisia, may perhaps be cited as an instance of Athenian pride, but it is a pride which finds expression, as in the ' Persae ' of Aeschylus, in honour done to vanquished enemies. To return once more to prehistoric times. Whether they had anything corresponding to the temples of the ANTECEDENTS AND SUEVIVALS 49 historic period, or a class of priests employed in taking care of them, or images of wood or stone carved curiously to represent the deity, is still an open question. It is im- possible to say how far back such rude approximations to the human form as have been found at Amorgos and in other islands may be supposed to carry us. But it is possible that Xoana of wood or marble, which were afterwards regarded with peculiar reverence, may have come down from a period far remote. Dr. Waldstein discovered at the Argive Heraeuin an upright stone which seems to have been an object of worship, and may be the very unhewn pillar which Pausanias describes as symbolising the goddess. Grotesque and terrific shapes, such as the Gorgon head derived from the Arabian Bes, or such monstrous combinations of the human and serpentine as the figure of Erichthonios on the pediment preserved in the Acropolis, belong in all probability to the period following upon the bloom of Mycenaean art. And some aniconic symbols (such as the conical form of Aphrodite) may reflect Phoenician worship. Some questions may be suggested to which there is no certain answer. 1. Are the gods of Greece originally those of a hunting or a pastoral or an agricultural people? All elements appear to have been present, but in what degrees it is ex- tremely difficult to say. 2. Were those rites which have less to do with patri- archal life or with the religion of the family, such as the worship of Demeter and Dionysus, inherent in Greek religion from the first, or brought in afterwards? With regard to Demeter, the answer seems to be that her worship grew naturally out of primitive village festivals, but was greatly modified in historic times by external influences. These, however, for reasons given above, can hardly have had much force before the seventh century : the Thesmophoria was associated with marriage customs, and the cult of Demeter in this respect resembled that of Hera. And if the Argolic empire of Pheidon belongs, as recent historians maintain, to the seventh century, when Greeks were settling at Daphne or Naucratis, and Amasis sent offerings to Delphi, the attribu- E 50 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE tion of the Thesmophoria to the Danaides indeed, the whole legend of the Perseidae may well have taken shape about that time. As to Dionysus, it is better to reserve our discussion of him for a subsequent chapter. One more consideration may be added here. It is often said that for the understanding of a religion, one should look not at what people feel or think, but at what they do. This is perfectly true where origins are in question. But in studying the development of religion, it must be always borne in mind that many things are reverently observed of which the original significance is utterly lost ; an often blind conservatism, and clinging to continuity, is a constant attri- bute of religious feeling. The point really in question is, not what they do, but in what spirit they do it. Shakespeare, in his beautiful delineation of the natural religion of Imogen's brothers, who had been brought up in the cave, away from the court, has finely touched this point. In laying out Fidele, whom they suppose to be dead, the elder says to the younger : We must lay his head to the East, My Father hath a reason for 't. That is all, and that is enough. We are now prepared to enter on the proper subject of this volume : ' Keligion in Greek Literature from Homer to Plato.' And to prevent disappointment it may be well to premise that I do not profess to deal, except incidentally, with the religion of the common folk, which, varying as it did in different localities, and in many places continuing without substantial change down to Christian times (Demeter, Persephone, the Nereides, Olympus, Charon, &c., are recog- nisable at the present day) affords a fascinating subject for endless investigation. Had I undertaken such a task after a few years of study, I might well be deterred from the attempt to execute it, when such admirable and extensive treatises as Mr. Farnell's ' Cults of the Greek States ' and Mr. Frazer's ' Pausanias ' are accessible to English readers. As it is, the fact that some ' survival ' in ritual or mythology belongs to the common stock of universal folk-lore will rather be made the excuse for passing lightly over it in the ANTECEDENTS AND SUKVIVALS 51 present work, except where it has manifestly contributed to some higher or more characteristic development. And yet one curious survival, pointing backward to a phase of tribal religion, may be here described. The Zeus of the Athenian citadel, whose worship was to a great extent overshadowed by that of Athena, had one great festival, the Dipolia, at which a ceremony called the Buphonia, ' the murder of an ox,' was continued down to the time of Theophrastus. * Stalks of barley and wheat were placed on the altar, and an ox which was kept in readiness approached and ate some of the offering, whereupon it was slain by a priest who was called u the murderer of the ox," and who immediately threw down the axe and then fled, as though the guilt of homicide were on him ; the people pretended not to know who the slayer was, but arrested the axe and brought it to judgment.' So much is told by Pausanias, but more particulars are given by Porphyry, quoting Theophrastus : ' Maidens called water-carriers were appointed to bring water to sharpen the axe and the knife ; one man handed the axe to another, who then smote that one among the oxen, which were driven round the altar, that tasted the cereal offerings laid upon it ; another ministrant cut the throat of the fallen victim, and the others flayed it, and all partook of the flesh. The next act in this strange drama was to stuff the hide with grass, and sewing it together to fashion the semblance of a live ox, and to yoke it to the plough. A trial was at once instituted, and the various agents in the crime were charged with ox-murder. Each thrust the blame upon the other until the guilt was at last allowed to rest on the axe, which was then solemnly tried and condemned, and cast into the sea.' l To discuss the origin of such a rite is beyond the scope of the present work, but its primitive character is manifest. Compare the sacredness of the kine in the Persian Gathas, and in India to this day. And yet, strangely enough, the trial of the inanimate instrument reappears in Plato's ' Laws ' (ix. 873 E) : 'If any lifeless thing deprive a man of life, except in the case of a thunderbolt or other fatal 1 Quoted in Mr. Farnell's Cults of the Greek States. E 2 52 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE dart sent from the gods, whether a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or by his falling upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbour to be a judge, and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And he shall cast the guilty thing beyond the border.' (See Farnell's ' Cults/) 53 CHAPTEE III BELIGION IN THE ILIAD From central Greece to Asia Minor The religion of a conquering race Different aspects of the Divine The Homeric pantheon Hero- worship absent, why ? Limitation and extension of polytheism Zeus and Fate The Homeric Hades Custom and morality Inevitable inconsistencies. THE Homeric poems are the earliest as they are in some ways the greatest expression of the Hellenic spirit which has come down to us in a connected form. But many difficulties stand in- the way of taking their evidence for the purpose of the present enquiry. 1. The legends on which the Iliad and Odyssey were based had probably been brought across by emigrants from the mainland of Hellas to the seaboard of Asia Minor, where the^ were developed, recast, or embroidered and finally shaped. Not only therefore do the poems contain the reminiscence of a former age, but a reminiscence crossed with later associations which had been gathered upon a different soil. It cannot therefore be inferred that the picture of religious ritual and emotion which appears in the Iliad represents what really existed in Phthia or at Orchomenos or Mycenae in the preceding age, and not rather what was familiarly known to the poet at Cyme in Aeolia, or at Smyrna, or in the island of Chios. 2. The singer, although he claimed a sacred office and was conscious of the inspiration of the Muse, was not a priest, or an expositor, whose business was to initiate his hearers into religious mysteries. His motive was practical and artistic rather than religious, and his work had less to do 54 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE with religion than that of the lyric or tragic poet of the fifth century. 3. The audience of the epic poet were not the common people, but members of an aristocracy, warlike chieftains, who listened to his lays after a day of hunting or of battle. Many rites and beliefs may have existed, and deeply in- fluenced the mind of the people, for which the hearers of an Homeric rhapsody cared little. 4. It follows from what is said above that the poems throw no light at all on the contemporary civilisation of central Greece. In Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, Laconia, many germs may have been already ripening which had great influence on the after history of religion, but of which the gilded youth of Aeolian or Ionian cities knew nothing. 5. The Ionic poet, however scrupulous in maintaining an antique colour, drew much of his illustrative and decorative detail from circumstances nearer home. He presents us therefore with a combination of old memories and recent impressions ; so that in speaking of the heroic age as de- scribed by him, we have in view, not a single object, but several blended in one atmosphere ; as when we look on a succession of ridges of some mountain chain which distance and the effect of light make indistinguishable. The poems are a treasure-house of things new and old, preserving some relics of an immemorial past like flies in amber, while bearing on their surface all the gloss of novelty. Thus they contain at once too much and too little : too much in so far as they reflect the consciousness of a cultivated Ionian of the ninth or eighth century B.C. ; too little in so far as the poet ignores or deliberately rejects what is beside his purpose or alien to the spirit of his art. All these considerations must be borne in mind as a sort of running commentary on what is now to be said. And what is specially to be remembered is the restricted scope of the poems as religious documents. In approaching them with a view to learning something of the religious mind of the heroic age, we have to contract our view and fix it almost exclusively on the chieftains of the conquering race. Allusions to the life of the common people occur very rarely, although THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 55 they are the more affecting on account of their scarcity, like Milton's comparison of Eve in Paradise to a village maiden. In certain regions of the land afterwards known as Hellas a comparatively stable condition of society seems for a time to have been attained. We hear of forays and reprisals, of wars between Pylos and Elis, or between Argos and Thebes, of dynastic troubles in Aetolia, and the like ; but these are matters of ancient history. The race of kings tracing their origin from a divine source have their mutual jealousies and private quarrels, but on the whole have learned to respect one another's rights, while they alternately protect and oppress the people, who labour, fight and foray under shadow of their power. Individuals of the ruling class have by force of character, by the wealth they have amassed, and by personal prowess, established an ascendency that is more or less widely acknowledged. The disturbing force of commerce has not yet crossed the simple classification of chiefs, retainers and common labourers. War, hunting, pasturage, and a modicum of agriculture are the principal industries. The king, while outwardly paying reverence to sacred persons such as heralds, prophets, and ministers of holy shrines, is little inclined to acknowledge any intermediary between himself and deity. He sacrifices, not as combining priestly with regal functions, but as the natural head of his family and clan, or of the army which he leads ; and while strictly observing a simple ritual, he is assisted in it not only by the heralds, but by his sons or comrades, especially by unmarried youths, whose fresh age marks them out as acceptable to the gods. If the horns of the victim have to be gilded, it is not the priest but the goldsmith who is employed. It is some- times imagined that the Iliad merely describes the rough, life of a camp, in which things are done irregularly, as emergencies permit, but in turning to the Odyssey we find no difference in this respect. Speaking for the present of the Iliad by itself, I proceed to remark (1) on the relation of the poet and his audience to religious tradition ; (2) on what may be called the per- sonnel of the Olympian dynasty ; (3) on the notions of fate, 56 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE the Erinnyes, and the world of the dead ; (4) on the moral elements in the poem, and the traces of incipient ethical reflection ; (5) on the inevitable inconsistency in the Homeric presentation of divine things. 1. The gods in Homer are regarded in two wholly different aspects. On the one hand, they are conceived as powers having a sort of vague omnipresence and ruling over their several provinces in the world of nature and of men ; thus Zeus, the lord of the sky, is thought of as the immediate agent in sending rain or snow ; Poseidon commands the sea ; Ares is identified with battle, even to such minute details as the flight of a spear; such attributes of super- human powers have entered into the language, and are introduced without special purpose or premeditation. But again, the same gods are thought of as magnified human personalities, having their separate homes on the summit of a great mountain, hidden by clouds from human sight. As thus conceived of, the wills of the gods are swayed by varying inclinations, which are sometimes only accidentally associated with their special functions as divine powers. They favour and protect their worshippers ; they take part with this or that warrior ; they resent the death of their sons, and in other ways are moved by passion and desire. Zeus exercises a sort of limited monarchy over this distracted realm ; in the long run he controls it absolutely, for his will and 'the determination of fate are one : this is both a religious belief and a requirement of artistic unity ; but on the other hand he shows from time to time all the caprice and inconsistency of an earthly ruler. His tenderness for Thetis forms the hinge of the whole action of the Iliad, in which, to avenge the honour of Achilles, the Trojans and Achaean s suffer all the extremities of war. It is to some extent matter of conjecture how far the audience of the poet were expected at every moment to realise for themselves the divine machinery which outwardly binds the action together. Mr. Leaf in his ' Companion to the Iliad,' page 355, observes that the brutal ferocity of Achilles to Hector would be softened for the ancient hearers by feeling that the gods were on his side ; and that THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 57 this fact, far from detracting from his personal heroism, would rather exalt it in their eyes. ' To them the presence of the gods on Achilles' side was not so much a mere extraneous aid as a tangible sign that Achilles was after all fighting the great fight of Hellenism against barbarism ; it is a reminder that the action on earth is but a reflection of the will of Heaven, and exalts rather than belittles those to whom the help is given. The moral superiority of Achilles being thus warranted from the point of view of national and religious feeling, to him redounds all the exaltation of his adversary.' With all deference to one who has entered so deeply into Homeric criticism, I cannot think that this was really the meaning of the great poet, perhaps the greatest of the world, whom we imagine as standing behind the action of the Iliad. It is true, of course, that all sense of human obligation towards an enemy is absent here, except so far as the poet himself implicitly condemns the excess of fierceness which he depicts. It is felt as excessive, but not as ignoble. The impression, however, which he intends to emphasise, and which was no doubt produced upon the hearer who was in sympathy with him, was not, ' how the gods protect Achilles ! ' ' how mightily the power of Zeus is working ! ' although that is also present as a circumstance of awe ; it was much rather, ' how intensely Achilles loved his friend ! ' This cardinal motive was not obscured for them by the savagery of the action, as it is for the sensitive consciousness of the modern reader : the ferocity was the measure of the affection. 2. The theology of Homer is considerably advanced beyond that stage of polytheism in which the varied aspects of earth, sea, and sky, of woods and rivers, of light and darkness, are simply personified. Even the highest gods retain many reminiscences of their functions as nature- deities : perhaps also some attributes adopted from more primitive worships ; but each of them severally is invested with a character distinctly human, and is moreover associ- ated rather with the place or nation whom he protects, or with the dangers from which he delivers his worshippers, than with his antecedents as an elemental power. It may 58 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE also be said that in the Iliad the Olympian gods are partly leaving behind them the local and particular stage, and becoming organised into a Pantheon. The heroic world lives in close intercommunion with the deities from whom the kings derive their race. At rare intervals some allusion occurs to yet more ancient powers whom Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon have supplanted. Zeus is now supreme within the realm of light. Cronos and the Titans and old lapetus are bound in some dungeon far beneath. Whether in this we recognise a religion of the conquered peoples, or some infusion from the east, or the outcome of a dim consciousness that the visible universe is not all, the fact of these allusions in the Iliad interests us from its con- nection with subsequent developments in Hesiod, Aeschylus, and elsewhere, which are thus proved to have had their antecedents in pre-Homeric times. Meanwhile, for the epic poet, the Olympic dynasty fills the celestial scene. Olympus in the Iliad is still localised, and is probably, at least in the original legend, the cloud-capped mountain in Thessaly, exalted and beautified by poetic imagination. Here Zeus holds his court, and in the winding glens between the summits are the homes of his children. His will may be thwarted or eluded for a time, but is ultimately irresistible. J3is supremacy, sometimes hardly distinguishable from destiny, is the most definite theological conception in the Iliad.y No passages of ancient poetry are more impressive than those in which the nod of Zeus is described as com- pelling the world ; and the opening of Book viii. in which he challenges all other powers to pull against him, although crudely expressed, carries with it a profound conviction. The simple faith in Zeus as the almighty disposer, and even as the guardian of justice, appears in the prayer of the Achaeans to him, that in the trial by combat between Paris and Menelaus the wrongdoer may fall. But the prayer is unfulfilled, else the poem could not have been continued. The son of Cronos does not perform it for them ; and as mythologically conceived the supreme deity is full of human weaknesses. He and Hera have their several favourites to whom they show kindness within the bounds of fate ; he is THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 59 cajoled by his consort with the aid of Aphrodite and Sleep ; he grieves with paternal fondness when it is fated that his son Sarpedon must fall. Even when honouring Achilles, he pities Agamemnon's tears. He pities the Trojans, who have done him faithful sacrifice, but acts against them. In all this we find only human feelings magnified, which stand in unconscious contradiction to the universality which is already attached to the notion of the supreme god. Nor is the Dodonean, Pelasgian Zeus, to whom Achilles prays, the same whom Hector entreats to protect his son. It is observable that the Achaeans think of Zeus as the dispenser of battle more seriously than the poet does ; also that Zeus in Homer never makes himself visible to mortal eyes. Hera, the Argive goddess, appears now as the protectress of her chief worshippers, and now as the consort of Zeus. She and Athena are at the head of a small faction, including Poseidon, who oppose themselves as far as they durst to the caprice of the supreme god in honouring the son of Thetis by afflicting the Greeks. Her standing epithet, Hera ' of bovine looks,' is regarded by Dr. Schliemann and others as originally having reference to the pristine worship of the goddess under the form of a cow, a cult akin to that of the Egyptian Hathor. The fact of such early symbolism, retained it may be from the primeval worship of a pastoral people, has been confirmed by further discoveries, but it need hardly be said that no consciousness of this is present in Homer. The relation of Zeus to Hera no doubt recalls some early contrast between male and female powers, con- ceived as creating and ruling the world ; according to Tiele it results from an imperfect blending of a patriarchal with a matriarchal deity. Neither of this, however, has the poet any distinct idea. Such primitive nature-worship is to him already a ' creed outworn.' The Muses and the Graces, givers of glad impulses, have left their native seats in Thessaly and Boeotia, and are thought of simply as divine powers. The position of Apollo in the Iliad is rather singular. His epithet, the far-darter, reveals him manifestly as a solar deity, and in an oft-repeated formula he makes one of what 60 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE has been called the Homeric trinity with Zeus and Athena. The pastoral attributes, so prominent in later mythology, are present only here and there in the Iliad. His love of song already appears in the first Iliad, when the Greeks celebrate him by singing a beautiful paean, to which he gladly listens ; and in the picture of Olympus, at the end of the same book, he wields the lyre to which the Muses sing. In the ninth Iliad Achilles instances the wealth of Apollo's Pythian shrine. But in his poetic function, as a part of the celestial machinery, Apollo is rather a Trojan and Asiatic than a Grecian deity. The poem opens with the offence done to him in the person of his minister, and with his vengeance, on which the subsequent action turns. He interposes many times on the Trojan behalf, he is the patron of Pandarus, and the rescuer of Aeneas. He borrows the Aegis to terrify the Greeks withal. He stands constantly beside Hector, whom he heals of his wound. He disarms Patroclus, he checks Achilles ; and if at last he betrays Hector, he does so under the compulsion of destiny. His seat at Chryse was one of many belonging to him on the Asiatic shore. 1 Apollo was the god of the Lycians, he had a shrine at Tenedos, and we know from independent sources that he had an oracle of time-honoured antiquity at Branchidae. With Poseidon he builds the Trojan wall, and he becomes the shepherd of Laomedon. Here for once we have a trace of his pastoral character. He again assists Poseidon in destroying the rampart of the Achaeans. To whatever source or sources the conception of him is to be ascribed, Apollo has long since assumed a quasi- human personality quite distinct from the sun-god, and he is not yet identified with the god of healing. Except that he naturally protects and heals his worshippers, his office is rather to destroy. He is the son of Latona, and brother of Artemis, but his birth at Delos is not mentioned either in the Iliad or the Odyssey, although his altar at Delos is once mentioned in the latter poem (vi. 162). Artemis is the female counterpart of Apollo, and is fre- 1 The local deity there, Chryse ' the golden,' has been identified with Theia, the goddess of gold in Pindar. THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 61 quently mentioned as the author of sudden and painless deaths, especially to women, a trait which anticipates her later worship as Eilithyia, goddess of childbirth. She is the huntress with the golden arrows of the certain aim, bright, crowned, enthroned on gold, the mistress of wild creatures. She has no prominent place in the action of the poem, but in the battle of the gods, probably a late passage, she assists Apollo against the Greeks, and is treated ignominiously by Hera. Except the slaughter of the children of Niobe, and the sending of the Calydonian boar, hardly any of the legends which afterwards grew around her find a place in the poem. She is regarded as a type of austere beauty, and she is already worshipped with choral dances of virgins, but her own virginity is less dwelt upon than it is elsewhere in Greek poetry. The story of the Iliad gives a curiously divided aspect to the person of Athena. Her temple stands upon the citadel at Troy, under the attribute of ' defender of the city.' Yet she has her native home at Athens, in the house of Erech- theus. One of the best remembered scenes in the poem is that in which, at the bidding of Hector, his mother Hecuba and the other Trojan matrons make their solemn offering to her of the largest and fairest garment (Peplos) they can find, and pray for the deliverance of their sons and people, and the goddess denies their petition. At the same time she is actively employed in passing to and from Olympus in the interest of the Greeks. She descends to moderate the action of Achilles, beside whom she is said to move continually ; she steadily befriends Odysseus and Diomedes, and other heroes of the Achaeans, and is joined with Hera in support of the Achaean and particularly the Argive cause. Although universally acknowledged as an Achaean goddess, she is already to some extent identified with Athens ; though she inhabits Olympus, she is content to dwell in the close-built house of Erechtheus ; and in the second book, which, how- ever, may possibly be later than the main body of the poem, she is mentioned as the nurse of Erechtheus, whom the earth brought forth, and whom she established in her own rich temple there, where the sons of the Athenians year 62 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE after year propitiate her with bulls and rams. She is, in a special sense, the daughter of Zeus, the supreme god, and is quite as much the patroness of action as of counsel, the helper of Herakles and Diomedes as well as of Odysseus. Her maiden- hood is not described, but is implied in the sacrifice to her of the heifer (vi. 94, 275, 308, x. 292, xi. 729). She inspires the charge of battle, she is the defender of cities ; she is called by the name of Alalcomene, said to be a city of Boeotia, which itself signifies defence. She is the invincible one, the unsubdued. If Hera is bovine, Athena has ' the look of an owl,' but the derivation of the epithet is uncertain, and to Homer it certainly meant either ' grey-eyed ' or ' keen- eyed.' She remonstrates with her father, and even goes forth with Hera to the aid of the Achaeans against his express desire, until warned to return. The attribute of wisdom comes out most distinctly in the passage of Book i. where she moderates the wrath of Achilles (cp. x. 245). Her function as the patroness of arts and crafts (Ergane) appears only at v. 61, 735, where she is credited with having adorned the garment worn by Hera, and at xiv. 278, where she is the patroness of the Trojan craftsman Harmonides. Poseidon acts chiefly as a disturbing and retarding force in the machinery of the poem. He has a grudge at the Trojans, and supports the Greeks ; except in what is called the ' Little Aeneid ' (Book xxii.), where he inconsistently appears in the interest of Aeneas. His rebellious spirit strives to break the bounds which Zeus and fate have set to his limited empire. He is more visibly associated with the element which he rules than the deities previously described ; and as a consequence of this, he is seldom found upon Olympus. His favourite haunts are Helice and Aegae on the Corin- thian Gulf, and he has a convenient watch-tower on the top of Samothrace. His ancient shrine upon Onchestus is not mentioned. He has locks of blue-black or seagreen hair, and is worshipped with sacrifices of bulls, the appropriate victim also for river-gods. In speaking of him as the encircler of the earth, or in comparing his shout to that of ten thousand men, the poet obviously associates him with the sea, no less than in attributing to him the disappearance THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 63 of the Grecian rampart. But the conception of his deity is not clearly consistent. He is not only the encircler but the shaker of the earth, and there may be a natural asso- ciation between the raging billows and the earthquake by which, as in the ' Prometheus ' of Aeschylus, the earth is rolled in surges to and fro. But Poseidon is also the giver of the horse, and there are traces of this already in the Iliad. He gave to Peleus the immortal steeds. To him as patron of horsemanship Antilochus prays, and is bidden by Menelaus to swear by the same god that he had not played foully in the race. These hints occur in Book xxiii., which is con- sidered late, but we may also observe that in viii. 440 Poseidon is employed in loosing the horses from the chariot of Zeus. Except in late and doubtful passages, Hermes appears only incidentally in the Iliad. In Book xxiv. he is the safe-conduct of Priam, and he is mentioned amongst the deities who take part in the battle of the gods, as siding with the Trojans, but refusing to fight with Latona. Both these passages, however, belong to what is now commonly regarded as the latest portion of the Iliad. The slight allusions to him in other parts of the poem, for instance, as the father of Eudorus, Book xvi. 180, or as the giver of flocks and herds in Book xiv. 491, suggest the impression that, as a pastoral deity, he is not greatly re- garded by the Argive chiefs. His attribute as a cunning deceiver is twice referred to (v. 390, xxiv. 24), and the epithet Argeiphontes dimly alludes to another part of his legend, not mentioned in the Iliad. ^There are degrees not only of power but of worth even amongst the Olympian gods. The Ares of Homer still bears some traces of the warrior deity of Thrace, who was his protot}^pe. He is a mighty being, a type of vigorous manhood, and the heroes in their moments of highest valour are compared to him. He is gigantic, brazen, of astounding voice, irrepressible, swift, shield-piercing, rousing to the fray ; but he is insatiable of battle, the destroyer of men, ever favouring one side, namely that which happens to be the stronger. When wounded he covers seven roods of 64 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE ground. Zeus, in speaking his true mind, declares that Ares is the most hateful to him of all the gods. He is the enemy of the Achaeans, for the most part favouring the Trojans in the war, and in this there may be something of the same feeling with which the author of the ' Telegonia,' a later epic, represented Ares and Athena as encountering each other in battle. But, just as Zeus, while acting in his own person, is inconsistently associated with ordinary elemental phenomena, so the name of Ares, only half per- sonified, often stands merely for the spirit of war, which gives life to the glancing spear, which is roused by the leaders of the host, and operates in manifold ways, altogether apart from the bodily presence of the god. Aphrodite, in the Iliad, chiefly impersonates external beauty, sensual charm, and the mutual attraction of the sexes. She is, of course, the friend of Paris, and despotic mistress of Helen, and she is also the mother of Aeneas. She loves laughter and smiles, she is golden and the giver of golden gifts. But in the Iliad she is spoken of on the whole with scant respect. Paris indeed rebukes Hector for scorning her gifts, but Helen, who knows her best of all, reviles her with such bitterness as only a woman can feel, until she is once more overborne by the irresistible spell which subdues the revived recollection of her former home and her longing for her brethren at Lacedaemon. Aphrodite subserves Hera in the unworthy stratagem by which the action of the poem is delayed, and the vigil- ance of Zeus is hoodwinked for a while. In the battle of the gods, a passage of doubtful antiquity, xxi. 416, she is present on the side of the Trojans, and when Ares is overthrown by Athena, she leads him out of the fray. In Book v. 131 ff. and 352, she is wounded by Diomedes, whom Athena has taught to refrain from attacking any except this weakest of the gods, ' the deceiver of unwarlike women ' ; and Ares gives her his chariot to return to Olympus, where she falls into the lap of her mother Dione, and is gently rallied by Athena and her father Zeus, who tells her to keep within her sphere, and to preside over the rites of love alone. The tw r o passages last mentioned are the only hints in the THE HOMERIC PANTHEON 65 Iliad of the close relation between Ares and Aphrodite, which is the subject of the song of Phemius in the Odyssey, and became prominent in subsequent mythology. Also in Book v. she is called Kypris; cp. Odyssey viii. 362-3, where Aphrodite retires to Paphos in Cyprus, while Ares flies to Thrace. Thus the foreign origin or connection of both deities is suggested. Hephaestus, on the other hand, is in no way connected with Aphrodite in the Iliad, his consort who receives Thetis in B. xviii. 382 being one of the Graces, who are native Thessalian deities. This god also, like Poseidon, is closely associated with the element which he represents and rules, and as the god of fire he is, like Prometheus afterwards, the supreme artist. His lameness, which moves the laughter of the gods, has been variously accounted for. In the Iliad the cause assigned for it is his fall from heaven, which is also an obscure point in his legend. That Lemnos received him in his fall is an incident suggested by the volcano Mosychlus, which in early times was active in the island, but now seems to have disappeared beneath the sea. Except where, as the god of fire, he resists Achilles, he is simply the divine artificer, as Daedalus is the mortal one. Hades as a personal deity comes in only incidentally as the receiver of the souls of the departed, the strong gate- keeper who opens not the house of his prisoners. His element is below, but once under the nod of Zeus he starts up from his throne, in fear lest the earth should open above him, and disclose his gloomy realm. Homer's conception of the world of shadows differs from that of savage races only in the more abiding consciousness of its unreality. The change from burial to cremation may have contributed to this. When the early Achaean interred his loved ones, he had positive satisfaction in thinking of the happy hunting ground to which he sent them, and in imagining some real continu- ation of the being that had been seen and felt so lately throbbing with warm vitality. To Homer this ardent uninstructed faith was a relic of the past. The thought of Hades was repulsive, but there was hardly any hint as yet of anything to take its place. F 66 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE yt The gods so far described had been established in Hellenic worship long before the Iliad was composed. But the personifying spirit and the mythopoeic faculty were still active, and many minor powers are brought in to reinforce the divine army, even in Olympus where the Muses sing and Ganymede reposes. Apollo having lost his solar cha- racter, the sun-god appears in proper person as Helios the all-seeing, or as Hyperion, who was afterwards made the father of the sun. Earth cannot rise to Olympus, but she is not the less a goddess distinguished from Demeter, with whose worship she was afterwards associated ; and it is perhaps significant that in striking the truce, while the Achaeans bring a victim for Zeus, the Trojans bring a white lamb for the sun, and a black one for the earth. Elsewhere, however, scarcely any distinction can be made between the Trojan and Hellenic worships. Nor are the powers that rule the spirits of men by any means exhausted. Ares has for com- panions Eris and Enyalios, or again the war-goddess Enyo : he is accompanied by Terror, and Flight, who is his son. Iris is both the rainbow and a messenger of the gods, hence she is often momentarily present in Olympus. Then there are the sea nymphs, the woodland nymphs, the mountain nymphs, and greater than these, the rivers, of whom Scamander plays such a distinguished part in a crisis of the poem. The Dawn, a separate personality, is the mother of Memnon. And besides these there are Eilithyia and other powers conducive to human life. Since every act required the immediate co-operation of a god, there was scarcely any limit to the inventive work of imagination. It is obvious upon the whole account, that so far from being the creator or nominator of the Greek Pantheon, as Herodotus supposed, the epic poet accepted it as part of the tradition upon which he worked, though it is manifest that the Homeric selection and representation had a powerful and most important influence in perpetuating particular conceptions. To the Homeric poems it was due that after generations conceived more nobly of divine action than they would otherwise have done.x An important question remains. Were heroes or demi- HERO-WORSHIP WHY ABSENT? 67 gods already worshipped in the time of Homer ? / The best authorities give a simply negative answer, aria there is certainly no distinct trace of anything of the kind. The case of Herakles, of which more will be said in the sequel, is a possible exception, proving the rule, and the immortality or quasi-immortality, miraculously accorded to favourites of gods, such as Tithonus or Ganymede (both belonging to the Trojan legend), is independent of the main stream of current mythology. And if the myth of Erechtheus is admitted as an exception, this occurs in the catalogue of the ships, which is generally referred to a later (Boeotian) source. Yet it would be strange if the worship of ancestors, one of the most primitive forms of religious culture, had been entirely absent from the earliest ages in Hellas, and that it existed in some shape is proved by the construction of the beehive tombs. It has been suggested that the Aeolian emigrants in passing to Asia and exchanging crema- tion for burial may have forgotten their former worship of their fathers' tombs. Living in a perfect climate they only thought occasionally of death. It is, however, worth con- sidering whether in depicting the life of the generation in whose veins the blood of Zeus still flowed, the poet has not deliberately ignored the divine honours paid to them in his own day. The readers of the ' Ajax 'of Sophocles receive no hint of that which the spectators knew, that the prince of Salamis had his image and his shrine amongst the other sons of Aeacus at Aegina, and his altar at Salamis. Orestes was also worshipped (cp. the Oresteion at Tegea), but this does not occur to the student of Aeschylus or Sophocles. And we may observe that it is not to be expected that the Myrmidons at Troy should offer incense to Achilles while yet alive or that Agamemnon should receive divine honours in his lifetime. However this may be, certain notes of preparation for the form of religion which afterwards became so important are observable in several places in the poem. See especially B. xi. 761, where Nestor recalls his past glories, when men prayed to him on earth as to Zeus in heaven, and the frequent reference to the divine prowess of a generation which has passed away. "It may well be F 2 68 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE imagined that while the Iliad reflects the feelings and beliefs of a proud aristocracy, at whose banquets it was- originally sung, other traditions may have been passing amongst the subject people fragments of myth and legend which had not yet found a poet who should give artistic shape to them. Some such hypothesis appears requisite, in order to account for the fact that many survivals of mere nature-worship and of early custom and ritual appear for the first time at a later stage of Greek literature ; so that, as Mr. Leaf broadly puts it, the Homeric civilisation is modern as compared with that of Athens. It does not follow that such fancies ' had long passed out of all remembrance at Mycenae,' but only that the selective art of the poet singing on the coast of Asia avoided them, or that they were unsuited to the fastidious taste of the chiefs before whom he sang, who were more interested in matters of war and honour than in mythology. The legend of Herakles may have been better known than appears from the poem, and even that of the Argonauts is once alluded to (vii. 468 ff.). Elis was already a seat of divination and magic (xi. 740). Chiron, a mysterious being, tutor of Achilles, is mentioned in xi. 831 as the most righteous Centaur (SitcawTaTos T^svravpwv). It remains to speak of two deities, Demeter and Dionysus, who are practically absent from the Iliad, and their absence is significant. In one passage, indeed, Demeter is spoken of as one of the many consorts of Zeus, but the passage, xiv. 326, is one of those legendary lists which were peculiarly subject to interpolation. Elsewhere Demeter is simply the giver of the corn, and is spoken of, and that only twice, in the familiar phrase 'the grain of Demeter.' She is also mentioned incidentally in alluding to a Cretan fable that made her the wife of lasion. Persephone, in the Iliad, is not her daughter, but only the wife of Hades, and a Chthonian power. Dionysus appears only in two passages, both late or suspected, viz. in the list already spoken of, where Semele his mother is mentioned among the consorts of Zeus, and in the allusion to Lycurgus in the speech of Diomedes, vi. 130 f., a passage which has sometimes been ZEUS AND FATE 69 questioned as contradicting the tenor of Book v. (It may be noted, however, that as Aphrodite's feebleness in war is her chief attribute, so this passage dwells on the cowardice of Dionysus who takes refuge in the lap of Thetis.) Are we to suppose then that the worship of Demeter and of Dionysus had not yet become established in Hellas ? or that for some reason the poet has chosen to ignore them ? That in many of the islands Dionysus was already worshipped is extremely probable. That a worship of Demeter, although much simpler than in after times, prevailed wherever agriculture flourished, is almost certain ; and is, indeed, implied in the phrase which speaks of her as the giver of the grain. But the proud warriors who listened to the epic singer took little account of such village celebrations. These pagan deities, as in a sense they may be termed, had no place in their regard beside Athena and Apollo. It was reserved for Attic literature to immortalise both deities, and spread their glories over the earth for the coming time. 3. But in the theology of the Iliad there is something higher than the traditions of divine action and of warlike achievement ; and this is partly due to the genius of the poet. However lightly Homer may conceive the quarrels between Zeus and Hera, or the laughter of the Immortals at lame Hephaestus, there can be no doubt as to the serious- ness with which he regards human destiny as a divine irreversible fact. Fate presides at the birth of each human being and fastens round him the thread which she herself has spun. This regulates his varied fortunes and decides his term. Hence Fate is again associated with Death, the crusher of the spirit, whose power is joined with the might of Destiny. The breath of man goes forth, and his shadow is received by Hades the strong gate-keeper, while he himself, if he escape the dogs and vultures, returns to his earth, with or without the help of devouring fire. Fate is sometimes a. separate power, at others can hardly be distinguished from the will of Zeus, or of the gods collectively. Even when personified, the destinies are not yet supplied with a genealogy, nor is their number fixed. Sometimes each man would seem to have a separate destiny, sometimes the lot of all 70 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE men would seem to depend upon a single power. The great conception of Destiny as a supreme divinity, which plays so large a part afterwards in Greek culture, is present in Homer, but fitfully, and except in rare passages is not as yet consis- tently personified. The share, or lot in life, is spoken of in much the same way as a man's share in the spoils of conquest, or in a banquet. The thing signified, however, is deeply inherent in the poem. The dishonour done to Achilles is felt from the first as the more pathetic because of the early death to which he is doomed. This unwelcome truth is clearly understood between Zeus and Thetis in their colloquy in the first book, and is alluded to by Thetis herself in her address to her son (Book i. 416 ff.). Erinnys is likewise a power at once singular and plural. The Erinnys that haunts the gloom hears out of the nether darkness the curse of Althaea on her son. On the other hand, the Erinnyes in the plural are appealed to by the father of Phoenix who had outraged his feelings, and again it is said that the Erinnyes ever accompany the elder brother. The Erinnys is a personified curse which becomes operative against the guilty, especially for the breach of filial or domestic sanctities, although even the poor man, when neglected, has his Erinnyes who vindicate him ; and in the singular passage in which the horse of Achilles breaks into human speech, he is checked by the Erinnyes, who seem here to personify a law of nature. The Erinnys is associated with Hades and Perse- phone ( ix. 457) and with Moira and Zeus in the con- fession of Agamemnon, who refers his infatuation to their anger. And this reminds us that Ate, infatuation personified, is hardly less dreadful than the curse itself. It is enough to recall in a sentence the famous allegory of Agamemnon, in which Zeus himself is described as not exempt from her disastrous influence. The Homeric conception of Hades, the place of shadows, is too familiarly known to need description. The epithets of Hades, ' he of the swift steeds ' hurrying men .away, ' of the strong gateway,' 'of the stern, unrelenting mood,' are sufficient to bring it back to mind. One point, however,, deserves special mention. The conception of the world of CUSTOM AND MORALITY 71 death is simpler in the Iliad than elsewhere. / The soul or shade passes immediately from earth to the unseen. It needs no conduct or extreme unction. The one passage which conflicts with this, when the shade of Patroclus com- plains that without burial he cannot pass the river, for the other shadows drive him away, belongs to a book which even conservative criticism admits to be later than the main body of the Iliad. Ermin Eohde has remarked that the funeral of Patroclus is performed according to rites which belong to a yet earlier stage of religious culture, implying a more vivid belief in continued existence after death. The poet's aim is to evince the boundless passion of Achilles ; but the customs are a survival from a past which believed in a real continuance of being, and also entertained &fear of the dead, which survives in our fear of ghosts, but from which Homer is free. The ghost of Patroclus is seen by Achilles in a dream, not with any fear, but with tender pity : on the other hand, there is a pervading sense of the gloom of Hades and of the helplessness of the shadows of the dead. The body which is the man's self is subject to decay. Thence came the temptation to maltreat the dead body of an enemy. But the unsubstantial ghost, which has fled away, is a wretched and feeble being, if it may be said to be at all. The darkness of the invisible world and the misery of mortality are intensi- fied by contrast with the vivid brightness that surrounds the actual energies of the living man, and there is also a strain of dissatisfaction with the primitive belief, which was ultimately to lead to a reconstruction of that belief, on the higher basis of spiritual idealism. 4. In the infancy of reflection the morality of a people is embodied not in words and maxims, but in custom and feeling. In the age represented by the Iliad, settled institu- tions, vofjioi, were not as yet ; but Themis, or positive obliga- gation, was acknowledged, not only in the command or judgment of the king, but in many rules of life, which although not formulated were universally held sacred and are appealed to as the sanction of conduct. It may be observed in passing that the word signifies both judgment 72 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE and the place of judgment (see Book xi. 807) ; also that Themis as a divine person is employed in summoning the council of the gods. Even acts which in modern times would be referred to Nature are in Homer often included under this term. Of ceremonial obligations we have already spoken. That in their associations, both with greater and lesser occasions in life, religious sanctions had a restraining influence over the violent passions which were subject to no other control, is sufficiently obvious ; the urbanity of manner, which so often contrasts with the savagery of military licence, is largely to be referred to this cause. The habit of euphemism, that is of avoiding words which might provoke the gods, was by no means an insignificant feature in the civilisation of an age in which personal influences were absolute in the human sphere. It is true that custom carried with it often only a positive, that is a literal obligation. The breach of the oath once passed awaked a religious terror which the most outrageous perfidy, without this, could not occasion. The only reference in the Iliad to a judgment of the dead (a notion which thousands of years earlier had been a cardinal point in Egyptian religion) is the appeal of Agamemnon to Hades and Persephone as those who punish oath-breakers beneath the ground. But the spirit already stirs beneath the letter, and the sense of divine presences who regard the oath, who care for the suppliant and the stranger, has a power to humanise and refine. However inconsistently and vaguely, the supreme god is already revered by those who pray to him as supporting the^s^ cause. Another influence tending in the same direction is the respect for sacred persons : the ministers of shrines but these are mostly on the Trojan side (where the priesthood of Theano is elective, and Helenus is priest, prince, and warrior in one) the herald, who serves not kings only but also the gods, and the prophet, or interpreter of dreams. Even the wrath of Achilles softens at the approach of the embassy to which the heralds lead the way. That the person of Chryses is more respected by the army than by its commander, when his passions are roused, takes little from the effect of the gentle reverence which surrounds the man of prayer and the restraint to CUSTOM AND MORALITY 73 which this gives rise. More universal, and not less potent because unseen, are two powers which throughout Greek life hold equal sway, Respect and Eight, al&cos rs KOI Sitcrj, especially the former. The appeal to aiSws is frequent in the Iliad; it is 'Reverence, that angel of the world,' which is the soul of discipline, which gives authority to office, which occasionally prompts mercy to an enemy, and ever compels pity for the suppliant, and together with the fear of Zeus inspires hospitality towards the stranger. The wrath of Achilles is doing violence to this feeling when Athena cautions him in Book i. But in receiving the embassy, and in his treatment of the corpse of Eetion, king of Thebe, whom he has slain, he shows himself fully sensible of it in his normal mood. The meaning of SLKTJ (= right) in Homer is less fixed. In the Iliad Sl/crj is the exercise of jurisdiction in the concrete. It is sometimes almost equal to Themis, implying right sanctioned by cus- tom, sometimes merely what is usual in a person or a class of persons their customary or appointed 'way.' In this sense it is applied in the Odyssey even to the condition of the dead. The Greek city, in the later historical sense, did not yet exist. The centres of moral sanction lay in the family and the clan. Domestic duties were profoundly sacred. The acknowledged licence of the camp, or of the roving wayfarer, does not prevent the rule of monogamy from being generally established. Even in the connections which are without this sanction, there is a tone of grace and genuine affection which redeems them from coarseness, but the distinction be- tween legitimate and illegitimate is clearly maintained. When Agamemnon declares that he prefers Chryseis to his wedded wife at home, that is understood to be the outbreak of a tyrannical disposition. On the other hand, the affec- tion of Achilles for Briseis, which she returns, is on both sides a true and delicate feeling, although it does not inter- fere with matrimonial projects, in case of his living to go back to Phthia. And Agamemnon, even in carrying out his harsh caprice, abstains from the last outrage against the rights of his rebellious comrade. Yet unchaste actions even 74 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE of an infamous kind, although they compel the offender to exile from his own people, do not prevent him from obtain- ing shelter and protection under a neighbouring chief. The case of Phoenix is an example. Similarly, bloodguiltiness, as a rule, makes flight inevitable ; though, as Agamemnon says, in many cases the avenger of blood may be pacified by a money payment on the part of the homicide, who is then permitted to remain with his own people. The sanctions surrounding human life were not yet deeply fixed. In the G-ortyn inscription every offence against the person, as in early England, has a money value estimated according to the dignity of the person injured. Among the many instances of homicide which occur in Homer, there is not one in which any reference is made to the ritual of purifica- tion. This was developed afterwards, with the growth of the worship of Apollo, in which a doctrine of atonement became part of the priestly instruction, and also with the creation of something approaching to a system of criminal law. The movement in the religious consciousness, which is implied in passing from the stage represented in Homer to such a theology of guilt and atonement as we find in Aeschylus, is very noteworthy, even if it may be supposed that the purifying rites themselves had an early origin in some Hellenic or non-Hellenic centre of religious culture. The significant fact is, that the feeling of the necessity of atonement or satisfaction for bloodshed became ultimately universal. The Homeric world has often been censured as un-moral, and it is true that conduct as represented in the Iliad is largely guided by personal impulses, and not by ethical con- siderations duly formulated. But there is a morality of feeling which in many ways anticipates the most refined ethical determinations, and of this the Iliad is full. The poem does not abound with moral maxims, still less with moral principles ; but human experience in its purest forms is nowhere delineated with greater vividness, subtlety and delicacy, nor with more of penetrating insight. As tried by any modern standard, there are gaps in the moral code. The relations of husband to wife, of brother to brother, and DEPTH OF MORAL FEELING 7& of friend to friend, are nobly conceived, but the laws of humanity and mercy are rudimentary. There is some difference, however, between the views of life and of the world entertained by the average warrior, by persons under the stress of extraordinary passion, and by the poet, and this in two ways, first in constructing his story, and secondly, in his general contemplation of human things. What is essential in Homer is not always that which has left the most lasting impression on mankind. The beauty of Helen, of the ' face which launched a thousand ships/ has passed into the ' world's desire ' ; but the remorse of Helen, her misery and feeling of her own condition, on which the poet lays at least equal stress, have been little noticed. The meeting of Paris in the field with the man whom he has wronged, which ' cows his better part of man,' has also a profound significance./. It is indeed within the human sphere that the divine in Homer is to be found., The humanity of the age (incomplete as it was) had far out- grown its theology. The poet is often more far-seeing than his own Zeus. (Impressions of experience and types of human character nave sunk deep, and are reproduced with extraordinary distinctness. To the poet, at least, the persons of his story revealed far-reaching truths of which he loses sight when he speaks separately about the gods. Of course no anachronism could be more extravagant than the attempts of philosophers in later times to find all wisdom in Homer. Not to speak of the absurdities involved, the naivete and freshness of epic poetry are thus utterly destroyed. Nor is Colonel Mure altogether justified in drawing out at length all the types of character which he finds in Homer. That is apt to make of the epic poet a sort of modern man of the world. But no delineation of human passion at its height has ever surpassed the Homeric picture of Achilles ; nor has any poet of later times reached greater depths of tenderness than appear in the dramatic portraiture of Helen, of Briseis, or of Andromache. The proud veracity of Achilles antici- pates a moral standard belonging rather to modern than to ancient life, and rarely dwelt upon in Greek literature, though the note is repeated more emphatically by Sophocles in the 76 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE 'Philoctetes.' When the Homer of the Iliad is face to face with life in its elementary aspects, with the foundations of character and personality, the limitations of the traditional theology and of imperfect social conditions are hardly apparent ; it is here that he proves himself indeed immortal : the sorrows of Andromache, the desolation of Briseis, the home affections and the manly patriotism of Hector, the moving appeal of Priam to Achilles, speak not to one age only but to all time, and penetrate human nature to the core. Nor should we pass over what may be described as Homer's ethical good taste, which is unsurpassed both in ancient and in modern poetry. Those special aberrations of the moral sense, from which Greece was never wholly exempt, must have existed before the Iliad. Yet the poems are absolutely free from any hint of it. In this Homer is superior to Solon, Aeschylus, Pindar, Sophocles, and all Greek writers down to the middle of the fourth century, when Plato in his old age composed the 'Laws ' ; and in this as in much else the poet justifies Dante's description of him as one ' who, like an eagle, soars above the rest.' In such blending of high feeling with childish fancies, we are confronted with a state of the human mind which is hard for us to realise, although a superior intelligence might not have far to seek for similar contradictions amongst our- selves ; and in the poetry of Dante, and even Milton, there are inequalities of an analogous kind. The 'affable arch- angel ' communicates to Adam in Paradise, as facts of angelic experience, what appear to us nowadays nothing better than ridiculous inanities. The passage in which this occurs is of a very different order from such flights of genuine poetry as the complaint of Adam through the still night, the creation of the birds, the address of Satan to the sun, the lines on ambition in ' Paradise Regained,' or the apostrophe to light at the opening of Book iii. of 'Paradise Lost.' The reflection can hardly fail to occur to the reader of Homer, that the poet himself takes less seriously the representation of super- human persons and their actions, than those scenes in which his principal characters are most deeply involved. The truth is that before the groundwork of the Iliad had been INCONSISTENCIES 77 laid, the worship of the Olympians on the Asiatic seaboard was already growing old. The poet's impressions ' of man r of nature, and of human life ' have a freshness and perfec- tion far surpassing the conceptions of divine beings which he shares with his contemporaries ; it does not appear as if he had deliberately modified these, although with the selec- tive power of a great artist he has probably omitted many features on which commoner minds would have been apt to dwell. The very depth and vividness of the poet's perceptions, combined with the absence of reflection, lead, however, inevitably to glaring inconsistencies which appear strange to a more philosophical age. The moving spring of the Iliad, the intense wrath of Achilles occasioned by an insult which only yields when it is supplanted by the deeper rage for his comrade slain, exhibits the union of tenderness and vindictiveness which is one of the marked characteristics of antiquity. The savagery of Achilles was to the ancient hearer only the measure of his love for his friend. And the tenderness to the aged Priam which succeeds it springs as instinctively from the inmost source of emotion as the outrage on the dead body of Hector. The contrast could not be more strongly marked than in the single line describing Achilles ' farewell to his dead friend : ' He groaned as he laid his slaughterous hands upon his comrade's breast.' Religious and other motives are variously conceived, because the mood in which the world is regarded changes with the change of situation. Intense enjoyment of life may be regarded as the major key which dominates the Iliad ; but the minor note is not less emphasised, and is increas- ingly heard towards the end. The gods are the givers of good things : that is the simple faith of the Achaean when he prays ; but prayers often cross, and the gods do not hear both sides, but give the victory to one, xiii. 302 ; though they are not always so scrupulous as in viii. 440, where they refrain from tasting of the sacrifice ; and the hero whom a god opposes breaks out in expostulation as Asius does (xii. 164), though at other times he may have been pious enough. This is very characteristic of an early stage of 78 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE religion. Again, the gods are interested in human things and care for their worshippers who sacrifice to them, yet they are overheard reproaching one another with the folly of taking mortal affairs too seriously, and Zeus himself remarks that no creature that lives and crawls upon the ground is more miserable than mankind. The view of a situation which commends itself to the persons of the story is often inconsistent with the supposed reality : the treachery of Pandarus, for example, is hailed by the Achaeans as securing victory to them, since there is a fresh act of impiety on the Trojan side ; but it has no apparent effect in the sequel. So in other places the neglect of sacrifice is assigned by popular feeling as a cause of disasters which are otherwise accounted for in the poem. Further the omniscience and omnipresence of the gods is a thought of which the mind of the age has glimpses, yet imagination fails to realise it. Many incidents would be impossible, could the gods be supposed to be conscious of all that passed. Zeus is the ideal of wisdom ; yet he is deceived by a contemptible fraud : Zeus as the god of the sky, who gives the rain, ceases not to work when as Hera's husband he is asleep on Ida; and though Ares favours the Trojans, yet if the blood of the Trojan Aeneas were spilled by Grecian Diomedes, it would satisfy the valiant god of war. To the poet it seemed only natural that the gods should combine superhuman powers with human frailty. When Thetis implores Zeus in his almightiness to honour Achilles, he remains silent for a while, and to a thoughtful reader it might seem as if the father of gods and men were meditating on the many deaths and other sorrows for mankind which are involved in his assent ; but, as the sequel proves, he is really thinking of the domestic scene, the quarrel with his wife, which must inevitably follow on his tremendous nod. When the Iliad and Odyssey became the basis of education for the Athenian youth, the protest of Plato against such inconsistencies might well be justified. And those who thought of Homer as the inventor of Olympus (how falsely we have seen) might accuse him vehemently, as INCONSISTENCIES 79 Xenophanes and Heraclitus did. The age of reflection having once begun, the contrast between heroic nobility and divine imperfection could not fail to be perceived. This led to criticism and scepticism and to allegorical interpretations of mythology. Yet when the poem is considered on its merits, the point most to be observed is the independent manner in which the poet stands behind his own creations. He is really, as already said, more wide-seeing than his own Zeus, compre- hending in one glance the objects of worship and the wor- shippers, each of whom regards passing events from a particular and subjective point of view. The disinterested objectivity of Greek art is manifest throughout the Iliad. On the other hand many survivals of primitive mythology appear as patches amidst the tissue of such nobler work, either as incidents of the celestial machinery, or in the way of casual illustration or allusion. One such incident of peculiar interest is the binding of gods by one another, a feature which is familiar to the students of general mytho- logy and folklore. It betrays a dim consciousness of the essential inconsistency of polytheism. Another curious feature of the popular belief, which appears incidentally in the poem, is the vain striving of mortals with immortals, as of Niobe with Latona, of Lycurgus with Dionysus, and of Idas with Apollo. Perhaps the most childish of such imaginations, next to the deception of Zeus himself by Hera, is the sending of the dream by Zeus to Agamemnon, inspiring a false hope of the immediate fall of Troy ; whereon the king sets about to deceive the Achaean host. Both acts are characteristically Greek, but they belong to a naive and early stage of Greek religion. The poetic motive is to interest the hearer, who contrasts the appearance with the fact ; it is the same which in a far subtler form enters into the composition of tragedy, and has been described under the somewhat questionable name of ' irony.' The almost entire absence of abstract reflection in the Iliad at once accounts for and excuses many happy in- consistencies, of which the poet is profoundly unconscious. 80 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE It may help us to realise this state of mind, if we consider some of the few proverbial sayings in which the wisdom of life already began to be embodied. Book i. 216. He who hearkens to the voice of gods is heard by them. Book v. 530. When men respect each other more are saved than slain ; but when they fly there is neither glory nor defence for them. Book vii. 282. It is a good thing to obey the influence of night. Book ix. 256. Kindness is the better part. Book x. 224. When two advance together, one perceives the way of advantage before the other can ; but one, though he perceive, has still a shorter view, and slender thoughts. Book xi. 408. I know that only cowards leave the war, but he who hath prowess in the fight must stand stoutly, whether he be wounded or wound others. Book xiii. 115. The thoughts of good men admit of remedy. Book xiii. 237. The valour even of sorry wights is something when combined. Book xix. 155 ff. Where Odysseus advises that the host should dine before the fight. These simple thoughts are of very different calibre from the feeling of the situation which the poet ever and again displays. It must be considered also how imperfect was the ethical vocabulary. The word of praise perhaps most expressive of the contemporary ideal was ' blameless ' or ' without re- proach.' But this conveyed no moral significance at all ; it simply meant that the person so described had no defect either of birth or personal qualities that could forfeit for him the position of a chief. It is applied for instance to Aegisthus, even in the Odyssey. The word which after- wards was the philosophical equivalent for virtue occurs only a few times, and then in the most simple meaning of manhood, that is, martial valour, or merely strength. Once more, the absence of fixed institutions already referred to, the inchoate condition of social life, must be taken into the account. The primary duty of hospitality is, of course, often dwelt upon, and is deeply inherent in the whole action of the poem ; on the other hand the idea of justice is still irretrie- vably bound up with revenge. See especially the passage RELIGION IN THE ILIAD 81 where Menelaus is about to spare his foeman, but is over- ruled by the righteous counsel of his elder brother. The idea of Nemesis, afterwards so potent, is only fitfully present in the Iliad, where the word itself has the more simple meaning of natural anger or indignation. rSome anticipation of it, however, appears in the last book, where the gods are roused to indignation by the passionate outrage of Achilles, and this indeed is the highest point of ethical development . which is attained in the whole course of the poem. There are incidental touches elsewhere in the Iliad, in which something approaching to the same ^pirit is revealed : for example, the simple human pathos of Achilles' own comparison of the weeping Patroclus to a little girl who clings to her mother's dress begging to be taken up. Nor is the tragic meaning of the fate of Achilles confined to the last books, although it is naturally there more fully dwelt upon. It is time to put together succinctly the main character- istics of what may be loosely termed the theological concep- tions of the heroic age, and of the poet of the Iliad. (1) The interest in human things was far more vivid than the traditionally accepted notions of things divine. The heart of man was deeply engaged in the former, while the other touched only his imagination or his fear. This is true at least of the poet and his hearers, whatever may have been the reverence for sacred persons amongst the common people. The priest of Apollo might cry to him to avenge his wrong : Achilles, in a supreme hour, might appeal instinctively to the god of his fathers and his house : the Achaeans might lift their voices to heaven in the stress of fight ; but for the poet and his audience, it is the human figure of Chryses or of Achilles that most signifies. (2) The delineation of human things owes part of its unrivalled freshness to the absence of reflection. It has been observed that only two out of innu- merable similes are taken from the action of the mind, and then it is the swiftness, not so much of thought, as of imagination, that is in point. (3) The bright distinctness G 82 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE of early horizons in Homer is correlative to the vagueness and gloom of the conception of a future life. The words of Aristotle ' death is terrible, for it is an end ' comprise in a formula what is felt rather than expressed in the Iliad. (4) The poem reflects a stage both of mythology and legend in many ways different from that which is to be found in the literature of the fifth and fourth centuries. The latter, however, undoubtedly contains survivals of a still earlier culture, and it is worth considering whether these were known to Homer, and rejected by him as unsuited to his art, or whether they were altogether of independent growth. It has been already remarked that such a doubt may be raised in regard to hero-worship. On the whole, it seems probable that, as there came to be more intercourse between the various centres of Hellenic life, certain features of ritual, myth, and legend would find their way into the general stream of literary tradition, which at the time when the Iliad was composed were unfamiliar to the poet, or altogether unknown or indifferent to his special audience. (5) It is an uncertain question how far, or in what sense, the will of Zeus in the Iliad is to be regarded as righteous. The notion of Nemesis, as above observed, is occasional rather than pervading. It is even doubtful whether the pathos of Achilles' fate conveyed to the poet's hearers the warning against ' too much ' which it must undoubtedly have carried with it, as read or recited to a contemporary of Herodotus. The essentially Greek thoughts of measure, justice, and equity are not absent from the poem, i.g. in Nestor, Odysseus, and Diomedes, but it is not in Olympus that they are to be found. Themis, the ordinance of authority, is but a shadowy precursor of the idea of law, ' the universal king,' which became so pronounced in subsequent Greek history. The power which vindicated order and punished the breach of social duties is already the Erinnys, a name of doubtful origin, but always associated with the darkness of the under- world. The passion of Althaea when she smites the earth with both her hands in calling up the Fury from beneath brings this association strongly to mind. The thought of a judgment after death occurs incidentally in two isolated RELIGION IN THE ILIAD 83 passages. But the vagueness of the moral sanction, and the absence of any clear standard of conduct, apart from primitive custom, only enhances the ethical originality of the poet who has represented the self-denying patriotism of Hector, the wifely devotion of Andromache, the self-control of Diomedes, and the pure friendship of Achilles and Patroclus. Two notes are struck by Homer which sound far onwards into Greek literature ; to the modern ear they seem to jar, but in ancient life they are correlative. The precept * thou shalt love thy friend ' is still inseparable from the other precept ' thou shalt hate thine enemy.' However paradoxical it may seem to our Christian sense, the tender affection and the stern inexorableness which show themselves in the same person combined to manifest the freshness and force of unsophisticated nature. G 2 84 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE CHAPTEE IV KELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY Obvious differences from the Iliad Growing civilisation Vindication of domestic right Not sentimental Modes of worship Mythology Heroic legend Moral principles Ethical reflection. NOTWITHSTANDING the imperfect development of society, and the poverty in ethical terminology which marked the heroic age, the Iliad contains clear evidence of the deep hold which had long since been taken by domestic institutions, and of the strong sanctions which surrounded the elementary relations of human beings to one another. These are imagined with such depth and force as to contain the essential substance of all morality under a religious bond. The vindication of the rites of home, and of the rules of hospitality, underlies the action and is never quite lost sight of. The poet's vision ranges far beyond his age, extending to the contemplation of universal humanity. His impressions are conveyed with incomparable vividness, subtlety and delicacy, but always in the form of feeling. The process of reflection and abstract thinking has hardly begun. The picture of the gods, on the other hand, and of their dealings with mankind, although grand and sublime in part, and pathetic on the side of the worshipper, is full of the crudest inconsistencies. The conception of divine power is more developed than the ideas of justice and beneficence. The most universal attribute of the gods is their exemption from death, which places a gulf of absolute separation between them and mortals even those in whose veins the blood of gods is flowing. In the Odyssey human things are regarded more com- prehensively on the whole, but are touched everywhere with a somewhat lighter hand. The gods, with the exception of RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 85 Athena, and perhaps of Poseidon, who is necessary for the machinery of the poem, are less distinctly conceived, and the gap between them and poor mortals is practically filled up for the imagination by a sort of fairy world of semi-human beings. The conception of Elysium, as a place far away upon the earth, to which the sons and sons-in-law of Zeus go after death, strikes a note which is absent from the Iliad ; and in the eleventh book, which, in part at least, is a later addition, the world of the dead is imagined under a different aspect, and there is a distinct reflection of the sacrificial worship of the dead ( ' blood-drinking ghosts ' ) . The gods are much more frequently spoken of collectively in the plural number, and so far as they intervene to govern human things, they do so with a serious purpose, and mostly with a view to vindicating the right. Life is still the slave of destiny, but men are blamed for their own misfortunes ; in this spirit the crime of Aegisthus is denounced by Athena, at the opening of the poem, and both the companions of Odysseus and the insolent suitors are said to be responsible for their own destruction. These are some of the more obvious differences. The legend of Odysseus is believed by some authorities to have originally taken shape in Arcadia. Assuming this to be true, the tradition would find its way to Ionia with the emigrants from Pylos, who accompanied the Neleid prince who helped to colonise Miletus. And accordingly, those elements of religious life which came from Phthia or Thes- saly are less prominent here ; and as the Ionian settlement was later than the Aeolian, so the Odyssey and even the materials out of which it grew are later than those of the Iliad. The poet, whom we suppose to be an Asiatic Greek, betrays his ignorance of the geography of the Peloponnese and the adjoining coasts. At the same time, the poem shows a greatly extended interest in the habitable world. This is not the place for considering the contradictions of the geography. It has been further confused by the fancy of the later Greeks, who, as they came to know more, seem to have trans- ferred some imaginary features from the mouth of the Black Sea to the coasts of Italy and Sicily. The description, 86 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE such as it is, could only have come into existence at a time when navigation was extending, and men's imaginations were much exercised with voyages of discovery. The Iliad is a poem of passion, the Odyssey a poem of endurance; the one moves amongst scenes of battle, the other amongst romantic adventures. Comradeship, rivalry, and vindictiveness are .the springs of action in the Iliad; the Odyssey presents us with a persistent will, passing onwards through manifold hindrances towards a purposed good. It is the apotheosis of conduct rather than of personal feeling, but this very fact perhaps involves an advance in reflection ; and when we look more closely at the work, we find many other kindred traces. The dwelling place of the gods is differently conceived, Olympus in the Iliad is still a mountain top with many peaks and ridges, in the hollows of which the gods have their golden houses. In the Odyssey, Olympus is hardly dis- tinguishable from an unseen heaven, not snow-clad and clouded like the mountain in the Iliad, but far withdrawn, exempt from storms and rains and wind and snow. Like the Nysaean hill of Bacchus afterwards, it has no precise locality, but just so much reminiscence of the original mountain as to give a touch of picturesqueness. We shall find a further stage of progress towards a pure abstraction in the Olympus of the Attic poets. As regards hero-worship, Menelaus is told by Proteus that he is destined to depart to the Elysian plain ; the deification of Herakles is alluded to, though in a passage that is probably of later origin than the rest, and Ino (Leucothea) has also been raised to the skies. Domestic and patriotic virtues form the cardinal interest of the whole action ; and it is important to remark that the constancy of Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope is entirely without the modern note of personal sentiment. It is not the womanly charm of Penelope that draws Odysseus home : it is the thought of home as such, with all its claims upon him. It is not because Odysseus won her heart, many years ago, that Penelope eludes the suitors, but because he is her lord, the noblest of men, and because she cannot bear to RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 87 think of leaving the mansion, so full of precious things, and parting from her son, to cheer the spirit of some less noble man. The reserve on both sides, when at last they come together, is extremely remarkable, and essentially Greek. Not that feeling is absent from either of them, but rather that it is profound, and is inseparable from practical aims, extending to a lifetime. It is even more apparent in the Odyssey than in the Iliad that the poet does not take the gods altogether seri- ously, but rather handles them with a consciously artistic purpose. Poseidon, for example, affords the chief celestial machinery for the action. He persecutes Odysseus in revenge for Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who is his son ; until Hera interposes, and by permission of Zeus secures the release of her favourite. Still more capricious are the poet's dealings with that fairyland of imagination, in which he has placed such unheroic beings, neither divine nor human, as the giant Laestrygones, the one-eyed Cyclopes, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the witch Circe, the nymph Calypso ; who diversify the action, and occupy the borderland between gods and men. It is not to be inferred that these were all unknown to the poet of the Iliad, or to his hearers, but their introduction into a serious poem was probably some- thing new. A taste for the marvellous, for strange experiences and adventures, had supervened together with the progress of navigation. The dwellers on the coast of Asia drank in eagerly the tales which travellers brought them from the outer world ; a sort of mythological geography became the food of their imaginations. At the same time the consciousness of their own civilisation tended to express itself in the supposed contrast between civilised and savage mankind. Hence the account of the Cyclopes, who cared not for one another, nor for the gods, but each commanded his own household, or cavehold : a note that is taken up by Plato and Aristotle. To the same consciousness that of a growing civilisa- tion we owe the very different picture of the Phaeacians who take Odysseus home : of Nausicaa, the mirror of maidenhood, the courtly Alcinous, the gracious Arete, and the dainty youths of whom Horace speaks as In cute 88 RELIGION IN GKEEK LITERATURE curanda nimium studiosa juventus (' Young men whose care is to be neat and trim ' ) . This charming episode has been variously understood. The ancients, perhaps too literally, identified Phaeacia with Corcyra (where there is a river near the town and also poplar trees), but the Corcyraeans of history are most unlike this gentle folk. Some, led by the alliteration, think that the Phoenicians were in the poet's eye ; but neither is there any resemblance here, except that both are seafarers. A more plausible explanation has been started recently viz. that the poet of the Odyssey brings his old-world hero into contact with his own contemporaries under a thin disguise. The scene may be Corcyra, but the airy, imaginary folk, whose ship became a rock in the sea this people with their walled town, their elaborate harbour, their well-built market-place, their fair temple of Poseidon, and grove of Athena are no other than the lonians of the eighth century, whose home was the flourishing Miletus or the fertile Samos. Thus the visit of Odysseus to Phaeacia is seen to be the first, as surely it is the most delightful, of a long series of imaginings, which with various degrees of bitterness or of gentle irony have reflected some features or some tendencies of contemporary life, or have embodied a contemporary ideal, such as More's ' Utopia/ Swift's ' Laputa,' or Johnson's ' Rasselas.' All grosser elements are purged away ; humanity appears in the most engaging aspect ; and yet in the self- complacency of this island folk, in their imagined security, their pride of ships, their boast of nearness to the gods, it seems allowable to trace some good-humoured persiflage of the poet's own neighbours, whom, to avoid offending them, he has purposely located on a distant and imaginary shore. To return now to the main drift of the poem. The triumph of Odysseus single-handed, with the aid of Athena, is the triumph of justice over lawless insolence. There is nothing like this in the Iliad, though there is something cognate to it in the main motive for the Trojan war. The hero is not merely vindicating his own personal honour, as Achilles was, but the most precious rights of his kingdom and his home. It is true that the vindication is unmixed with RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 89 clemency : execution is unrelentingly wrought, not only on the suitors, but on the poor misguided maid-servants, who are strung up ' like larks upon a line.' The thoroughness of the Greek artist allows of no half-lights or neutral shades ; indeed, there is little of tenderness in the person of Odysseus. His worth, like that of Ajax in Sophocles, is rather accen- tuated by the devoted attachment of those dependent on him, from Penelope downwards, including Eumaeus the swineherd, and Argus the dog. It is here that the strokes of tenderness come in. And this gives the opportunity for saying that, while the interest of the poem again centres in the royal race, the blood of gods, the Odyssey contains several interesting glimpses of more humble life. Some points of manners, especially connected with religion, may be further noted. In the Iliad, after a sacrifice, people enjoy themselves to the full, and without stint. Athena, in the person of Mentor, remarks in the Odyssey that it is not well to sit too long at the feasts of the gods : one should return home again. The gods love moderation, even in an act of worship. In the Iliad the gods appear in various disguises, but never for long. The remark that Athena is ever at the side of this or that hero, for instance Diomedes, is said in a tone of conscious hyper- bole. There is nothing like the persistent companionship of the disguised Athena, which both Telemachus and his father enjoy. Athena in the Odyssey also exercises a kind of magic, which, except in the case of the dead bodies of Sar- pedon and Hector, is hardly present in the Iliad making Odysseus alternately old and wrinkled, and handsome and young. Having thus indicated some of the main features of the Odyssey as a religious work, I propose to touch briefly (1) on modes of worship ; (2) on differences of mytho- logy between the Iliad and the Odyssey ; (3) on the legendary elements of the poem, and the traces of incipient hero-worship ; (4) on conceptions of private and public duty ; (5) on the growth of ethical reflection, as shown (a) in proverbial expressions ; (b) in the ideal of human virtue. 90 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE 1. A beautiful picture of Greek piety is presented in the third book of the Odyssey, where Telemachus, accom- panied by Athena disguised as Mentor, finds Nestor and his sons at Pylos engaged in holding a great sacrifice to Poseidon. They are assembled upon the seashore, a place hardly lending itself to formal consecration, but perpetually in view of the divine element of which Poseidon was the personification. They are offering to him black bulls without a spot of white, a colour probably associated with the darkness of the deep, the epsftos v(j)a\ov of Sophocles ; the animal symbolising im- petuous strength, and for this and other reasons consecrated also to the gods of rivers. There are nine stations, at each of which nine bulls are sacrificed ; the poet does not say by whom, but there is no mention of an officiating priest. Each victim is held with its head towards the sea. The sacred rite, including the formal tasting of the inward parts, and the roast- ing of the thigh-bones covered with fat, for a sweet-smelling savour to the god, is just completed when the visitors arrive. Athena bids Telemachus approach, and inquire of Nestor about his father's fortunes ; and when the young man hesitates, she assures him that by the grace of heaven his own thoughts, which are not contemptible, will be supple- mented by the suggestion of a god. Nestor is sitting sur- rounded by his sons. Their comrades are preparing the sacrificial feast. On seeing the strangers, all come forward to greet them and to give them room. They are seated on soft sheepskins upon the sea sand ; they taste of the inward parts, so sharing the communion of the sacred day (this is noticeable as an indication that burnt sacrifice was not only offered to the god, but partaken of in communion with him) , and wine is handed to them for libations accompanied with prayer. It is offered first to Mentor as the elder guest, whereat Athena is pleased. She, in the person of Mentor, prays to Poseidon on behalf of Nestor and his sons and people, and for the prosperous return of Telemachus, when he has succeeded in his quest. She pours the libation, then hands the cup to Telemachus, who likewise prays. The feast then follows, and only after that Nestor thinks meet to ask the strangers who they are. Next morning, having discovered RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 91 overnight that Athena in person had vouchsafed to visit them, Nestor and his sons hold a private sacrifice to Athena. To her is offered a heifer. The horns are gilded by the smith, who brings his tongs to hold the metal, and his hammer and anvil to beat it out ; and Athena herself, says the poet, came to accept the sacrifice. Two youths lead in the heifer by her horns, water for the hands is brought from within the house, and barley-meal. Thrasymedes, the eldest son, stands by with an axe ; Perseus holds the bowl to receive the blood ; Nestor himself pours out the purifying water, and performs the initiatory rite of sprinkling the meal ; and while he cuts off a lock of hair from the victim's head and throws it in the fire, he prays aloud and at some length to Athena. Thrasymedes then fells the victim, whereupon Eurydice, the wife of Nestor, his daughter and his daughters- in-law lift their voices in auspicious shouting. Then the head of the creature is raised from the ground, the jugular vein is opened by Pisistratus, the youngest son, and the blood poured out ; the body is broken up, the thigh- bones are taken out and covered with two layers of fat, on which bits of raw flesh are placed. Nestor himself burns these on a fire of cleft wood, and pours wine thereon, while the young men stand by with five-pronged forks in their hands ; and when the thigh-bones have been burned, the formal tasting of the inwards follows. The joints are then divided and roasted upon spits, which appear to be held at the fire by hand. It is worth while to be thus minute in following this, which is the fullest account of sacrifice in Homer. The details of Greek ritual are im- perfectly known, and for the very reason that they were so familiar to the audience are but scantily described. And it is right to add that the swineherd Eumaeus, another model of hospitality and piety in his simpler way, when he enter- tains Odysseus as a supposed stranger, loses no time in religious formalities, but simply brings two porkers from the sties, and slays them ; the word is * sacrifice,' and this may imply some shadow of a religious act, but there is no mention of any ceremonial details, before the animals are seized, cut up, and roasted, and the hot flesh laid before Odysseus, spits 92 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE and all, and then sprinkled over with white barley-meal. Nor is there any mention of libation of the wine, which Odysseus drinks in silence beside the meat which he devours, while planning evil against the suitors. But when the labouring men come in, bringing the swine from the pasture, the chief swineherd takes a bolder line, and sacrifices in honour of the stranger the best boar of the herd ; and he goes about this with all due ceremony. They place the victim at the hearth. Eumaeus himself performs the initial rite by cutting off the hair, and as he throws it in the fire, he prays to all the gods for his master's safe return. He has no axe at hand, but fells the animal with a split piece of oak (this is the village butcher's plan to this day), then the blood is drawn, and the carcase broken up, whereon the swineherd performs the religious rite of laying pieces from all the limbs upon the fat, with which, as we may presume, the thigh-bones have been covered. These are sprinkled with meal and thrown on the fire, after which the cooking process is completed, and this time the joints are drawn from off the spits and set together upon trays. The swine- herd distributes them to all present, reserving the prime piece for Hermes and the Nymphs, to whom he has prayed, and honouring Odysseus with the chine. Odysseus admires this hospitality. Eumaeus bids him eat and leave the future to the god, who can do all things according to his will. Once more a portion, probably the same that had been reserved for Hermes and the Nymphs, is offered to the gods, and some of the wine is poured out as libation to them, all by Eumaeus, who then places the goblet in the hands of Odysseus. It is clear that the ritual of divine worship was known to gentle and simple, and might be performed by any head of a household, without the interference of a priest. Why then should there have existed separate ministers of religion ? Chiefly as caretakers of the shrines and offerings, which, at some few centres, constituted the wealth of the gods, especially where there was a seat of divination. The reverence for the priest was, however, already accentuated by his consequent nearness to the god, to whom he prayed con- RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 93 tinually as dprjrrjp, and stood in a peculiarly intimate rela- tion. The herald also, and -the ordinary soothsayer, each forming a separate class, had special sacredness attaching to them in their limited functions. 2. Greek mythology in some ways adhered strictly to tradition, but it had also in every age a fluid and plastic element, which gave it endless adaptability. The differences in this respect between the Iliad and the Odyssey, though it is reasonable to assign them to different authors, and pos- sibly to a different place and time, are less significant of wide divergence than has been often supposed. The most obvious discrepancy is the employment of Iris in the Iliad, and of Hermes in the Odyssey, as the messenger of the gods. The apparent anticipation of this feature in the last book of the Iliad affords one of the arguments by which that book is separated from the rest. But it should be observed that Hermes is there employed not exactly as a messenger but as a conductor. And we may recall the fact that, in the ' Hymn to Demeter,' while Iris carries the message of Zeus to earth, Hermes is his envoy to the shades. Another differ- ence consists in the assignment of Aphrodite as wife to Hephaestus the divine artificer in the Odyssey, a bit of symbolism of the same kind as his marriage to the Grace in the eighteenth Iliad. This occurs, however, only in the song of Phemius, and may have been a special fancy of some minstrel, not a fixed assumption of mythology. She appears under her name of Cythereia both in the eighth book and xviii. 192. This and her association with Ares perhaps reflect that aspect of her worship which was of Phoenician origin. The attributes of some of the Olympians are altered, perhaps in consequence of the different tone of the whole poem. Athena is more distinctly the goddess of wisdom and good counsel, but her warlike attributes are retained when occasion serves ; in two similes, B. vi. 233, B. xxiii. 160, she is associated with Hephaestus as having taught arts to mankind. Artemis is still the leader of the Nymphs, sur- passing all the rest in stature as well as beauty. She retains her other attributes, and in particular is the special patroness 94 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE of Penelope, as the faithful wife. Poseidon is constantly in evidence, except for the interval during which he is absent amongst the Ethiopians ; he is the father of river gods, and also of Polyphemus, Neleus, and Nausithoos the first king of Phaeacia ; hence he is the natural guardian of the Phaeacians, being the grandfather of Alcinoos, and his temple stands in the centre of their public place. This last, it is worth observing, is described as built or surrounded with great stones, sunk deep into the ground. But if the theory above suggested (p. 88) is true, the elaborate temple is part of that advanced civilisation in which the Phaeacians are imagined as anticipating the lonians of the poet's own time. It is not certain, however, whether the ' fair temple ' is to be regarded as hypaethral or covered in. The other Olympians, including Apollo, fall somewhat into the background in the Odyssey ; the cause of this probably being that the action is principally at sea. The chief allusion to Apollo is in the mention of a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, whereat Agamemnon rejoiced, because the Pythian oracle had told him that the strife between the noblest of the Achaeans would be for his advantage. This is the story of the first lay of Phemius, not reported at length, at which Odysseus veils his face as he sheds tears. The will of Zeus is of course present through- out, but is more often implied than spoken of, except at crises of the poem, when he grants the prayer of Athena, or of the Sun whose oxen have been slain, or sends Hermes upon a mission. The truth is that in the Odyssey the divine action is already often generalised ; not only are gods spoken of in the plural more frequently than in the Iliad ; but ' god' or ' a god,' in the singular, often occurs where it is uncertain what individual deity is in question. Amongst the many minor powers in which the Odyssey abounds, the Harpies deserve special mention. The word appears in the Iliad, but only as an epithet of the mytho- logical mare, out of whom by Zephyrus as sire the horses of Achilles came. There it means simply swift, or possibly swift as a storm wind ; in two of the three places in the Odyssey it appears accordingly as a personification of tempest RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 95 snatching men away. But in the prayer of Penelope to Artemis, in the twentieth Odyssey, where she recalls the fate of the daughters of Pandareus, the Harpies, though still identified with storm wind, appear more distinctly as mythological personages, and it becomes more easy to con- ceive of the after- development of the legend concerning them, in which they snatch away the supper of Phineus, and play other tricks familiar in comparative folklore. 3. Although silence in the Iliad is not always to be interpreted as implying ignorance, it is tolerably clear that the legends of cities and of great houses were already in a state of growth when the Odyssey was written. The version given of them differs from that in the Iliad as well as from the later literature, and is not everywhere consistent. Take first the story of Agamemnon. In this, although none of the incidents could be anticipated in the action of the former poem, some modifications may be traced within the Odyssey itself. In the story as told by Menelaus, or by Athena in Olympus, the guilt of Clytemnestra is implied, but she is not represented as having imbrued her hands in blood. But Agamemnon himself in Hades, or his shade rather, tells how, after he had received his death wound, Clytemnestra herself slew Cassandra over him, and left him without even closing his eyes. In other respects the stories differ : Aga- memnon implies that he and his companions at the banquet given by Aegisthus were surprised and slain. In the account given by Proteus to Menelaus, Agamemnon is compelled to land near the abode of Aegisthus, and afterwards finds his way to Mycenae, where the banquet is held, but his com- panions are not slain. In neither passage is it implied that Orestes, in avenging his father, had killed his mother ; un- less this may be inferred from the story of Menelaus, who speaks of him as celebrating the funeral feast both of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. One point which has raised some confusion is the mention of the storm that caught Agamemnon at Cape Malea. It is probable that the poet, who elsewhere shows himself ignorant of the geography of the Pelopon- nesus, mistakes the point of Laconia for the point of Argolis. The story of Herakles also is more advanced in the later 96 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE poem. In the Iliad he is merely the strong man, who like other heroes is the son of Zeus, but in no wise immortal, though he had taken part in some battle of the gods, in which he wounded Hera ; and on another occasion he had wounded Hades in some obscure contest, described as having taken place at Pylos (also alluded to by Pindar). The en- counter of Herakles with Hera and with Hades is touched upon in the speech of Dione (Iliad vi. 130 ff.). Many other points of his legend are referred to, especially that of his birth, in which Hera contrived that Eurystheus should have dominion over him. But his immortality ap- pears only in Odyssey xi. 626, probably a late passage. His ghost is found in Hades, while he himself is feasting amongst the immortal gods, and holding beauteous Hebe. The shade compares his own fortune when on earth with the trials of Odysseus, and recalls the labours he had suffered at the bidding of Eurystheus, although he was the son of Zeus ; above all the hardest of them, that of bringing the hound of Hades (not yet named Cerberus) to the light of day. Herakles, then, has been raised to the skies ; Menelaus, on the other hand, is promised a future life on the Elysian plain, which is described in language nearly resembling that in which Olympus itself is elsewhere spoken of. The gods are to grant him this because he is the son-in-law of Zeus. No reason is given why he and Bhadamanthus are thus preferred to many others, who are of the same divine lineage. But in the eleventh Odyssey Minos is already represented as a judge amongst the dead. The worship of heroes, in later times, did not imply immortality in the sense of being raised to heaven with Herakles, or sent to Elysium with Menelaus, although the latter, or something like it, seems to have been the belief of Pindar. They were imagined as having exceptional privileges in Hades, and as exercising an im- portant influence over the fortunes of their descendants, being mysteriously present in the neighbourhood of their tombs. There is no trace of this peculiar worship even in the Odyssey. It acquired fresh strength and prevalence after the troubles of which the Odyssey shows us the begin- ning, when a feebler race longed for the protection of the EELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 97 heroic chiefs, who had been either driven out or slain during a time of anarchy. But to this we shall return. Meanwhile one more passage of the Nekyia must be adduced to illustrate the tendency in the Odyssey to extend the privilege of immortality in a modified shape to some excep- tionally favoured men. The sons of Leda, wife of Tyn- dareus, who are here spoken of as his sons, and not the sons of Zeus, have both gone beneath the ground, but there below are permitted on alternate days to be alive. That is their divine privilege. We have here in its simplest form a legend which was afterwards much elaborated. In the third Iliad it had not yet been thought of. 4. The time represented in the Odyssey is the com- mencement of a period of disturbance and unsettlement ; yet there is more evidence than in the Iliad of concep- tions belonging to a comparatively settled state of society. In this, as we have seen, there may be some reflection of the poet's own time. The picture of Cyclopian and Laestrygonian life betokens a consciousness of the value of civilisation and the arts of peace. The repose of Menelaus in his own hall, more rich and splendid than that which he had left in desolation, and the tranquil life of Nestor and his sons, are contrasted with the troubled state of Ithaca in the continual absence of Odysseus ; the ' confusion in the little isle,' which Telemachus is not yet old and experienced enough to remedy. There is a trace of something like oriental despotism in the promise of Menelaus to give Telemachus possession of a town, from which his friend engages to evict the population ; so Agamemnon in the ninth Iliad offers to his offended comrade seven towns on the borderland between Argos and Pylos, which had to be kept under by the sword in order to secure the tribute which the master was to exact. But Odysseus in Ithaca before the Trojan war is supposed to have held his ascendency over the neighbouring chieftains and their retainers without violence, exercising a gentle sway. We find little, however, as yet of anything corresponding to civic life. There is a public place to which the people assemble for sacrifice and festival and to hear the edict of the king, who may have H 98 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE previously made known his will to his privy council. But loyalty, when not compelled by force majeure, depended wholly upon personal qualities. It was otherwise with the family and the immediate household, whether of kings or private men. They were bound together not only by the pressure of necessity or the force of affection, but by a religious constraint, which had in it an obligation to which we should give the name of duty. The solidarity of the family was already an immemorial tradition. The filial piety of Telemachus towards the father whom since early childhood he has never seen ; the grief of Laertes, which is comparable to that of Wordsworth's Michael, have a deeper source than mere fondness for a person beloved. The attach- ment of Eumaeus to his lord is a mingled feeling, consisting partly of loyalty to a master, and partly of affection for one who has treated him well when he was in his power. There is in it a sort of dumb faithfulness like that of Argus the dog ; but it finds expression in the care which he spends daily upon the herd, and his grief at the exactions from which it suffers. The endurance of Odysseus and his control over his feelings is nowhere more tried, not even in his meeting with Penelope, than in the hut of the swineherd. Here again the ideal is accentuated by contrast. The faithfulness of Eumaeus and Eurycleia is opposed to the greed and self- seeking of the goatherd Melanthius and the frivolity of the maid-servants. The action of the Iliad turns primarily upon the breach of the rites of hospitality, but it is in the Odyssey that we find the exercise of that virtue fully set forth. Once more in this regard we turn to Nestor, Menelaus, Helen and Eumaeus. The courtliness of Helen, who from her experience of life has acquired a quickness of observation in social matters far greater than is shared by her phlegmatic lord, is shown by her discovery of the likeness between Telemachus and his father and her suspicion of the young man's identity. Very charming also is the magic spell by which she soothes the stranger into simple enjoyment of the evening's enter- tainment, leaving all thoughts of business cares until the RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 99 following morning. This is expressed symbolically by an Egyptian drug which she instils into the wine-cup, but the reader dwells more on her personal charm. The picture of manners would be incomplete without the mention of youth- ful comradeship so finely exemplified in the intercourse of Telemachus with Pisistratus. The respect for age is also gracefully portrayed, for example, when the inspired man hands the bowl for libation to the supposed Mentor first. 5. Proverbial maxims in the Odyssey, though still naive and childlike, are both more frequent and more reflective than in the Iliad. For example, 'All men have need of the gods ' is given as a reason for prayer. ' The mind of the eternal gods is not quickly changed.' 'A god, if he so will, may save even from afar.' 'Not even the gods can ward off death from those they love.' ' A courageous heart has always the best chance among strangers.' ' The gods love not harsh deeds, but honour justice and considerate conduct.' Odysseus wishes for the maiden who has shown him friendship ' a husband and a house and unanimity at home, than which nothing is better or more precious.' Several of these wise sayings are placed by the poet in the mouth of the disguised Athena. The ethical vocabulary is not much enlarged (except in the use of certain epithets, such as Trsptypav), but partly from the nature of the poem, the ideal of humanity held up to admiration has far more in it of justice and of self-control. Odysseus escapes from countless dangers to which not his own imprudence, but the rashness and wilfulness of his companions have exposed him, to their own ruin. They disregard express warnings and commands from the gods, but in doing so they exhibit the unrighteousness and ir- regular impulses of their nature. Odysseus is saved by the friendship of the gods, notwithstanding the revenge of Poseidon for the condign punishment which the mortal had inflicted on the wild son of a tempestuous god. We are not merely reading between the lines when we in- terpret this to mean that faithfulness, patience, endurance, temperance are sure of their reward. This is not to allegorise H 2 100 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Homer ; and even Horace is not far from the mark when he speaks of the poet of the Odyssey as a teacher of Justice and Truth, though in following his Stoic authorities he has carried the fancy to excess. And the impressive scene in which the returned Odysseus leaps on the great threshold, bow in hand, with Athena and Telemachus beside him, is no mere climax of a romantic story, but the revelation of a day of judgment. Throughout the period which we have now reviewed there is. observable a strain of pure religious feeling, combined with deep and penetrating impressions of an essentially moral order, but hampered with the inevitable inconsistencies of polytheism, with popular superstitions, and with a backward or inefficient stage of social institutions and of ethical reflection. We have to imagine a state of mind in which chance words striking upon the ear, in moments of mental tension, had an acknowledged power to encourage or to depress ; when it mattered seriously whether a great bird flew on the right hand or on the left, yet in which prayer was offered to the immortals in the simplest faith, and the devotion of child to parent and a man's care for those of his own household were as perfect as at any subsequent time ; when divine and superhuman powers were imagined as in perpetual conflict, revenging unintended slights or insults with inordinate vehemence, and yet the supreme will of Zeus, and the final determination of destiny, was believed to be in harmony with eternal right ; when gods were imagined as living ' at ease/ and yet as caring for mankind, and visiting them, to judge between the righteous and the wicked ; when fate was thought of as absolute, and yet men were held responsible for their own misdoings. The difficulty of reconciling such thoughts to the facts of life was perhaps not greater than other ages have experienced, but it was not felt or thought of. The same person in a moment of disappointment would accuse the gods of envious cruelty, and in a time of need approach them with a simple feeling of dependence and a sincere hope RELIGION IN THE ODYSSEY 101 that they would answer prayer and accept the offerings made to them in accordance with the ancient ritual. How- ever difficult it is for us to enter into such a condition of the human spirit, it is necessary to do so if we would understand the subsequent development of religious conceptions amongst the ancient Greeks. 102 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE CHAPTEK V CENTEAL GEEECE HESIOD : ' WORKS AND DAJS ' ; * THEOGONY '- THEOGNIS ELEGIAC AND LYEIC POETEY HOMEEIC HYMNS THE brilliant era of Mycenean or Achaean civilisation, in which at a few great centres powerful chiefs overawed the surround- ing population, had been swept away before successive in- roads, the chief of which was spoken of in after times as the Dorian migration. The resources of the heroic kings may have been exhausted by some such combined effort as the ex- pedition to Troy. There followed a long period of unsettlement and misery, which is partly reflected for us in the poetry of Hesiod : a time no longer of frank enjoyment, as when the minstrel sang in the hall of the chief, but one of conscious distress ; when peaceful industries were insecure and the civilisation of many years was broken up or had been banished to find a richer development upon the shores of Asia ; when first the Aeolians from the north, and afterwards the lonians, headed according to tradition bytheNeleid sons of Codrus, had fled before the advance of alien conquerors. Yet in the intervals of turmoil we are led to infer a silent growth of religion, morality, and imagination. Then and always there were religious influences in Greece which tended towards the unification or grouping of particular tribes, so creating the outlines of a nation which counter-tendencies prevented from being fully formed. The organisation of the Amphictionic council in northern Hellas, the institution of the Olympic games in the Peloponnese, are two great evi- dences of this general truth. Of these the Amphictionic influence was gradually supplanted by the predominance of Sparta and of Athens alternately, under the favour of the priesthood of Apollo at Delphi ; but the Olympian festival, HESIOD WORKS AND DAYS 103 when once it had eclipsed the games on Mount Lycaeus, became more and more important for the whole of Hellas. The mention of the Panhellenes in Hesiod and in the (Boeotian) catalogue of ships implies that some union of Hellenic tribes existed in that early time when Hellas was a district in Phthia, just as already in the Iliad the tribes gathered before Troy are called TiavaxcuoL We return then to central Greece and come down to the time when Ionia was flourishing, and the Homeric poems had assumed something approaching to their final shape. Meanwhile an independent growth of religious thought and feeling had been spreading silently in Boeotia. The race of kings, of whom the epic poet sang from memory, had passed away. Great changes had intervened. An internecine war between Orchomenos and Thebes had weakened both powers, but ended in the triumph of the Cadmeians. Then came incursions from the north and west. The Boeotians descending from Thessaly overran Boeotia, and what had been Cadmeia was now Thebes ; Orchomenos was no longer of any account, but echoes of her broken civilisation still remained, as for instance in the worship of Athena Itonia. The great Dorian migration had occupied the Peloponnese, where the rival powers of Argos and of Sparta were slowly establishing themselves, and the mettle of Sparta was being tested by the first Messenian war. Attica remained unravaged, and had already its sanctuary of Athena in the house of Erechtheus. It was in some such condition of things that the father of Hesiod (for some un- known reason) came across the Aegean from Cyme, and settled in the old country of the Aeolians at Askra in Boeotia. We know this from Hesiod himself. Possessing an imperfect mastery of the art of hexameter verse which had so long flourished on the other side, Hesiod found the worship of the Muses still alive upon the slopes of Helicon. His poetry reflects for us the altered state of central Hellas, when the life of the chieftains at once recorded and idealised in the Iliad was no longer in being, and new thoughts and feelings were awakened amongst those who had remained behind. The warlike incursions that had swept away the 104 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE reigning dynasties passed over the heads of the humbler population, who were bound to the soil, and either suffered an exchange of masters, or according to the terms proposed to Sicyon, as we learn from Pausanias, submitted to the conqueror on condition of a fresh division of the land. These small peasant-proprietors, as we may term them, were not deserted by the Muse whom they annually worshipped, and in the ' Works and Days ' of Hesiod we have a welcome glimpse of the imagination about higher things with which they sought to enliven the dreariness of their lot. They are haunted, as one might expect, with superstitious fancies about lucky and unlucky days and the like ; they dream of a golden age which has unhappily receded far into the past, and there are those amongst them who meditate more deeply on the things which they have heard concerning gods and children of the gods, and who also seek by simple precepts and pithy sayings to instruct and warn their fellows about the life which they must live. From Hesiod come the famous lines which Aristotle quotes more than once : ' The man who thinks for himself aright is best of all ; he who follows another's rightful thought is also good ; but he who neither thinks aright nor listens to another's thought, that man is nothing worth.' In Hesiod, too, the goddess of Eight is for the first time personified as Dike : ' A noise is heard, it is the cry of Justice whom men greedy of bribes are hustling. She weeping comes to visit the abodes of men, bringing evil to her enemies.' ' Thirty thousand deathless beings on the Earth are watching over mortal men : unseen they watch where right is done, where cruelty prevails. Moreover Zeus has a virgin daughter, Justice, revered by the Olympian gods. When any does her wrong, she sits by her father Zeus and tells of it, and then the people suffer for the wrongdoing of their overlords.' ' The man who wrongs another harms himself.' Such naive enforcement of the religion of life is scattered here and there amongst minor precepts about the seasons for ploughing, sowing, and reap- ing, and the observance for various purposes of lucky and unlucky days. The idea of a detailed theogony now first appears ; HESIOD THEOGONY 105 in which, as we find it in Hesiod, there are many traces of a more primitive and also of a darker tradition than that which Homer has chosen to perpetuate. The dim allusions to the conflict of Zeus with the Titans and with his father Cronos, which are scattered up and down the Iliad, are here explained, and the succession of generations amongst the children of the earth and sky is elaborately set forth. It would be tedious and unprofitable to enter fully into the details of the mythology, and it would be too long to draw out distinctly the elements of primitive reasoning which in this strange web are interwoven with accidental associa- tions and idle fancies. It must suffice to mark the stage of incipient thought about divine things, which is here registered. The question has occurred to the mind of the age, How did the gods come to be ? and this was a first step towards universal speculation about nature and its cause or author. The line in Homer, whether belonging to the earliest portion of the work or not, ' ocean the original of gods and Tethys their mother,' shows already the faint beginnings of such a tendency. The thought of Hesiod, who refers the origin of all things to desire (spcos) , goes considerably deeper ; and it was adopted as a necessary link in the chain of Platonic speculation. But on the whole, the theogony of Hesiod contains few elements of profound or generative thought. It is largely made up out of fragments of primi- tive reasoning, such as are now familiar to all students of early mythologies. It contains scraps of Eastern tradition, and also indicates the prominence given to certain worships by the importance of the towns in which they were mostly celebrated. The demi-gods in Hesiod are identified with the kings of the former age, who are now called blessed, and are still looked up to as guardians of mankind. The attempt of some critics to find an historical meaning in the succession of the gold, silver, and iron has no real foundation. The meaning is that things were better and better the further back you went. Some of the more prominent legends concerning the heroic world were accumulated in a poem 106 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE attributed to Hesiod, and at all events belonging to the same school, the only extant portion of which of any extent is a description of the shield of Herakles, a manifest imitation of the shield of Achilles in the eighteenth Iliad. The chief difference consists in the substitution of legendary and mythological details for the realistic presentation of scenes from ordinary life. To dwell now a little more particularly on certain points suggested by the body of poetry which has thus been gener- ally described. 1. The aspect of mythology which appears in Hesiod occurs in Homer only in scattered allusions, These allusions, however, cannot without violence be separated from their context and assumed to be later interpolations. The primeval struggles which ended in the conquest of Zeus are implied in the occasional references to the distant place (as far from earth as earth is from the sky) in which Cronos, lapetus, and the Titans were confined, and where the powers who punish perjury have their seat (cp. Hesiod, ' Theogony ' 720-725). The passing mention of Typhoeus (for whom see ' Theogony ' 821-868) occurs, indeed, in the catalogue of ships, which is otherwise thought to have affinities with the Boeotian school ; but it is, notwithstanding, a striking fact that such an allusion should be admitted, not only in the ' Hymn to Apollo,' but in the canonical text of the Iliad. And certainly, if we glance for a moment at the general features of primitive religion, it must be admitted that the opposition between light and darkness, and the victory of the powers of light, is less likely to have been a secondary than a primary element of mythology. 2. But in the ' Theogony ' of Hesiod we trace an endeavour, which, whether earlier or not, is certainly other than the effort of the minstrel to realise in a connected narrative the life of an heroic age. The work is a strange conglomerate in which, together with many childish fancies, which it is idle to account for except by the simple love of story-telling that grows out of personification, the working of dimly conscious ideas is notwithstanding to be traced. Some of these fancies are probably due to primitive tradition, and HESIOD 107 some to more recent or contemporary symbolism. Thus the story by which the separation of earth and heaven and the fertilisation of the ground is accounted for is on a par with the mythology of savage races (cp. Iliad xiv. 97-210). On the other hand, the notion of Cronos, the offspring of earth and heaven, devouring his children, until arrested and subdued by his son and conqueror Zeus, is of a higher but still primitive order. Once more, that Zeus should have Metis (Wisdom) for his first consort, and Themis (Justice) for his second, comes of later reflection, and many points of genea- logy such as the description of the progeny of Styx, or that of Night, are of a distinctly allegorical character, in which fanciful etymology also plays a part. This does not justify the allegorising interpretation of the Stoics, or of Bacon's ' Wisdom of the Ancients,' which robs primitive symbolism of its native unconsciousness, and ignores its intermittent, acci- dental working. Yet it is foolish to refuse to see the allegory when it is written in large letters. Hesiod is like his own men of the silver age, remaining a child in his own house, for a hundred years. Yet the child of a hundred years can- not but have thoughts mingling with his childish fancies or shining through them. For example, when Zeus, in order to subdue the Titans, releases the hundred-handed monsters whom he had bound, it is plainly implied that force cannot be subdued by mind alone without the help of power, and the whole conception of a conflict amongst the gods may be regarded as anticipating the leading thought of Heraclitus, that ' war is the father of the world.' The problem of the origin of evil is dimly adumbrated in the story of Pandora. 3. It is an obscure question, yet one we can hardly abstain from raising, how far the theology which in Hesiod seems to be localised in Boeotia had a Cadmeian, that is to say, a Phoenician origin. It would be easy to find parallels between the peculiar complexion of the ' Theogony ' and some phases of Babylonian tradition. The importance attached in 'Works and Days' to the rising and setting of the stars (not, it is to be observed, at all in connection with temple worship, but with agricultural pursuits), or to the sacr'edness of the seventh day, does read like a reminiscence of Chaldea. It is 108 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE not a little remarkable that Keto, the prolific mother of so many strange unnatural forms, of which the sea-god Pontus is sire, is, as her name denotes, a monster of the deep, and thus analogous to the fish gods of early Babylonia. On this, and many cognate subjects, it is necessary to suspend our judgment until we have more light, and to rely only upon the facts that are clearly known. 4. In Hesiqd, for the first time, the divinity of heroes as the sons of gods is definitely asserted. This would be more clearly apparent if the sequel of the ' Theogony ' had been completely preserved to us. The legend of Herakles in par- ticular is much more fully developed than in Homer, al- though, here again, it is not quite safe to rely on the evidence of silence. The hero's crossing the ocean after the oxen of G-eryon (' Th.' 291-4) has an especially Phoenician air. The allusion in the Iliad to the wounding of Hades by Herakles, in Pylos amongst the dead, is illustrated by the mention in the * Shield of Herakles ' of an encounter between the hero and the god of war. Cp. the words of Hera in the fifth Iliad, 385, r\rj JJLSV "Apijs /c.r.X. 5. The description of the shield of Herakles deserves attention on other grounds. As compared with the shield of Achilles on the one hand, and with the great period of Greek sculpture on the other, it reveals to us an intermediate phase in which art was not dominated either by naturalism or as yet by an ideal of beauty. The images of war represented on the shield are inspired by a sort of ghoulish imagination. The Keres, or spirits of Doom, digging their huge nails into the corpses of the dead, like the earliest sculptures of Selinus or the monstrous form of Erichthonius on some of the monu- ments found on the Acropolis at Athens, would be censured as un-Greek, did they not occur in a Greek poem. The imagery of the poem, apart from such descriptions, has certain features suggestive of a time when the mainland of Hellas was liable to frequent shocks of earthquake. The recurring metaphors drawn from landslips and rocks dis- lodged from mountains vividly recall the description in Herodotus of the manner in which Apollo defended Delphi from the Mede. (This may remind us of the theory held by HESIOD 109 some that Hesiod was a poet of Delphi.) The ' Shield of Herakles,' even more distinctly than the rest of Hesiodic poetry, shows an undoubted acquaintance with the Iliad, yet is full of rhythmical defects of which neither Homer nor an Homerid could have been guilty. In this connection, the poet's own assertion that his father came from Cyme in Aeolia is not without significance. 6. The 'Works and Days/ while reflecting in an interesting manner the personal feeling of the poet, no longer a court minstrel, but a rustic bard, contain a mixture of moral, religious, and prudential aphorisms embodying an ethical ideal, at once different from, and in some ways more ad- vanced than, that of the Iliad and Odyssey. The simple fact that didactic poetry here for the first time takes the place of narrative is most significant. Hesiod is in fact an E^ijyrjrijs or religious expositor. The Muses say to him 1 We can discourse in lies that look like Truth : But, if we list, we can tell true tales too.' The Homeric poems, reflect the life of the Achaean chieftains in the camp and in the hall a life abounding in bright energy and in a, joyousness which is rather accentuated than overclouded by the darkness which awaits men after death. We are now to look at life from the other side. Not princely birth or accomplishments but honest industry is regarded as the secret of such limited satisfaction as life affords. The idea of Justice (Slier/) is for the first time clearly developed, and is correlative to the sense of injustice which the people suffer under their new masters, the grasping overlords. The feeling of the misery inseparable from life is deepened, and the longing for a lost ideal is expressed in the fable of the five ages, in the coarse of which honour (al$(0$) and right feeling (ve^so-is) are represented as having left the world. Virtue and vice are also clearly opposed ; yet power is irresistible the nightingale must go where the hawk carries him ; the singer may not contend with the judge. Not that wealth is despised if got by labour : it is said (line 311) to be accompanied by virtue and glory, while poverty is also the gift of God ; nor are the gods as yet exempt from caprice. Though one observe the 110 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE seasons, yet if Poseidon or Zeus be angry, the ship, even in summer time, is not safe. Superstition and proverbial wis- dom are inextricably interwoven : idleness must be avoided, moderation observed, and the thigh-bones must be duly burned. This implies, however, that every man might still be his own priest. There is little evidence as yet of a temple worship : see for instance the altar to Zeus on Helicon (Hesiod, ' Theogony ' 4) . Reciprocity is one of the laws of human life, but to give is nobler than to receive ; in that saying, pruden- tial morality seems to pass out of itself. Yet amongst the moral maxims instead of ' Bear it that the opposed may be- ware of thee,' a twofold recompense of evil is enjoined. The superstitious observances required at line 722 ff. of ' Works and Days ' have a very primitive look, and the abstinences there enjoined out of reverence for the sun, the open air, Night, and above all the family hearth, have a distinctly Aryan complexion. Some picturesque touches may be noted in pass- ing, such as the indication of the beginning of spring, ' when a (plane) leaf on the topmost bough is as large as a crow's foot-mark.' Some prudential aphorisms are probably of immemorial age, and may be expected to outlast our race, such as that ' every pickle maks a mickle ' (line 360) , and ' it's a poor thrift that spares the dregs ' (line 369) (cf. Plat. ' Phaedo ' ), 'at lovers' perjuries, they say, Jove laughs.' The word vofjios is acquiring the sense which it afterwards obtained (' Works and Days ' 386). Maxims are still simple, but contain more of the wisdom of life : * a good neighbour is a good thing ' ; ' a bad wife roasts a man without the help of fire ' ; ' fools grasp at pelf, knowing not that half is more than the whole, nor how much comfort there is in a dinner of herbs.' The feeling of dependence on superhuman agencies is more constant in Hesiod than in Homer. But the intensifying of religious fear and even of superstition in Hesiod cannot be shown to be associated with any marked increase in the power of the priesthood. 7. One or two points of mythology maybe touched upon in conclusion. The circumstances of the birth of Athena (1. 888) are different from what was later the orthodox tradition. Probably the more refined poets of a later age DIDACTIC POETRY THEOGNIS 111 shrank from the naive conception of Zeus swallowing his wife Metis at a gulp. Demeter is as yet simply the goddess of harvest, apparently without mystic attributes, the consort of Zeus, and mother of Persephone and of Plutus. She is associated, however, with Zeus Chthonios, who is sometimes identified with Hades, but here and probably elsewhere is to be distinguished from him. The seventh day is sacred because it is the birthday of Apollo (1. 769). The fifth day is haunted by the Erinnyes (1. 801) . In the ' Theogony ' as it stands, there is no clear trace of an attempt to arrange the greater gods in groups of twelve or eight or three. It is manifest that in very early times the tract of territory afterwards occupied by Boeotia and Phocis had been the scene of many cross- currents of religious influence. Invaders from the north and north-west brought in the worship of the Muses and Graces, originally nature-deities, from Pieria to Helicon ; of Dionysus from Thrace to Thebes and Delphi ; of Ares from Thrace to Thebes ; while the Phoenicians, entering from the seaboard, engrafted on some native worships the religion of Herakles at Thebes, and of Poseidon on Mount Onchestos, and had possibly established an earth-oracle at Delphi before the arrival there of Apollo or even of Dionysus. The strangely blended attributes of Poseidon, the earth-shaker, the lord of the deep, the bringer of the steed, are best accounted for by some contact with a Phoenician source. Whether or not Thebes is to be regarded as the centre from which this influence spread, its reality is unquestionable : the associations surrounding Cadmus, Europa, Melicertes, Aphrodite, Herakles, Daedalus, leave no room for doubt. With Hesiod begins the personal or subjective note, which is a new thing in literature, and sounds onward through the succeeding age of lyric and gnomic poetry. The didactic form, which meets us as a new phenomenon in the 'Works and Days,' appears also in the body of elegiac verse which passes under the name of Theognis of Megara. It is certain that he belonged originally to Megara in central Greece, although Plato and others connected him, whether 112- RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE rightly or not, with the newer Megara in Sicily. These poems reflect the experience, not so much of another age, as of another class, who during the period of unsettlement on the Hellenic mainland had suffered the consequences of political reaction. In the neighbourhood of the isthmus, the old aristocracy were being supplanted, through the growing importance of industry and commerce, by new men whom they despised. Hence a mode of discontent, and of conscious misery, very different from that of the Boeotian peasant, but expressed in precepts into which ethical reflection enters in a somewhat similar way. The poets of the noblesse complain aloud that 'money makes the man.' While he glorifies justice as the sum of human excellence, Theognis identifies goodness with high birth, and badness with vulgarity. He commences his poem with an invocation of the Delian not the Delphian Apollo, of his sister Artemis, and of the Muses and Graces, who at the marriage of Cadmus had sung this strain : ' what is beautiful is dear, what is unbeautiful is not beloved.' He boasts of being famous in the world, but complains that he cannot please his neighbours. They are not without sense, but are led astray by the enemies of ' the good,' that is, of the men formerly in power. Those who once were poor men and despised now claim to be ' the good.' He longs in vain to find a comrade whom he can trust ; such a partisan is worth more than gold and silver. An open enemy is better than a dissembling friend. With such intermingling of political prejudice and moral wisdom, the poem proceeds, rising here and there into genuine religious fervour, and appeals to Zeus and to Apollo to protect the state from the insolence of upstarts and false friends. The poet has travelled far, but finds no country to please him like his own, not Sicily, not vine-clad Euboea, not Sparta amongst the reed-beds of Eurotas. But some- what inconsistently he deprecates the spirit of faction, and though at the opening he worships the Delian Apollo, he specially reveres the sacredness of the Delphian oracle. He loves not war, but it is shameful not to fight for one's own state. Amongst many echoes of contemporary thought, this poet gives, perhaps the first clear utterance to the pessimistic THEOGNIS 113 strain, of which more will have to be said by and by : ' best of all for creatures of earth not to be born, or see the sun's keen rays ; but when born, it is best most swiftly to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie low with the mould heaped over one.' ' Hope alone of kindly powers remains with men, the rest have abandoned us, and gone to heaven. Good faith, a mighty deity, is gone, sobriety hath left mankind, and the Graces have deserted earth ; oaths are no longer truly kept amongst men, and no one hath any reverence for the immortals. The race of pious men hath perished. They no longer recognise just ways or piety, yet while one lives and sees the light of day, let him show piety to the gods and wait on hope. Let him pray to heaven, and while he burns the splendid thigh-bones, let him sacrifice first and last of all to the goddess of hope.' Theognis marks the transition towards the age of Solon, as darkness precedes the dawn. I have brought in the con- sideration of Theognis here, because, although somewhat later as a whole than the Hesiodic poetry, and more in line with the direct succession from Homer, this body of verse contains, probably with later interpolations, some unmistakable echoes of a distinct aspect of the period of unsettlement in central Hellas. Meanwhile, a different phase both of political and intellectual life had been developed in the islands of the Aegean and on the shores of Ionia, some part of which had contributed to the form rather than the spirit of the poems just described. The island centres had been exempt from the immediate influence of great changes to which the Hellenes of the continent on either side had been subjected in the seventh century. They had their quarrels amongst themselves, as one or another island, and one or another powerful individual, had predominated. But there appears to have been more scope than could be found elsewhere, either at this time or afterwards, for the prevalence of personal emotion and intensity of private social life. The lyric poetry which formed the bloom of this civilisation remains to us only in tantalising fragments, which suggest that the loss of such a literature is even more to be deplored than that I 114 KELIGION IN GKEEK LITERATURE of the comedies of Menander. But it may be questioned whether, if it had been extant as a whole, it could have been regarded as an important factor in the development of religion in the sense in which the term is understood for the purpose of the present volume. We gather that the worships of Dionysus, Demeter, and Aphrodite were more vividly present to these people than that of the Olympian gods. Archilochus glories in the power with which he can improvise the dithyramb of royal Dionysus, when the wine is flashing through him. Sappho's invocation to Aphrodite is the most intense religious utterance of this individual and subjective poetry, and Anacreon similarly glorified the power of love. The most important in a literary sense, as well as the earli- est, of these creative minds was undoubtedly Archilochus of Paros. In him the personal note above adverted to comes into sudden and startling prominence. His was a strong and turbulent spirit, that amidst many outward changes, during an adventurous life, found utterance for its intense passion- ateness and savage indignation ; moved at one time by personal injuries, at another by sympathy with great mis- fortunes such as those of the Thasians. His apostrophe to his own spirit * confused with hopeless cares ' is more characteristic of him than the awe he felt at the eclipse, which suggested the familiar thought that nothing is to be accounted strange, not even if the course of nature should be interrupted or reversed. Yet the strain of moral reflection having a religious association is not absent. The decision of victory is with the gods, to whom all things are to be ascribed : ' oftentimes when men are lying on the dark ground in misery they raise them up, and often when most prosperous, they overthrow them and lay them flat ; thence many woes arise, and the man wanders in a life of want, and with thoughts disabled.' ' father Zeus, thou rulest the sky, thou seest what is done whether villanous or righteous amongst men, thou carest for the insolence and right conduct even of the lower animals.' His prayer to Hephaestus for such gifts as that deity is wont to give breaks off unluckily before we have learned its occasion or its object, whether this be skill in craftsmanship or the fiery destruction of his foes. THE HOMERIC HYMNS 115 Like other poets, he is ready to sing at religious ceremonies, and to lead up the Lesbian paean to the flute. As in all the poetry discussed in the present chapter, the religion of the Muses and of the Graces is a pervading spirit more consciously present than in Homer. The general impression derived from the fragments of lyric poetry of the seventh century is, that in the life of the islanders at this time, before the disastrous consequences of the Ionian revolt, individuals enjoyed a larger extent of social freedom than at any other period of Greek history. But the fear of the gods seems to have sat lightly on them, and the sunny vividness of their mental life can hardly be regarded as a positive moment in the evolution of religion. Yet we take note, in passing from them, of the general fact that in their hours of most intense consciousness and passionate emotion, the appeal to powers above themselves, Zeus, Apollo, Demeter, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Eros, breaks forth instinctively, as from a source of inex- haustible fulness from which they draw a momentary inspiration. Among the inhabitants of the Asiatic seaboard, of which Miletus was the most important centre, amidst great varieties of social life and culture, there was far more of continuity in intellectual development. It was hereabout that the Homeric poems had attained their final shape, and it was here that elegiac poetry took its rise. Of this, so far as we know, Callinus was the earliest exponent. He lived in stirring days when the host of the Cimmerians was over- running Asia and threatening the Ionic seaboard. A fragment of his appeal to Zeus to spare the Smyrneans has been preserved, in which he ' casts up to him ' the many fair thigh- bones of oxen that had been offered in burnt sacrifice. His elegiacs have an heroic ring. Mimnermus is a softer spirit, but he also has some warlike lines referring to the struggle with Lydia, in which Pallas Athena figures as the patroness of warriors. To speak more generally, in the Ionian poetry of this age we trace two principal effects : the love of pleasure, arising partly from the growth of luxury that was due to pro- sperity and the contagion of Lydia ; and at the same time a pessimistic reaction, which may be ascribed partly to the i 2 116 EELIGION IN GEEEK LITERATUEE sense of insecurity of a people dwelling at ease, but under the shadow, first of Lydian, and afterwards of Persian supremacy. The keenness of enjoyment passing over into regret for its transitoriness prompts reflection on ' some undercurrent woe.' Mimnermus singing in this minor key dwells at V length upon the note lightly struck by Homer, in comparing human life to that of leaves, so anticipating the philosophy of change of which Heraclitus became the great exponent. Hecataeus and other chroniclers now sought to consolidate and arrange in prose writing historical and legendary tradition, while Pherecydes of Syros, also in prose, continued the effort of Hesiod by attempting a more consistent theogony 'and cosmogony. The Homeridae, at Chios and elsewhere, besides those additions to the Iliad and Odyssey which modern criticism has attributed to them, not only preserved the Homeric deposit, but individuals amongst them such as Lesches and Arctinus became the authors of new epics dealing with the various portions of the Trojan cycle, such as the ' Cypria,' the 'return of the heroes,' and the 'lesser Iliad.' The * Thebais 'and the ' taking of Oechalia ' belong- ing to the same period were based on other legends brought from central Greece. To the same line of tradition belongs the rise of a class of poems of uncertain and probably of various ages. The habit of invoking some great deity on the occasion of his festival, before reciting a selected portion of Homeric poetry, had become usual with the rhapsodists, whose preludes were sometimes of considerable length, and some of these have been preserved to us, under the name of the 'Homeric Hymns.' The present chapter may not unfitly be concluded with a brief reference to the most important of these. The brightness of Ionian civilisation is pleasingly re- flected in the ' Hymn to Apollo.' The birth at Delos is the principal subject, and the hymn itself was probably sung or recited at the Delian festival, which is in fact described in the well-known passage referred to by Thucydides. The exaltation of Delos as a sort of Bethlehem confessing her un worthiness at the unlooked-for annunciation is a pro- minent feature of the strain ; another is the description of THE HOMERIC HYMNS 117 Apollo Citharoedus when he first appears in Olympus ; and not less interesting, although more obscure, is the digression, perhaps interpolated, in which an attempt is made to connect the Delian with the Delphian Apollo, and at the same time to account for the comparative neglect of Tel- phussa as a seat of Apollonian worship. Edward Meyer has called attention to the comparative depreciation of Delphi, which he interprets as betraying a desire to exalt Delos at its expense, and supposes some connection with the rivalry of Athens with Sparta ; but the description of the Delian festival is surely too early to admit of such a motive. The truth rather seems to be that the poet, or poets, belonged to the islands or to the Ionian seaboard and knew of Delphi only by report. Another proof of the absence of Delphian doctrine is that in the account of the slaying of the dragon, otherwise orthodox enough, there is no hint that Apollo needs any atonement for that act of bloodshed. The list of places visited by the god, both in Greece proper and in Asia Minor, beginning with Lycia, Maeonia, and Miletus, is unfortunately broken off by a lacuna in the text, else we might know more of the Delian amphictiony, whose im- portance survived Athenian ascendency. The effort of the poet, here as elsewhere, is to bring into harmony various local beliefs, not directly deducible from the general attributes of the god. The hymn has a touch of gentle pathos in the personal reference to the singer himself, so long identified with Homer in general tradition, ' the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle.' The golden sheen overspread- ing the isle in the day of her visitation may suggest a possible origin for the choice of Delos as the birthplace of a solar deity. Some pious soul, perhaps a pirate withal, may have seen some glory of sunrise on the rocky cliff and wondered. The remainder of the hymn, sometimes regarded as a wholly separate composition, besides the curious episode about Telphussa, contains a minute account of the god's first arrival at Delphi, with a wholly different legend about the birth of Typhon from that which we read in Hesiod, and a very singular myth about the origin of the Delphians founded on the combination of two fanciful derivations of 118 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Crisa from Crete, and of Delphinium from Delphis, a dolphin. These are preceded by the beautiful description of the first arrival of Apollo in Olympus, which forms the conclusion of the first and finest portion of the Hymn. ' As swift as thought he goes from earth to Olympus to the home of Zeus to join the festive gathering of the gods. And straightway on his coming the Immortals are engaged with song and with the lyre, and all the Muses in a throng, alternating with their bright voices, hymn the immortal gifts of gods, and the miseries of men, which they suffer at the hands of the immortal gods, as they live without knowledge or device. Nor can they find a cure for death, or a bulwark against old age. But the Graces with fair locks, and the cheerful Hours, and Harmonia and Hebe and Aphrodite, daughter of the highest, join in the dance, each holding her fellow by the wrist. And there pre-eminent in beauty and in stature, the sister of Apollo brought up together with him, Artemis that showers her arrows, is conspicuous amongst that choir. There too with them are sporting Ares and clear-sighted Hermes, and Phoebus Apollo meanwhile plays the lyre amongst them, stepping loftily with a noble air. And about him shines bright radiance from his glancing feet and from his garment of immortal woof, while Latona of the golden locks and counsellor Zeus delight their divine souls with the spectacle, beholding their own son at play amongst the immortal gods.' The ' Hymn to Hermes,' of uncertain date, continues the same serene and cheerful strain, passing over into mirth and humour. Hermes, of all the gods, is the most familiar comrade of mankind. He gives them unexpected wealth, and helps them in their enterprises, honest or dishonest, a very St. Nicolas to thieves ; the average Greek mind obviously delighted in listening to the story of his tricksy ways. The hymn expatiates on his birth and infancy, which is marked by two great feats his theft of the oxen of Apollo and his invention of the lyre. His brother Apollo is pacified for the first escapade, by the charm of the invention. This hymn supplies the firmest ground for the theory that would derive THE HOMERIC HYMNS 119 the name of Hermes from the Sanskrit, and identify his deity with the breeze of morning which drives away the cows of the sun, that is the clouds, that go before him, and makes them disappear, while the luminary laughs at his young brother's theft and listens gladly to the music of the dawn. But hearers of the hymn had no conception of the solar myth which is suggested by the comparison of Vedic hymns. The spirit of the whole performance has been admirably rendered for English readers by the kindred and sympathetic genius of Shelley. In another hymn addressed to Hestia, Hermes, probably as the god of boundaries, is associated with the goddess of the hearth. The ' Hymn to Demeter ' reflects a wholly different strain of feeling, inspired by a worship which as early at least as the sixth century had obtained a widespread import- ance on both sides of the Aegean. It was suggested in a former chapter that local village ceremonies and beliefs probably survived the most abrupt political changes, re- maining as an undergrowth when the tall trees of the forest were felled ; many instances in illustration of this remark may be quoted from Pausanias, and they are mostly connected with the worship of Demeter. Just as in the hymn before us she nurses the child of Celeus at Eleusis, so in the Sicyonic legend she is the nurse of Orthopolis, and it is significant that the cult of Demeter and Persephone is associated with that of the Eumenides and the Fates. The burden of the hymn, embodying the Eleusinian myth, is the blindness of mortals to their blessings, whereby they reject an offered immortality. The main theme is finely exemplified in the low relief discovered at Eleusis, representing Demeter and Persephone and between them the boy Triptolemus (or Zagreus), the child of Hades and Persephone. Persephone is carried off by Pluto and calls in vain on her mother, who hears of her loss from Hecate and from the Sun. Demeter then leaves Olympus, and is found by the daughters of Celeus sitting by the well, like an elderly woman in widow's weeds. She undertakes to nurse Demophoon, the son of Celeus and Metaneira, and 120 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE would have made him immortal by putting him to. rest amongst the embers of the hearth, had not his mother one night seen her doing this and not unnaturally taken alarm. The sorrow of the Great Goddess, in which earth sympathises, issuing in the destruction of the works of men ; her joy in the restoration of her lost child, making earth to flourish again ; the secret wile of Hades, giving Persephone the pomegranate seed which secured her return to the realms below, sustain the human interest of the poem. The promise of immortality, in a larger sense than that which the poet of the hymn could have conceived, has been drawn from the original in a well-known poem by the alchemy of which Tennyson was so great a master, reading modern thoughts into ancient forms of imagination. We shall have to refer again to this hymn in speaking of the mysteries at Eleusis. At present it is enough to say that it belongs to a time when the worship of Demeter at Eleusis had not yet been ' contaminated ' with that of Dionysus. Three hymns to Dionysus are included in the collection. Two of these are exceedingly short, one of them a mere fragment. In all of them he is the son of Zeus and Semele, and in the two brief hymns the mountain Nysa is men- tioned as the place of his nurture. In the fragmentary hymn this is described as a lofty mountain, well-wooded, far from Phoenicia and near the stream of Nile. Thyone is also mentioned as another name for Semele. The longer hymn describes the first epiphany of the god. He is found by Tyrrhenian pirates on the seashore, .like a beardless youth, with long dark hair. They bind him with withes, but he bursts them as Samson did ; the pilot then proposes to leave him on the shore, but the captain will not hear of it. They begin their voyage, when suddenly wine flows in runnels about the ship, with poignant fragrance, and over the sail there sprouts a trailing vine, hung over with clusters. 1 Dark ivy winds about the mast, with flowers and berries, and on the rowlocks wreaths are hung. The sailors turn towards 1 See the ship of Dionysus, on the well-known vase, reproduced in Frazer's Pausanias. THE HOMERIC HYMNS 121 shore, when the youth changes to a lion, and threatens them with roaring from the deck. A bear breaks out amidships, and sits up with threats. The sailors crowd in terror round the pilot, the lion seizes the captain, the mariners all leap into the sea and are changed into dolphins. The pilot alone is spared and made a wealthy man. 122 KELIGION IN GEEEK LITERATURE CHAPTEK VI PEEIOD OF TEANSITION HEKO-WOKSHIP ALLUSION has already been made in speaking of Theognis to the way in which the growth of commerce and industry disturbed the simple relations which formerly existed between the members of each tribe. The people became more important, slaves were multiplied, and cities were consolidated. The right of primogeniture was impaired, inheritances were divided, and some powers of adoption and bequest were acknowledged. State prosecution, accompanied with religious ceremonies, at once regulated and attempered the old rough obligation of the avenger of blood. For the gentile name Alcmaeonid, Eumolpid, Lakiad came to be substituted first the national appellation * Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, of Athens,' and by and by the name of the deme or district ' Sophocles, son of Sophillus, from Colonus.' The spiritual centre of gravity was passing from the family to the state, from the hearth to the high altar. And those deities acquired a special prominence who had most to do with civic life : Athena at Athens, Hera at Argos, Poseidon at Corinth. Above them all stands the Delphian Apollo, whose authority reached to all Hellenic cities. But the family, especially in the extended form of the clan, had at the same time an influence which grew with the growth of settled institutions ; and the heroes to whom each group assigned its origin became more and more the objects of ceremonial reverence. Their real presence in the neigh- bourhood of their tombs or sanctuaries was increasingly believed in, and the worship of ancestors, which had never died out, was more and more fostered as assuring the stability of the community. The early stages of this movement are PEEIOD OF TEANSIT10N 123 of course obscure, but half -forgotten struggles left a lasting impress on religious feeling through signal examples of self- devotion in the cause of the fatherland (Codrus, Erechtheus, Menoeceus, Megareus, Aristodemus, Aristomenes), which, whether legendary or historical, are equally important in their effects upon religion. The steps of this process of consolidation in the case of Athens in the sixth century are known with tolerable clear- ness, many points having been made more distinct by the recent discovery of Aristotle's treatise on the ' Constitution of the Athenians.' It is no longer possible, as has sometimes been attempted, to deduce such development in a direct line from the family to the clan, from the clan to the tribe, and from the tribe to the city. New divisions required by political exigencies were deliberately made to cross the former division, which was, notwithstanding, continued for social and religious and to some extent for military purposes. The ascendency of the great families, especially where they have the wit to amass wealth and court popularity, dies very hard. Great and small families alike maintained their peculiar sacred rites, except where many joined in a common celejDra- tion as in the Apaturia. The Phratry, an old military division, continues to subsist, but the tribe, Phyle, is the political unit, which is again subdivided on principles of political con- venience. For all these changes religious sanctions have to be found. For example, the ten tribes, which were substituted in the constitution of Cleisthenes for the four previously exist- ing, must each have an eponymous hero, who comes gradually to be regarded as the ancestor of every member of the tribe. This implied a sort of legal figment analogous to the law of adoption, but with less of illusion about it. How purely conventional this came to be appears from the inscription towards the end of the fifth century awarding a crown to Thrasybulus at the restoration of the democracy, in which the privilege is accorded to him of belonging to any tribe or deme at his pleasure. But the case was very different at the time of the former revolution, when the national spirit rose to meet the legislator who found in time-honoured names a sanction for the liberties which he conferred. The 124 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE Ten Eponymi were selected by the Pythia from a hundred native heroes whose names were presented to her. In this whole process two divine powers came into increasing prominence, Apollo and Athena : Apollo as the high authority revealing to mankind the supreme will of Zeus ; Athena as the guardian of the city, which is henceforth one, and is sheltered under her protecting wings. ' Our city shall never perish by the will of Zeus, and the care of the immortal gods ; so high-souled is her patroness, Pallas Athena, of the mighty sire, who watches over her and holds her arms above. It is her own citizens who, under the influence of wealth, seek to ruin the great city by their folly.' These words of Solon are very significant of the spirit of the higher minds of Attica in the early sixth century. The lawgiver's appeal to justice is not less solemn than that of Hesiod, and even more convincing, because more hopeful : ' Her dread foundations may not be neglected ' ; ' though she keep silence, she knows what acts are done and what hath been, and in time she comes inevitably, bringing the reward.' Such utterances help us to realise the greatness of Solon's achievement. What figures in history as a political reform was nothing less than the infusion of a new religious principle, affecting, not modes of worship, but the minds of the worshippers. The reign of law is gradually taking the place of mere cus- tomary tradition or the decision of the magistrate. Towards the end of the seventh century, in various parts of Greece, beginning with the shores of Italy, prominent citizens had been entrusted with the duty of preparing codes of law. Zaleucus at Locri in Italy, Charondas at Catana in Sicily, are specially known ; but they are only examples of what was taking place elsewhere. Lycurgus is credited with the Spartan institutions, but he seems to be a legendary figure, in whom some much earlier and some later tradition was concentrated by the popular imagination. At least he can- not have left a written code. For amongst other innova- tions which the conservative Spartans refused to adopt were walled fortifications and written laws. Their pTJrpai were preserved by oral tradition. The Cretan Dorians, EARLY LAWGIVERS 125 on the other hand, had very early an accepted code of family law, which at Gortyn was engraved on the walls of an ancient building, of which the stones have been trans- ferred to the theatre, itself ancient, in which they were found. Draco is the corresponding figure at Athens ; he is a real person, and some of his enactments are clearly known. The famous legislation of Solon aimed at meeting a special exigency, and was social and economical, more than constitu- tional. It is interesting to reflect that his wisdom, which had so much of reason and experience in it, and was quite free from the pessimism which Herodotus attributes to him, was allied with the work of Epimenides, a religious enthu- siast, and a sort of medicine man, whose reputation as an exorcist led the Athenians, in their extremity, to invite him from Crete. Plato and Aristotle agree in giving this account of him. According to other authorities he was a native Athenian. Here we find in the Athenian people an interesting combination of native shrewdness with the same simplicity w r hich led them afterwards to be willingly imposed upon by the mummery with which Pisistratus returned, led home by a living image of Athena. It may perhaps be asked whether religious forms and practices, thus conventionally modified to suit political convenience, must not have lost something of their reality, but for the popular mind it was not so : a people of lively imagination, who read little, converse much, and live in the present, are easily capable of new impres- sions ; and ' new forms which express or satisfy existing emotions soon acquire for them the sanction of antiquity. The worships which gave expression to the growing sense of common civic life were profoundly congenial to the advancing consciousness of each limited nationality. What rather moves one's wonder is, as Plato says, the native strength of the civic bond, which held together under the stress of factions that seemed likely to tear the state in sunder, amidst the contradictory interests of old families, novel claims, and restless ambitions. The love of power did not altogether supplant the love of country. Both often burned together in the same breast. That individuals of exceptional originality and force had 126 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE much to do in moulding the strong fabric of the Hellenic communities is indisputable. But it does not follow that in referring the rules of life, to which they clung tenaciously, to one original source in the person of the lawgiver, they were not following the same natural tendency which led to the creation of the eponymous hero or of the legendary founder of the mysteries. It is also important to observe that it was mostly under the presidency of one strong man, such as Pisistratus, and in connection with the process of consolidation here spoken of, that the arts of architecture and of sculpture attained to such magnificence in their association with religious functions. The buildings on the Acropolis, for example, mark the complete centralisation of religious and civic life at Athens. There is hardly any trace of temple- worship amongst the Greeks of the Homeric time. The kings of the Mycenaean period had been more solicitous to fortify their castles, and to prepare their own beehive tombs, than to raise temples in honour of the people's gods. Such shrines as that which Chryses constructed for his rude image of Apollo were more frequent on the shores of Asia than in Hellas proper. The temple of Apollo at Bran- chidae, near Miletus, was of ancient renown ; but like that of Delphi, which already existed in the eighth century B.C., it owed its grandeur to the offerings of foreign kings, which required a spacious building to hold them. It was when the race of kings had departed, and cities became conscious of a corporate existence, that they built houses for their gods, and supported priests to care for them and to conduct the ceremonies which symbolised the continuity of civic life ; and just as the monarch of Tiryns and Mycenae might summon an architect from over seas to build him a palace or a tomb, so the city, which sought to enhance the glory of the house which secured the presence of its god, might send for some one skilled in arts that were not yet fully developed upon Greek soil. It is to be observed, more- over, that the city rather than the priesthood had the initi- ative in all this course of change. No doubt the priestly caste, for instance the Eteo-Butadae on the Acropolis, had their interests to serve, and well knew how to work the PANTHEISTIC TENDENCIES 127 oracle of the conservative party ; but statesmen such as Solon, Pisistratus, or Pericles were too hard for them, and would not suffer the religion of the people to be made a hindrance to the growth of the state. Thus the safety and glory of the community were indissolubly associated with the present favour of the gods and heroes whom their fathers worshipped, and in whose actual presence, so long as their ritual was duly performed, the people implicitly believed. The peaked roof of a Greek temple, with the gable end or pediment which gave such grand opportunities for the sculptor's art, is ascribed by Pindar, together with other notable inventions, to Corinth, whose wealth derived from commerce gave her an influence on the progress of the arts, of which the decorated vases of this period afford abundant evidence. Thus although it is undeniable that the arts of architec- ture and of sculpture, ever closely associated, were originally derived in some measure from the Egyptians, in so far as mechanical accomplishments were concerned, yet as their increasing splendour reacted on religious feeling, and awakened the native imagination, these arts became, under the influence of Greek genius, a new creation and birth of time. The Greek so invariably transformed what he received into shapes congenial to the Hellenic spirit, that it is at once futile and unimportant, when a few obvious resem- blances and differences have been observed, to disentangle further the foreign threads from the whole complex web. A similar uncertainty attends the far deeper movement which, while these popular rites were hardening into per- manent shape, was in progress among a few more aspiring minds, and was ultimately to prove a solvent for the cere- monial conventions that seemed so irremovable. The sixth century B.C. is one of those epochs in the history of our race which mark a widespread access of spiritual vitality. In the case of Hellas it is still a moot question how far some fresh impact from Egypt or from further east had to do with this. But a sort of pantheistic awakening at once in- tellectual and religious, beginning from many centres, of which 128 KELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE the names of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the mythical Orpheus may serve to remind us, had set going a wave of mingled speculation and aspiration, which at one time threatened to destroy mythology, at another to transmute it into novel forms. Wants hitherto unfelt were met in various ways. Individuals were not satisfied with the traditional and conventional worships of the family or of the state, There was a deepening sense, we know not how infused, of guilt requiring atonement, of pollution crying for purgation, a feeling which had its roots in very early times, but was now becoming universal. Meditation upon life and death brought into a glaring light the inadequacy of the Homeric conception of a future life, and a craving for some assurance of blessedness hereafter. These desires combining with the primeval village festival gave new importance to mystic ceremonies, especially those of Eleusis, and had consider- able influence in shaping the religion of Orphism, with its novel features of mythology, ritual, and discipline. The worship of the Erinnyes or Furies, in which the power of the curse was personified, also assumed novel forms, and was blended with that of other Chthonian powers. The philosophic aspect of this wide movement will be more conveniently considered in treating of the subsequent growth of philosophy. But it is necessary before passing from it to remember that this also must be reckoned with in estimating the changes in poetry and general literature which emerged about the end of the sixth century. Now, too, the Homeric poems and the lyric poetry which had succeeded them began to exercise a powerful influence upon religion and the arts that ministered to it. The worshipper who had listened to an epic rhapsody, or to some outburst of choral song, could no longer think of the god to whom he paid his vows after the old crude and scarcely human fashion. A refined anthropomorphism tended to obliterate the last surviving relics of animal-worship and of savage rites. A blind reverence still clung to the rude square pillar that merely indicated the characteristics of the human form, but feeling and imagination craved for something more. And this the artist tried to satisfy and to supply. Thence gradu- BLOOD-GUILTINESS 129 ally the plastic arts, following in the wake of poetry, set before the eyes of those who came to worship the shapes and the expressive grouping which might render outwardly the forms of fancy. The thoughts of the poet also took a new direction. He chose his subjects more immediately from the experience of life : maxims, apothegms, and apologues became more frequent with him ; he aimed more at suggesting food for reflection, and in speaking of the gods avoided what seemed ugly or repellent. Man began to think of the power on whom his life depended more distinctly as the fountain of justice, and as civic relations were more and more developed, these higher thoughts began to find their centre in some one or other of the Olympian deities, especially in Athena and Apollo. Athena was looked up to by the Athenians as their protectress ; she was also their instructor. Intermittently and to a less degree the Pythian Apollo stood in this relation to the whole Grecian world and to Lacedaemon above all. The most noted change in this respect was the new consciousness about the guilt of homicide which over- spread the whole Grecian world, and was immediately associated with the Delphian worship of Apollo. The only forms of purification known to Homer are fumigation with sulphur, as in the Odyssey, and washing with sea-water, as in the first Iliad. The latter process survived in such ceremonies as the annual washing of the Palladium at Phalerum, and the rush to the sea with which the Eleusinian rites began. But there is no hint in Homer of expiation through the blood of swine (sacrificed to Demeter) , or of other forms of ceremonial purgation which afterwards became universal. We have an interesting glimpse of one stage in this process in the visit of Epimenides to Athens, when after a long period of misery the people had called him in to heal them. After inquiry, he declared that this came on them for the blood of Cylon's partisans whom the Alk- maeonidae had slain, when suppliant at the altar of Athena. To purge this guilt, the Alkmaeonidae were banished, and the bones of their dead taken out of their graves and cast beyond the borders of the land. This feeling of blood- K 130 EELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE guiltiness was in the first instance positive and ceremonial, and was afterwards abused, becoming a superstition and an instrument of unscrupulous policy. But it contained in it the germ of a profoundly moral feeling, and of that conscious- ness of sin which is the beginning of a deeper religious life. Apollo and Athena thus became vicegerents of their father Zeus on earth, Apollo as the author of religious purity, Athena as the patroness of justice and equity. ^ The worship of the dead is by some thought to be the origin of all religion. It is at all events a phase through which all races of mankind who have attained to any historical importance have at some time passed. In the propitiation of the Manes it survived the latest period of Latin culture, and was continued by the Greek and Koman Churches in the invocation of saints. In the Cyclades Charon still gets his coin from the mouth of the dead as he did of old. To be without this element of religious life would therefore seem to be indicative either of primitive immaturity or of a late and advanced stage in the growth of the human mind. But the apparent exceptions to this rule are startling enough. Herodotus says that the Egyptians have no such custom ; Hebrew religion presents few traces of it, unless in Saul at Endor ; and in Homer, as before re- marked, hardly any vestige of it is to be found. The statement of Herodotus, however, about Egypt is obviously based on a misconception. The departed kings, buried with such pomp, whose pyramids were maintained with great endowments providing for the unending performance of an elaborate ritual, were to all intents and purposes the objects of such worship. If the priest endeavoured to explain to his Greek interviewer that the worship was not paid to Eameses or Necho as such, but to the god with whom the spirit of either was identified, the historian's mystification might easily be as complete as when, relying on appearances, he had identified Osiris with Dionysus. Or it might be meant that the being so worshipped was not a hero but a god. The Egyptian Ka or spirit of the dead was in the case of a king more essentially divine than the shade of Ajax or Orestes. As to hero-worship in the HERO-WORSHIP 131 heroic age, I may refer to what I have said above, p. 67. The blood which Odysseus pours into the narrow pit, by the advice of Circe, is precisely such an offering as in central Greece was made at every great man's tomb. The custom of providing the national hero or patron saint with a sacred precinct, such as had once been the ' privilege of the king, became universal in Hellas before the seventh century B.C. There is no reason to doubt that the hero so worshipped was often a real member of some family, who had impressed himself upon the people's imagination, either by founding a dynasty, or repelling an invader, or by his misfortunes, or in some other way. But political exigencies also gave rise to the invention of what are called eponymous heroes, the supposed ancestors of a family or clan, whose blood-relationship was largely supposititious. Instead of giving his name to the clan, such a hero was often named after it. Semi-divine honours were also paid to the mythical originators of certain forms of ritual. Eumolpus, for example, was the father of those who conducted the Eleusinian mysteries. Another true cause of hero-worship arose when a god of former days had been supplanted by a more important deity, whose son or servant he was now supposed to be. Asclepius, Castor, Polydeuces, and others, whom Homer speaks of as mortals, may have been gods before his time. The strength of the impulse to worship the dead may be measured by the number and variety of the grounds which made a man a hero. First comes the claim of the head of a family descending from patriarchal times. As many families coalesced into one clan, the common ancestor of the clan must either be found or invented, and every tribe or district which came under a common government had its epony- mous hero, whose worship symbolised the bond of union. As these units again coalesced into a greater whole in forming the city, the many festivals in honour of these ancestors, real or supposed, were sometimes united into one, as in the Athenian or rather Ionian feast of the Apaturia. The founder of a colony, who carried with him the sacred fire from the mother-city, invariably received such honours after death ; and other sacred associations led to the multi- K 2 132 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE plication of such rites, as, for example, the worship of Pelops at Olympia. This tendency remained a living power in Greece far on into historical times ; we know that Hagnon and Brasidas were so worshipped successively at Amphipolis, and the power of the local hero was the object of such vivid belief that the presence even of his image with the army was regarded as conducive to victory. In the same region the people had raised an altar to a Persian governor after his death, because of his extraordinary stature. Such faith must have often been severely tried, yet it survived. We can only point to one instance where it appears to have been shaken, and in this case it is not the native hero who proved so disappointing. When Thebes appealed to Aegina for help, the Aeginetans in all good faith sent the images of the sons of Aeacus, and when defeat followed, the Thebans returned the images, and asked for men. But this failure was not thought of when the presence of the same images at the battle of Salamis was believed to have been decisive. The hero present at his tomb was supposed to have all the human feelings of a living citizen. The vicissitudes of war, alliance, and colonisation affected the fortunes of heroes as well as of living men. There were many tombs of Oedipus in many parts of Greece : for the Athenian he was buried at Colonus ; for the Boeotian, at Potniae ; for the Corinthian at Sicyon. There was a tomb of Cassandra both at Argos and at Sparta ; of Talthybius, both at Sparta and in Aegina. Orestes, although not a Dorian, was a powerful factor in the Spartan state, and not until his bones had been laid within Spartan ground, and a temple raised over them, could the Lacedaemonians be secure of supremacy in the Peloponnesus. A less fortunate policy was pursued by Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, who being at war with Argos, sought to exile Adrastus the Argive hero worshipped at Sicyon. When the Pythoness forbade this in words of contumely, he instituted the worship of Melanippus, of whom legend spoke as the greatest enemy of Adrastus in his lifetime. This, however, was the action not of the people, but of a tyrant. Many cases are recorded in which an enemy HERO-WORSHIP 133 received divine honours after death. The tomb of Mardonius in the Plataean territory was respected down to the time of Pausanias. Onesilas, the Cyprian tyrant who besieged Amathus, having been slain in conflict with the Persians, the Amathu- sians maltreated his remains, but because of a portent (a swarm of bees having settled in the hollow of his skull) and a consequent oracle, they instituted an annual sacrifice to him, which was continued for more than one generation. On the other hand, it is equally instructive to observe that in removing all traces of the worship of Hagnon the Athenian general, the Potidaeans felt, as Thucydides tells us, that it could not be pleasant for him to receive their offer- ings side by side with the worship of his adversary. Philip of Crotona, the most beautiful man of his time, who was disappointed of his promised bride, the daughter of his country's enemy, and joined the fatal expedition of Dorieus, is said by Herodotus to be the only mortal to whom the people of Egesta ever paid divine honours. They raised a heroon over his tomb and continued to propitiate him with sacrifices. Yet his coming amongst them must have been a serious danger to their state. Pausanias mentions (iii. 13 1) that a tomb of Idas and Lynceus was shown near the tomb of Castor in the neigh- bourhood of Sparta. The historian thinks it unlikely that such bitter enemies should be buried so near together, but the association is characteristic of the impartiality with which Greek religion accorded reverence to those, although opposed in life, who had in any way impressed the popular imagination. Similarly in Mysia, whether amongst a pure Greek race or not, Thersander who was slain by Telephus was honoured together with that hero in connec- tion with the worship of Asclepius. In the same connection another feature of this branch of ritual appears ; for in the popular imagination, by all except such rare spirits as Antigone, resentment was supposed to continue after death : thus in the ' Ajax ' of Sophocles, Odysseus although friendly is not invited to take part in the sepulture of Ajax whom he had offended ; and in the temple of Asclepius just spoken of, 134 RELIGION IN GREEK LITERATURE the worshippers of Telephus were not permitted to approach Asclepius, until they had purified themselves. The reason was that Machaon the son of Asclepius was slain by Eurypylus the son of Telephus, and for the same reason the songs in praise of Telephus that were chanted there made no mention of Eurypylus, his warrior son. The act of Cleisthenes above mentioned is a strong instance of the early prevalence of the same belief. Solon, and after him Pisistratus, had appealed from the religion of the Eupatridae, which centred in various local cults, to the universal sanctity of Zeus and Athena, of the Earth and of supreme Justice. But the power of the local gods was not extinct, and when making the people his ally, as Herodotus puts it, Cleisthenes sought for the patronage of great heroes acknowledged by general consent and approved by the Delphic oracle, to counterbalance the influence of great families whose patron saints were still so strong. Each tribe in the new democracy must have its own Attic hero. The ritual of hero-worship was distinguished from that of the Olympian gods in several ways. "Whatever may be the result, either in Greece or Egypt, of the minute investiga- tions which have been of late pursued on the subject of temple orientation, the general fact is indisputable : the temples of the gods in Greece were so contrived that the statue in the main shrine should face the rising sun upon the day of festival. The temple of the hero on the other hand opened to the west, and looked towards Erebus and the region of gloom. This is strikingly exemplified by what Pausanias tells us (confirmed by recent investigation) of the temples at Olympia. The entrance to the Pelopeum, he says, is towards the setting of the sun, whereas the temple of Zeus, as a matter of course, faced eastwards. The same historian's account of the ritual of sacrifice in the Pelopeum is further suggestive. It was performed by the rulers for the year, and the victim was a black ram. Such sacrifice to those below was not followed by a feast. The worshippers did not taste of the victim. The sooth- HERO-WORSHIP 135 sayers had no share in the victim, but an officer known as the woodsman, who supplied the wood for sacrifice, got the neck and nothing more. His business was to supply both states and individuals with wood of an appointed kind in due measure for the purpose of the sacrifice. White poplar was the only wood allowed, and it is very noticeable that whosoever, whether native or foreigner, shared in that sacri- fice was not allowed to enter the temple of Zeus on the same day. So true is the saying of Aeschylus, that the honours of the highest gods are kept apart from those of powers below. The exact differences of ritual in minute points between the worship of gods and that of heroes is no- where clearly stated, except the essential point that in the act of hero-worship the blood was poured through an open- ing into the ground. But that there were such differences, and that they were very clearly marked, appears from the fact that a special word (svajl^siv) is used for sacrificing to a hero, in contradistinction to the more general term (6vsiv} t which applies to all sacrifice, but also in a special sense to offerings made to the Olympian gods. 1 The worship of heroes from whom the race derived its origin was continued with little abatement in democratic times, but there can be little doubt that it was for many generations one of the strongholds of oligarchy. No one can read Pindar without a keen sense of the inordinate family pride with which he regards his own lineage from the Aegeidae as at least equal to that of the Heracleid kings of Sparta. The theme of every Epinikian ode is that the brave are born from the brave, the noble from the noble, and no motive is more operative in his morality than that noblesse oblige. Such notions might be consistent with beneficent 'despotism, but not with any real sympathy with the people. The Athenian tragic poets sought to popularise the native heroes, and to make of them an ideal for the admiration of mankind ; but while in doing so they yielded something to the strong current of rising democracy, they also ministered to the 1 A third term for religious offering, 6pyide