FOUR STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LECTURis OCT 7 1913 \^ FOUR STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION STUDIES BASED ON A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED IN APRIL 1912 AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BY V GILBERT MURRAY REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN-LITTERIS-U3ERTAS l[!!l NEW YORK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1912 PRINTED BY HORACE HART M.A, AT THE CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD, ENGLAND PREFACE This small book has taken a long time in growing. Though the first two essays were only put in writing this year for a course of lectures which I had the honour of delivering at Columbia University, the third, which was also used at Columbia, had in its main features appeared in the Hihhert Journal in 1910, the fourth in part in the English Review in 1908 ; the translation of Sallustius was made in 1907 for use with a small class at Oxford. Much of the material is much older in conception, and all has been reconsidered. I must thank the editors of both the above-named periodicals for their kind permission to reprint. I think it was the writings of my friend Mr. Andrew Lang that first awoke me, in my undergraduate days, to the importance of anthropology and primitive religion to a Greek scholar. Certainly I began then to feel that the great works of the ancient Greek imagination are penetrated habitually by religious conceptions and postulates which literary scholars like myself had not observed or understood. In the meantime the situatipn has changed. Greek religion is being studied right and left, and has revealed itself 6 PREFACE as a surprisingly rich and attractive, though somewhat controversial, subject. It used to be a deserted territory ; now it is at least a battle-ground. If ever the present differences resolved themselves into a simple fight with shillelaghs between the scholars and the anthropologists, I should without doubt wield my reluctant weapon on the side of the scholars. Scholar- ship is the rarer, harder, less popular and perhaps the more permanently valuable work, and it certainly stands more in need of defence at the moment. But in the meantime I can hardly understand how the purest of ' pure scholars ' can fail to feel his knowledge enriched by the savants who have compelled us to dig below the surface of our classical tradition and to realize the imaginative and historical problems which so often lie concealed beneath the smooth security of a verbal ' construe '. My own essays do not for a moment claim to speak with authority on a subject which is still changing and showing new facets year by year. They only claim to represent the way of regarding certain large issues of Greek Religion which has gradually taken shape, and has proved practically helpful and consistent with facts, in the mind of a very constant, though unsystematic, reader of many various periods of Greek literature. In the first essay my debt to Miss Harrison is great and obvious. My statement of one or two points is PREFACE 7 probably different from hers, but in the main I follow her lead. And in either case I cannot adequately describe the advantage I have derived from many years of frequent discussion and comparison of results with a Hellenist whose learning and originality of mind are only equalled by her vivid generosity towards her fellow-workers. The second may also be said to have grown out of Miss Harrison's writings. She has by now made the title of ' Olympian ' almost a term of reproach, and thrown down so many a scornful challenge to the canonical gods of Greece, that I have ventured on this attempt to explain their historical origin and plead for their religious value. When the essay was already written I read Mr. Chadwick's impressive book on ^he Heroic Age (Cambridge, 191 2), and was delighted to find in an author whose standpoint and equipment are so different from mine so much that confirmed or clarified my own view. The title of the third essay I owe to a conversation with Professor J. B. Bury. We were discussing the change that took place in Greek thought between, say, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, or even between Aristotle and Posidonius, and which is seen at its highest power in the Gnostics. I had been calling it a rise of asceticism, or mysticism, or religious passion, or the like, when my friend corrected me. * It is not 8 PREFACE a rise ; it is a fall or failure of something, a sort of failure of nerve.' — We are treading here upon some- what firmer ground than in the first two essays. The field for mere conjecture is less : we are supported more continuously by explicit documents. Yet the subject is a very difficult one owing to the scattered and chaotic nature of the sources, and even where we get away from fragments and reconstructions and reach definite treatises with or without authors' names, I cannot pretend to feel anything like the same clearness about the true meaning of a passage in Philo or the Corpus Hermeticum that one normally feels in a writer of the classical period. Consequently in this essay I think I have hugged my modern authorities rather close, and seldom expressed an opinion for which I could not find some fairly authoritative backing, my debt being particularly great to Reitzenstein, Bousset, and the brilliant Hellenistisch-Rdmische Kultur of P. Wendland. I must also thank my old pupil, Mr. Edwyn Bevan, who was kind enough to read this book in proof, for some valuable criticisms. The subject is one of such extraordinary interest that I offer no apology for calling further attention to it. A word or two about the last brief revival of the ancient religion under ' Julian the Apostate ' forms the natural close to this series of studies. But here our material, both historical and literary, is so abundant PREFACE 9 that I have followed a different method. After a short historical introduction I have translated in full a very curious and little-known ancient text, which may be said to constitute something like an authoritative Pagan creed. Some readers may regret that I do not give the Greek as well as the English. I am reluctant, however, to publish a text which I have not examined in the MSS., and I feel also that, while an edition of Sallustius is rather urgently needed, it ought to be an edition with a full commentary. I was first led to these studies by the wish to fill up certain puzzling blanks of ignorance in my own mind, and doubtless the little book bears marks of this origin. It aims largely at the filling of interstices. It avoids the great illuminated places, and gives its mind to the stretches of intervening twilight. It deals little with the harvest of flowers or fruit, but watches the incon- spicuous seasons when the soil is beginning to stir, the seeds are falling or ripening. G. M. CONTENTS PAGE I. Saturnia Regna IS 11. The Olympian Conquest • • • 57 III. The Failure of Nerve .... 105 IV. The Last Protest. . . . - ^57 Appendix : Translation of the Treatise of Sallustius, Trepl Seoju kol Kdcr/xou . .187 INDEX 215 avOpojTTO^ 6 KvpLO'S ef ovpavov. ' The first man is of the earth, earthy ; the second man is the Lord from heaven.' I SATURNIA REGNA SATURNIA REGNA Many persons who are quite prepared to admit the importance to the world of Greek poetry, Greek art, and Greek philosophy, may still feel it rather a paradox to be told that Greek religion specially repays our study at the present day. Greek religion, associated with a romantic, trivial, and not very edifying mythology, has generally seemed one of the weakest spots in the armour of those giants of the old world. Yet I will venture to make for Greek religion almost as great a claim as for the thought and the literature, not only because the whole mass of it is shot through by those strange lights of feeling and imagination, and the details of it constantly wrought into beauty by that instinctive sense of artistic form, which we specially associate with Classical Greece, but also for two definite historical reasons. In the first place, the student of that dark and fascinating department of the human mind which we may call Religious Origins, will find in Greece an extraordinary mass of material belonging to a very early date. For detail and variety the primitive Greek evidence has no equal. And, secondly, in this department as in others, ancient Greece has the triumphant if tragic distinction of beginning at the very bottom and struggling, however i6 SATURNIA REGNA i precariously, to the very summits. There is hardly any horror of primitive superstition of which we cannot find some distant traces in our Greek record. There is hardly any height of spiritual thought attained in the / world that has not its archetype or its echo in the stretch of Greek literature that lies between Thales and St. Paul. The progress of Greek religion falls naturally into three stages, all of them historically important. First there is the primitive Euetheia or Age of Ignorance, i before Zeus came to trouble men's minds, a stage to which our anthropologists and explorers have found parallels in every part of the world. Dr. Preuss applies to it the charming word * Urdummheit ', or ' Primal Stupidity '. In some ways characteristically Greek, in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere that one is tempted to regard it as the normal beginning of all religion, or almost as the normal raw material out of which religion is made. There is certainly some repulsiveness, but I confess that to me there is also an element of fascination in the study of these ' beastly devices of the heathen ', at any rate as they appear in early Greece, where each single * beastly device ' as it passes is somehow touched with beauty and transformed by some spirit of upward striving. Secondly there is the Olympian or classical stage, a stage in which, for good or ill, blunderingly or successfully, this primitive vagueness was reduced to a kind of order. This is the stage of the great Olym- pian gods, who dominated art and poetry, ruled the I SATURNIA REGNA 17 imagination of Rome, and extended a kind of romantic dominion even over the Middle Ages. It is the stage that we know from the statues and the hand-books of mythology. Brilliant critics have said that this Olympian stage has value only as art and not as religion. That is just one of the points into which we shall inquire. Thirdly there is the Hellenistic period, reaching roughly from Plato to St. Paul or the earlier Gnostics, a period based on the consciousness of manifold failure, and consequently touched both with morbidness and with that spiritual exaltation which is so often the com- panion of morbidness. It had behind it the failure of the Olympian theology, the failure of the free city-state, now crushed by semi-barbarous military monarchies ; it lived through the gradual realization of two other failures — the failure of human government, even when backed by the power of Rome or the wealth of Egypt, to achieve a good life for man ; and lastly the failure of the great propaganda of Hellenism, in which the long-drawn effort of Greece to educate a corrupt and barbaric world seemed only to lead to the corruption or barbarization of the very ideals which it sought to spread. This sense of failure, this progressive loss of hope in the world, in sober calculation, and in organized human effort, threw the later Greek back upon his own soul, upon emotion, upon the pursuit of personal holiness, upon emotions mysteries and revelations, upon the comparative neglect of this transitory and imperfect life for the sake of some dream-world far off, which shall subsist without sin or corruption, the same P- p. &48 B 1 8 SATURNIA REGNA i yesterday, to-day, and for ever. These three are the really significant and formative periods of Greek religious thought ; but we may well cast our eyes also on a fourth stage, not historically influential perhaps, but at least romantic and interesting and worthy of considerable respect, when the old religion in the time of Julian roused itself for a last spiritual protest against the all-conquering ' atheism ' of the Christians. The tendencies of the third stage are here accentuated by an increased demand for definite dogma and a still deeper consciousness of worldly defeat. I shall not start with any definition of religion. Religion, like poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined. But some description of it perhaps may be useful, or at least some characteristic marks. In the first place, religion essentially deals with the uncharted region of human experience. A large part of human life has been thoroughly surveyed and explored ; we understand the causes at work ; and we are not bewildered by the problems. That is the domain of positive knowledge. But all round us on every side there is an uncharted region, just fragments of the fringe of it explored, and those imperfectly; it is with this that religion deals. And secondly we may note that religion deals with its own province not tentatively, by the normal methods of patient intellectual research, but directly, and by methods of emotion or sub-conscious apprehension. Agriculture, for instance, used to be entirely a question of religion ; now it is almost entirely a question of science. In antiquity, if a field was barren. I SATURNIA REGNA 19 the owner of it would probably assume that the barren- ness was due to ^pollution', or offence somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offences, or at any rate those of his neighbours and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at any rate in the earlier stages ; he would say it was a case for deeper ploughing or for basic slag. Later on, if disaster followed disaster till he began to feel himself a marked man, even the average modern would, I think, begin instinctively to reflect upon his sins. A third characteristic flows from the first. The uncharted region surrounds us on every side and is apparently infinite ; consequently, when once the things of the uncharted region are admitted as factors in our ordinary conduct of life they are apt to be infinite factors, overruling and swamping all others. The thing that religion forbids is a thing never to be done ; not all the inducements that this life can offer weigh at all in the balance. Indeed there is no balance. The man who makes terms with his conscience is essentially non-religious ; the religious man knows that it will profit him nothing if he gain all this finite world and lose his stake in the infinite and eternal.^ ^ Professor Emile Durkheim in his famous analysis of the religious emotions argues that when a man feels the belief and the command B 2 20 SATURNIA REGNA i Am I going to draw no distinction then between religion and mere superstition ? Not at present. Later / on we may perhaps see some way to it. Superstition is N^the name given to a low or bad form of religion, to the kind of religion we disapprove. The line of division, if we made one, would be only an arbitrary bar thrust across a highly complex and continuous process. Does this amount to an implication that all the as something coming from without, superior, authoritative, of infinite import, it is because religion is the work of the tribe and, as such, superior to the individual. The voice of God is the imagined voice of the whole tribe, heard or imagined by him who is going to break its laws. I have some difficulty about the psychology implied in this doctrine : surely the apparent externality of the religious command seems to belong to a fairly common type of experience, in which the personality is divided, so that first one part of it and then another emerges into consciousness. If you forget an engagement, sometimes your peace is disturbed for quite a long time by a vague external annoyance or condemnation, which at last grows to be a distinct judgement — ' Heavens ! I ought to be at the Committee on So-and- so.' But apart from this criticism, there is obviously much historical truth in Professor Durkheim's theory, and it is not so different as it seems at first sight from the ordinary beliefs of religious men. The tribe to primitive man is not a mere group of human beings. It is his whole world. The savage who is breaking the laws of his tribe has all his world — totems, tabus, earth, sky and all — against him. He cannot be at peace with God. The position of the hero or martyr who defies his tribe for the sake of what he thinks the truth or the right can easily be thought out on these lines. If you take the tribe as merely the human group it presents difficulties. See Durkheim, ' Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse,' in Travaux de V Annie Sociologique, 191 2 ; or G. Davy, 'La Sociologie de M. Durkheim,' in Rev. Philosophique, xxxvi, pp. 42-71 and 160-85. I SATURNIA REGNA 21 religions that have existed in the world are false ? Not so. It is obvious indeed that most, if analysed into intellectual behefs, are false ; and I suppose that a thoroughly orthodox member of any one of the million religious bodies that exist in the world must be clear in his mind that the other million minus one are wrong, if not wickedly wrong. That, I think, we m.ust be clear about. Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation towards the uncharted, the mys- terious, tracts of life which surround him on every side. And for my own part I am content to say that his method must be to a large extent very much what St. Paul calls TTLCTTLs or faith : that is, some attitude not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being, using all its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and most inarticulate feelers and tentacles, in the effort somehovv^ to touch by these that which cannot be grasped by the definite senses or analysed by the conscious reason. What we gain thus is an insecure but a precious possession. We gain no dogma, at least no safe dogma, but Vv-e gain much more. We gain something hard to define, which lies at the heart not only of religion, but of art and poetry and all the higher strivings of human emotion. I beheve that at times vv'e actually gain practical guidance in some questions Vv'here experience and argument fail.^ That 1 I suspect that most reforms pass through this stage. A man somehow feels clear that some new course is, for him, right, though he cannot marshal the arguments convincingly in favour of it, and may even admit that the weight of obvious evidence is on the other side. We read of judges in the seventeenth century who 22 SATURNIA REGNA i is a great work left for religion, but we must always remember two things about it : first, that the liability to error is enormous, indeed almost infinite; and second, that the results of confident error are very terrible. Probably throughout history the worst things ever done in the world on a large scale by decent people have been done in the name of religion, and I do not think that has entirely ceased to be true at the present day. All the Middle Ages held the strange and, to our judgement, the obviously insane belief that the normal result of religious error was eternal punishment. And yet by the crimes to which that false belief led them they almost proved the truth of something very like it. The record of early Christian and mediaeval persecutions which were the direct result of that one confident religious error comes curiously near to one's conception of the wickedness of the damned. To turn to our immediate subject, I wish to put forward here what is still a rather new and unauthorized view of the development of Greek religion ; readers will believed that witches ought to be burned and that the persons before them were witches, and yet would not burn them — evidently under the influence of vague half-realized feelings. I know a vegetarian who thinks that, as far as he can see, carnivorous habits are not bad for human health and actually tend to increase the happiness of the species of animals eaten — as the adoption of Swift's Modest Proposal would doubtless relieve the economic troubles of the human race, and yet feels clear that for him the ordinary flesh meal (or ' rejoicing over corpses ') would ' partake of the nature of sin '. The path of progress is paved with inconsistencies, though it would be an error to imagine that the people who habitually reject any higher promptings that come to them are really any more consistent. I SATURNIA REGNA 25 forgive me if, in treating so vast a subject, I draw my outline very broadly, leaving out many qualifications, and quoting only a fragment of the evidence. The things that have misled us moderns in our efforts towards understanding the primitive stage in Greek religion, have been first the widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primitive, and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the notion of ' Gods '. Mr. Hartland, in his address as president of one of the sections of the recent International Congress of Religions at Oxford,^ dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that wherever the word ' God ' is used our trustiest witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the best observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they have no conception of God, others that they are constantly thinking about God. The truth is that this idea of a god far away in the sky — I do not say merely a First Cause who is ' without body parts or passions ', but almost any being that we should naturally call a ' god ' — is an idea not easy for primitive man to grasp. It is a subtle and rarefied idea, saturated with ages of philosophy and speculation. And we must always remember that one of the chief religions of the world, Buddhism, has risen to great moral and intellec- tual heights without using the conception of God at all ; in his stead it has Dharma, the Eternal Law." Apart from some few philosophers, both Christian and Moslem, the gods of the ordinary man have as ^ Transactions of the Third International Congress of Religions, Oxford, 1908, pp. 26-7. 2 q-jj^ Buddhist Dharma, hy Mrs. Rhys Davids. 24 SATURNIA REGNA i a rule been as a matter of course anthropomorphic. Men did not take the trouble to try to conceive them otherwise. In many cases they have had the actual bodily shape of man ; in almost all they have possessed — of course in their highest development — his mind and reason and his mental attributes. It causes most of us even now something of a shock to be told by a mediaeval Arab philosopher that to call God benevolent or righteous or to predicate of him any other human quality is just as Pagan and degraded as to say that he has a beard.-^ Now the Greek gods seem at first sight quite particularly solid and anthropomorphic. The statues and vases speak clearly, and they are mostly borne out by the literature. Of course we must dis- count the kind of evidence that misled Winckelmann, the mere Roman and Alexandrian art and mythology; but even if we go back to the fifth century b. c. we shall find the ruling conceptions far nobler indeed, but still anthropomorphic. We find firmly established the Olympian patriarchal family, Zeus the Father of gods and men, his wife Hera, his son Apollo, his daughter Athena, his brothers Poseidon and Hades, and the rest. We probably think of each figure more or less as like a statue, a habit of mind obviously wrong and indeed absurd, as if one thought of ' Labour ' and ' Grief ' as statues because Rodin or St. Gaudens has so represented them. And yet it was a habit into which the late Greeks themselves sometimes fell ; ^ their arts of 1 See Die Mutaxiliten, oder die Freidenker im Islam, von H. Steiner. 1865. 2 Cf. E. Reisch, Entstehung undWandel griechischer Goiter ges taken. Vienna, 1909. I SATURNIA REGNA 25 sculpture and painting as applied to religion had been so dangerously successful : they sharpened and made vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had been mostly the result of normal human laziness. The process of making winds and rivers into anthropomor- phic gods is, for the most part, not the result of using the imagination with special vigour. It is the result of not doing so. The wind is obviously alive ; any fool can see that. Being alive, it blows ; how ? why, naturally ; just as you and I blow. It knocks things down, it shouts and dances, it whispers and talks. And, unless we are going to make a great effort of the imagination and try to realize, like a scientific man, just what really happens, we naturally assume that it does these things in the normal way, in the only way we know. Even when you worship a beast or a stone, you practically anthropomorphize it. It happens in- deed to have a perfectly clear shape, so you accept that. But it talks, acts, and fights just like a man — as you can see from the Australian Folk Tales published by Mrs. Langloh Parker — because you do not take the trouble to think out any other way of behaving. This kind of anthropomorphism — or as Mr. Gladstone used to call it, ^ anthropophuism ' — ' humanity of nature ' — is primitive and inevitable : the sharp-cut statue type of god is different, and is due in Greece directly to the vv^ork of the artists. We must get back behind these gods of the artist's workshop and the romance-maker's imagination, and see if the religious thinkers of the great period use, or imply, the same highly human conceptions. We shall find Parmenides telling us that God is One, and coin- 26 SATURNIA REGNA i cides with the universe, which is a sphere and immov- able ; ^ Xenophanes, that God is all-seeing, all-hearing, and all mind ; ^ and as for his supposed human shape, why, if bulls and lions were to speak about God they would doubtless tell us that he was a bull or a lion.^ We must notice the instinctive language of the poets, using the word 6e6<; in many subtle senses for which our word ' God ' is too stiff, too personal, and too anthropomorphic. To evrv^elv^ ' the fact of success,' is a god and more than a god ; to yiyvcocrKeiv ^i\ov^, ' to recognize a friend' after long absence, is a 'god' ; wine is a ' god ' whose body is poured out in libation to gods ; and in the unwritten law of the human con- science ' a great god liveth and groweth not old '.^ You will say that is mere poetry or philosophy : it represents a particular theory or a particular metaphor. I think not. Language of this sort is used widely and without any explanation or apology. It was evidently understood and felt to be natural by the audience. If it is metaphorical, all metaphors have grown from the 1 Parm. Fr. 8, 3-7 (DIeh 2). 2 Xen. Fr. 24(Diels2). 3 Xen. Fr 15. 4 Aesch. Cho. 60; Eur. Hel. 560; Bac. 284; Soph. O.T. 871. Cf. also 7] (fif)6vr](TL06vo<; KOLKicrTo^ KaStK(jjTaT09 Oeos. Hippothoon Fr. 2. A certain moment of time . . . ^PXV '^^^ ^^os iv avOpwTTOL^ iSpv/jievr] o-oj^et iravra. PL Leg. jjs E. TO. fxuipa yap ttolvt i(Trlv 'A<^poStr>; fSpoTols. Eur. Tro. 989. rjXOev Se 8ats OdXua Trpccr/SicrTr] Oeojy. Soph. Fr. 548. I SATURNIA REGNA 27 soil of current thought and normal experience. And without going into the point at length I think we may safely conclude that the soil from which such language as this grew was not any system of clear-cut personal anthropomorphic theology. No doubt any of these poets, if he had to make a picture of one of these utterly formless Gods, would have given him a human form. That was the recognized symbol, as a veiled woman is St. Gaudens's symbol for ' Grief '. But we have other evidence too which shows abun- dantly that these Olympian gods are not primary, but are imposed upon a background strangely unlike them- selves. For a long time their luminous figures dazzled our eyes ; we were not able to see the half-lit regions behind them, the dark primaeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from which they drew their vitality. The surest test to apply in this question is the evidence of actual cult. Miss Harrison has here shown us the right method, and following her we will begin with the three great festivals of Athens, the Diasia, the j Thesmophoria, and the Anthesteria.^ -^/ The Diasia was said to be the chief festival of Zeus, / the central figure of the Olympians, though our authorities generally add an epithet to him, and call him Zeus Meilichios, Zeus of Placation. A god with an ' epithet ' is always suspicious, like a human being with an ' alias '. Miss Harrison's examination ^ See J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, i. ii, iv ; Mommsen, Feste der StadtJthen, 1898, pp. 308-22 (Thesmophoria), 384-404 (Anthesteria), f2i-6 (Diasia). See also Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. 28 SATURNIA REGNA i {Prolegomena^ pp. 28 ff.) shows that in the rites Zeus has no place at all. Meilichios from the beginning has a fairly secure one. On some of the reliefs Meilichios appears not as a god, but as an enormous bearded snake, a well-known representation of underworld powers or dead ancestors. Sometimes the great snake is alone ; sometimes he rises gigantic above the small human worshippers approaching him. And then, in certain reliefs, his old barbaric presence vanishes, and we have instead a benevolent and human father of gods and men, trying, as Miss Harrison somewhere expresses it, to look as if he had been there all the time. There was a sacrifice at the Diasia, but it was not a sacrifice given to Zeus. To Zeus and all the heavenly gods men gave sacrifice in the form of a feast, in which the god had his portion and the worshippers theirs. The two parties cemented their friendship and feasted happily together. But the sacrifice at the Diasia was a holocaust : ^ every shred of the victim was burnt to ashes, that no man might partake of it. We know quite well the meaning of that form of sacrifice : it is a sacrifice to placate or appease the powers below, the Chthonioi, the dead and the lords of death. It was performed, as our authorities tell us, /xera crrvyvo- Tr)To<;, with shuddering or repulsion." The Diasia was a ritual of placation, that is, of casting away various elements of pollution or danger and appeasing the unknown wraths of the surrounding darkness. The nearest approach to a god contained ^ Prolegomena, p. 15 f. 2 Luc. Icaro-Menifpos 24 schol. ad loc. I SATURNIA REGNA 29 in this festival is Meilichios, and Meilichios, as we shall see later, belongs to a particular class of shadowy beings wh.0 are built up out of ritual services. His name means ' He of appeasement \ and he is nothing else. He is merely the personified shadow or dream generated by the emotion of the ritual — very much, to take a familiar instance, as Father Christmas is a ' projection ' of our Christmas customs. The Thesmophoria formed the great festival of Demeter and her daughter Kore, though here again Demeter appears with a clinging epithet, Thesmo- phoros. We know pretty clearly the whole course of the ritual : there is the carrying by women of certain magic charms, fir-cones and snakes and unnameable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility ; there is a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields. There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life below the earth, and a rising again of life above it ; but it is hard to find definite traces of any personal goddess. The Olympian Demeter and Persephone dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with the shadow Thesmophoros, ' She who carries Jhesmoi^'' ^ ^ Frequently dual, rw &earfjiocf)6p(x), under the influence of the 'Mother and Maiden' idea: Dittenberger Inscr. Sylloge 628, Ar. Thesm. 84, 296 et passim. The plural at ©ea-ixocjiopoi used in late Greek is not, as one might imagine, a projection from the whole band of worshippers ; it is merely due to the disappearance of the 30 SATURNIA REGNA i not a substantive personal goddess, but merely a personification of the ritual itself : an imaginary charm-bearer generated by so much Charm-bearing, just as Meilichios in the Diasia was generated from the ritual of x4ppeasement. Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. Is there any similar divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes. Both here, and still more markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, habitually — I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred Sow. A Pig is the one animal in Greek religion that actually had sacrifice made to it.^ The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts. On the surface there is a touch of the wine-god, and he is given due official prominence ; but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of the festival, Dionysus and his brother gods are quite forgotten, and all that remains is a great ritual for appeasing the dead. All the days of the Feast were nefasti, of ill omen ; the first day especially was e? to Dual from Greek. I accept provisionally the derivation of these Oea-fiOL from Oecr in Oea-craa-Oat, ^e(rp6voj^} The assembled prayer, the united cry that rises from the oppressed of the world, is itself grown to be a god, and the greatest god. A similar projection arose from the dance of the Kouroi, or initiate youths, in the dithyramb — the magic dance which was to celebrate, or more properly, to 1 Aesch. Suppl. I, cf. 478, Zeis iKTijp. Rise of the Greek Epc^, pp. 108, 291. Adjectival phrases like Zevs iKeVio?, 'iKcrr^o-to?, 'iKxaZo? are common and call for no remark. I SATURNIA REGNA 45 hasten and strengthen, the coming on of spring. That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of Hfe, and Hes at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares : in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history and attributes of Zeus.^ This spirit of the dance, who leads it or personifies its emotion, stands more clearly perhaps than any other daemon half-way between earth and heaven. A number of difficult passages in Euripides' Bacchae and other Dionysiac literature find their explanations when we realize how the god is in part merely identified with the inspired chief dancer, in part he is the intangible projected incarnation of the emotion of the dance. ' The collective desire personified : ' on what does the collective desire, or collective dread, of the primitive community chiefly concentrate ? On two things, the food-supply and the tribe-supply, the desire not to die of famine and not to be harried or conquered by the neighbouring tribe. The fertility of the earth and the fertility of the tribe, these two are felt in early religion as one." The earth is a mother : the human mother is an apovpa, or ploughed field. Earth as she brings forth vegetation in spring is Kourotrophos, rearer of ^ Hymn of the Kouretes, Tke?nis, passim. 2 See in general I. King, Ths Development of Religion, 1910; E. J. Payne, History of the Nezu World, 1892, p. 414. Also Dieterich, Muttererde, esp. pp. 37-58. r 44 SATURNIA REGNA i Kouroi, or the young men of the tribe. The nymphs and rivers are all Kourotrophoi. The Moon is Kourotrophos. She quickens the young of the tribe in their mother's womb ; at one terrible hour especially she is ' a lion to women ' who have offended against her holiness. She also marks the seasons of sowing and ploughing, and the due time for the ripening of crops. When men learn to calculate in longer units, the Sun appears : they turn to the Sun for their calendar, and at all times of course the Sun has been a power in agriculture. He is not called Kourotrophos, but the Young Sun returning after winter is himself a Kouros,^ and all the Kouroi have some touch of the Sun in them. The Cretan Spring-song of the Kouretes prays for vioi TroXtrat, young citizens, quite simply among the other gifts of the spring.^ This is best shown by the rites of tribal initiation, which seem normally to have formed part of the spring Dromena or sacred performances. The Kouroi, as we have said, are the initiated young men. They pass through their initiation ; they become no longer TratSe?, boys, but avSpe<;, men. The actual name Kouros is possibly connected with Keipco, to shave,^ and may mean ^ Hymn Orph. 8, lo wporpocfic Kovpe. 2 For the order in which men generally proceed in worship, turning their attention to (i) the momentary incidents of weather, rain, sunshine, thunder, &c. ; (2) the Moon ; (3) the Sun and stars, see Payne, History of the New World called America^ vol. i, p. 474, cited by Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 390. ^ On the subject of Initiations see Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, New York, 1908 ; Schurtz, Altersklassen und Mdnnerbunde, Berlin, 1902 ; Van Gennep, Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909. Also Nilsson, I SATURNIA REGNA 45 that after this ceremony they first cut their long hair. Till then the Kovpo<; is aKeporeK6iJLrj<; — with hair un- ^ shorn. They have now open to them the two roads d/^ that belong to dvSpe^ alone : they have the work of | begetting children for the tribe, and the work of killingj the tribe's enemies in battle. The classification of people according to their age is apt to be sharp and vivid in primitive communities. We, for example, think of an old man as a kind of man, and an old woman as a kind of woman ; but in primitive peoples as soon as a man and woman cease to be able to perform his and her due tribal functions they cease to be men and women, ctVSpe? and yui/at/ceg : the ex-man becomes a yepcoj/ ; the ex-woman a ypau?.^ We distinguish between ' boy ' and ' man ', between ' girl ' and ' woman ' ; but apart from the various words for baby, Attic Greek would have four sharp divisions, Tratg, e(f)rj/3o<;, avijp, yepcuv.^ In Sparta the divisions are still sharper and more numerous, centre- ing in the great initiation ceremonies of the Iranes, or full-grown youths, to the goddess called Orthia or Grundlage des Spartanischen Lehens in Klio xii (191 2), pp. 308-40. The derivation from Ketpw is far from certain : see ThemiSy P- 337, n. I. 1 Cf. Dr. Rivers on matey ' Primitive Conception of Death,' Hibhert Journal, January 191 2, p. 393. 2 Cf. Cardinal Virtues, Pindar, Nem. iii. 72 : ev Trawrt veoicrt 7ral' was usual in these weak ancient communities. They were in fear of wild beasts ; they were helpless against floods, helpless against pestilences. Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground ; and if the Saviour was not reborn with the spring, they slowly and miserably died. And all the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was v-'" somehow a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defile- ment. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of early agricultural works, the human sacrifices, the scapegoats, the tearing in pieces of living animals, and perhaps of living men, the steeping of the fields in blood. Like most cruelty it has its roots in terror, terror -'^* of the breach of Tabu — the Forbidden Thing. I will not dwell on this side of the picture : it is well enough known. But we have to remember that, like so many morbid growths of the human mind, it has its sublime side. We must not forget that the human victims were often volunteers. The records of Carthage and Jerusalem, the long list in Greek legend of princes and princesses who died for their country, tell the same story. In most human societies, savage as well as civilized, it is not hard to find men who are ready to endure death for their fellow-citizens. We need not suppose that the martyrs were always the noblest of the human race. They were sometimes mad — hysterical or megalomaniac : sometimes reckless and desperate : p. p. 648 D V 50 SATURNIA REGNA i sometimes, as in the curious case attested of the Roman armies on the Danube, they were men of strong desires and weak imagination ready to die at the end of a short period, if in the meantime they might glut all their senses with unlimited indulgence.-^ Still, when all is said, there is nothing that stirs men's imagination like the contemplation of martyr- dom, and it is no wonder that the more emotional cults of antiquity vibrate with the worship of this dying Saviour, the Sosipolis, the Soter, who in so many forms dies with his world or for his world, and rises again as the world rises, triumphant through suffering over Death and the broken TIabu, Tabu is at first sight a far more prominent element in the primitive religions than Mana^ just as misfortune and crime are more highly coloured and striking than prosperity and decent behaviour. To an early Greek tribe the world of possible action was sharply divided between what was Themis and what was Not Themis, between lawful and tahu^ holy and unholy, correct and forbidden. To do a thing that was not Themis was a sure source of public disaster. Consequently it was of the first necessity in a life full of such perils to find out the exact rules about them. How is that to be managed ? Themis is ancient law : it is ra Trar/jta, 1 Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 267 ; F. Cumont, ' Les Actes de S. Dasius,' in Analecta Bollandiana, xvi. 5-16; cf. especially what St. Augustine says about the disreputable hordes of would-be martyrs, called Circumcelliones. See Index to Augustine, vol. xi in Migne : some passages collected in Seeck, Gesch. d. Unter gangs der ami ken Welt, vol. iii, Anhang, pp. 503 if. I SATURN I A REGNA 51 the way of our ancestors, the thing that has always been done and is therefore divinely right. In ordinary life, of course, Themis is clear. Every one knows it. But from time to time new emergencies arise, the like of which we have never seen, and they frighten us. We must go to the Gerontes, the Old Men of the Tribe; they will perhaps remember what our fathers did. What they tell us will be Presbiston, a word which means indifferently 'oldest' and 'best' — alel 8e vecorepoL acfypaSeovcTLv, ' Young men are always being foolish.' Of course, if there is a Basileus, a holy King, he by his special power may perhaps know best of all, though he too must take care not to gainsay the Old Men. For the whole problem is to find out ra Trdrpia, the ways that our fathers followed. And suppose the Old Men themselves fail us, what must we needs do ? Here we come to a famous and peculiar Greek custom, for which I have never seen quoted any exact parallel or any satisfactory explanation. If the Old Men fail us, we must go to those older still, go to our great ancestors, the rjpoj€<;, the Chthonian people, lying in their sacred tombs, and ask them to help. The word XP^^ means both ' to lend money ' and ' to give an oracle ', two ways of helping people in an emergency. Sometimes a tribe might happen to have a real ancestor buried in the neighbourhood ; if so, his tomb would be an oracle. More often perhaps, for the memories of savage tribes are very precarious, there would be no well-recorded personal tomb. The oracle would be at some place sacred to the Chthonian people in general, or to some particular personification of them, a Delphi D 2 52 SATURNIA REGNA i or a cave of Trophonios, a place of Snakes and Earth. You go to the Chthonian folk for guidance because they are themselves the Oldest of the Old Ones, and they know the real custom : they know what is Presbiston; what is Themis. And by an easy extension of this knowledge they are also supposed to know what is. He who knows the law fully to the uttermost also knows what will happen if the law is broken. It is, I think, important to realize that the normal reason for consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of fact. It was that some emergency had arisen in which men simply wanted to know how they ought to behave. The advice they received in this way varied from the virtuous to the abominable, as the religion itself varied. A great mass of oracles can be quoted enjoining the rules of customary morality, justice, honesty, piety, duty to a man's parents, to the old, and to the weak. But of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled the progress of knowledge. Also, like most manifesta- tions of early religion, they throve upon human terror: the more blind the terror the stronger became their hold. In such an atmosphere the lowest and most beastlike elements of humanity tended to come to the front ; and religion no doubt as a rule joined with them in drowning the voice of criticism and of civiliza- tion, that is, of reason and of mercy. When really frightened the oracle generally fell back on some remedy full of pain and blood. The mediaeval plan of burning // heretics alive had not yet been invented. But the history of uncivilized man, if it were written, would provide a vast list of victims, all of them innocent, who I SATURNIA REGNA 55 died or suffered to expiate some portent or monstrum — some reported repas — ^with which they had nothing whatever to do, which was in no way altered by their suffering, which probably never really happened at all, and if it did was of no consequence. The sins of the modern world in dealing with heretics and witches have perhaps been more gigantic than those of primitive men, but one can hardly rise from the record of these ancient observances without being haunted by the judgement of the Roman poet Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum and feeling with him that the lightening of this cloud, the taming of this blind dragon, must rank among the very greatest services that Hellenism wrought for mankind. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST I. Origin of the Olympians The historian of early Greece must find himself often on the watch for a particular cardinal moment, generally impossible to date in time and sometimes hard even to define in terms of development, when the clear outline that we call Classical Greece begins to take shape out of the mist. It is the moment when, as Herodotus puts it, ' the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarian, as more intelligent and more emancipated from silly nonsense.' ^ In the eighth century b.c, for instance, so far as our remains indicate, there cannot have been much to show that the inhabi- tants of Attica and Boeotia and the Peloponnese were markedly superior to those of, say, Lycia or Phrygia, or even Epirus. By the middle of the fifth century the difference is enormous. On the one side is Hellas, on the other the motley tribes of ' barbaroi '. When the change does come and is consciously felt we may notice a significant fact about it. It does ^ Hdt. i. 60 cTret ye aTreKpiOy] Ik TraXacTepov tov /Sap/^dpov Wveos to 'HXXrjvLKov iov Koi Se^iwrepoi/ kol ev-qOiiq's rjXiOiov OLTrrjXXay/xivov fiaXXov, As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me : 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans ; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' S8 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii not announce itself as what it was, a new thing in the world. It professes to be a revival, or rather an emphatic realization, of something very old. The new spirit of classical Greece, with all its humanity, its intellectual life, its genius for poetry and art, describes itself merely as being ' Hellenic ' — ^like the Hellenes. And the Hellenes were simply, as far as we can make out, much the same as the Achaioi, one of the many tribes of predatory Northnien who had swept down on the Aegean kingdoms in the dawn of Greek history.^ This claim of a new thing to be old is, in varying degrees, a common characteristic of great movements. The Reformation professed to be a return to the Bible, the Evangelical movement in England a return to the Gospels, the High Church movement a return to the early Church. A large element even in the French Revolution, the greatest of all breaches with the past, had for its ideal a return to Roman republican virtue or to the simplicity of the natural man.^ I noticed quite lately a speech of an American Progressive leader claiming that his principles were simply those of Abraham Lincoln. The tendency is due in part to the almost insuperable difficulty of really inventing a new word to denote a new thing. It is so much easier to 1 On this subject in general see Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. i ; Leaf, Companion to Homer, Introduction; R.G.E. chap, ii ; and especially J. L. Myres, Dawn of History, chaps, viii and ix. 2 Since writing the above I find in Vandal, VAvenement de Bonaparte, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers : *Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates . . . et ils creaient un type de haute vertu guerriere, quand ils croyaient seulement le reproduire.' II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 59 take an existing word, especially a famous word with fine associations, and twist it into a new sense. In part, no doubt, it comes from mankind's natural love for these old associations, and the fact that nearly all people who are worth much have in them some instinc- tive spirit of reverence. Even when striking out a new path they like to feel that they are following at least the spirit of one greater than themselves The Hellenism of the sixth and fifth centuries was to a great extent what the Hellenism of later ages was almost entirely, an ideal and a standard of culture. The classical Greeks were not, strictly speaking, pure Hellenes by blood. Herodotus and Thucydides ^ are quite clear about that. The original Hellenes were a particular conquering tribe of great prestige, which attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it, imitate it, and call themselves by its name. The Spartans were, to Herodotus, Hellenic ; the Athenians on the other hand were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain time ' changed into Hellenes and learnt the language '. In historical times we cannot really find any tribe of pure Hellenes in existence, though the name clings faintly to a particular district, not otherwise important, in South Thessaly. Had there been any undoubted Hellenes with incontrovertible pedigrees still going, very likely the ideal would have taken quite a different name. But where no one's ancestry would bear much inspection, the only way to show you were a true Hellene was to behave as such : that is, to approximate to some constantly rising ideal of what the true Hellene 1 Hdt. i. 56 f. ; Th. i. 3 (Hellen son of Deucalion, in both). / 6o THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii should be. In all probability if a Greek of the fifth century, like Aeschylus or even Pindar, had met a group of the real Hellenes or Achaioi of the Migrations, he would have set them down as so many obvious and flaming barbarians. We do not know whether the old Hellenes had any general word to denote the surrounding peoples ('Pelas- gians and divers other barbarous tribes ' ^) whom they conquered or accepted as allies.^ In any case by the time of the Persian Wars (say 500 b. c.) all these tribes together considered themselves Hellenized, bore the name of ' Hellenes ', and formed a kind of unity against hordes of ' barbaroi ' surrounding them on every side and threatening them especially from the east. Let us consider for a moment the dates. In political history this self-realization of the Greek tribes as Hellenes against barbarians seems to have been first felt in the Ionian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, where the ' sons of Javan ' (Yawan = 'idcov) clashed as invaders against the native Hittite and Semite. It was emphasized by a similar clash in the further colonies in Pontus and in the West. If we wish for a central moment as representing this self- realization of Greece, I should be inclined to find it in the reign of Pisistratus (560-527 B.C.) when that ^ Hdt. i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed. 2 The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. The word f^dpjSapoL is absent from both poems, an absence v/hich must be intentional on the part of the later reciters, but may well come from the original sources. The compound ^ap^apocfiwvoL occurs in B 867, but who knows the date of that particular line in that particular wording]? L^sjJ^ v6Ueviv.^A' '^^^^"^-^ a.^4^^ II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 6i monarch made, as it were, the first sketch of an Athenian empire based on alliances and took over to Athens the leadership of the Ionian race. In literature the decisive moment is clear. It came v^hen, in Mr. Mackail's phrase, ' Homer came to / Hellas.' ^ The date is apparently the same, and the influences at work are the same. It seems to have been under Pisistratus that the Homeric Poems, in some form or other, came from Ionia to be recited in a fixed order at the Panathenaic Festival, and to find a canonical form and a central home in Athens till the end of the classical period. Athens is the centre from which Homeric influence radiates over the mainland of Greece. Its effect upon literature was of course enormous. It can be traced in various ways. By the content of the literature, which now begins to be filled with the heroic saga. By a change of style which emerges in, say, Pindar and Aeschylus when compared with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remark- able change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, were comparatively little affected by the epic influence ; the later elegists, like Ion, Euenus, and Plato, were steeped in it.^ 1 Paper read to the Classical Association at Birmingham in 1908. 2 For Korinna see Wilamowitz in Berliner Klassikertexte, V. xiv, especially p. 55. The Homeric epos drove out poetry like Corinna's. She had actually written : ' I sing the great deeds of heroes and heroines ' (ttovet 8' dponov dpera? x^tpwtaSwv diSw, fr. 10, Bergk), so that presumably her style was sufficiently ' heroic ' for an un- Homeric generation. For the change of dialect in elegy, &c., see Thumb, Handbuchd. gr. Dialekte, pp. 327-30, 368 ff., and the literature there 62 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii In religion the cardinal moment is the same. It consists in the coming of Homer's ' Olympian Gods ', and that is to be the subject of the present essay. I am not, of course, going to describe the cults and characters of the various Olympians. For that inquiry the reader will naturally go to the five learned volumes of my colleague, Dr. Farnell. I wish merely to face certain difficult and, I think, hitherto unsolved problems affecting the meaning and origin and history of the Olympians as a whole. Herodotus in a famous passage tells us that Homer and Hesiod ' made the generations of the Gods for the Greeks and gave them their names and dis- tinguished their offices and crafts and portrayed their shapes ' (2. 55). The date of this wholesale proceeding was, he thinks, perhaps as much as four hundred years before his own day {c. 450 B.C.) but not more. Before that time the Pelasgians — i.e. the primitive inhabitants of Greece as opposed to the Hellenes — were worshipping gods in indefinite numbers, with no particular names ; many of them appear as figures carved emblematically with sex-emblems to represent the powers of fertility and generation, like the Athenian ' Herms '. The whole account bristles with points for discussion, but in general it suits very well with the picture drawn in the first of these essays, with its Earth Maidens and Mothers and its projected Kouroi. The background is the pre-Hellenic ' Urdummheit ' ; cited. Fick and Hoffmann overstated the change, but Hoffmann's new statement in Die griechische Sprache, 191 1, sections on Die Elegie, seems just. The question of Tyrtaeus is complicated by other problems. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 65 the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropo- morphic Olympian family, as defined in the Homeric epos and, more timidly, in Hesiod. But of Hesiod we must speak later. Now who are these Olympian Gods and where do they come from ? Homer did not ' make ' them out of nothing. But the understanding of them is beset with problems. In the first place why are they called ' Olympian ' ? Are they the Gods of Mount Olympus, the old sacred mountain of Homer's Achaioi, or do they belong to the great sanctuary of Olympia in which Zeus, the lord of the Olympians, had his greatest festival ? The two are at opposite ends of Greece, Olympus in North Thessaly in the north-east, Olympia in Elis in the south-west. From which do the Olympians come ? On the one hand it is clear in Homer that they dwell on Mount Olympus ; they have ' Olympian houses ' beyond human sight, on the top of the sacred moun- tain, which in the Odyssey is identified with heaven. On the other hand, when Pisistratus introduced the worship of Olympian Zeus on a great scale into Athens and built the Olympieum, he seems to have brought him straight from Olympia in Elis. For he introduced the special Elean complex of gods, Zeus, Rhea, Kronos, and Ge Olympia.^ Fortunately this puzzle can be solved. The Olym- pians belong to both places. It is merely a case of ^ The facts are well known : see Paus. i. 1 8. 7, The inference was pointed out to me by Miss Harrison. / 64 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 11 tribal migration. History, confirmed by the study of the Greek dialects, seems to show that these northern Achaioi came down from Thessaly across central Greece and the Gulf of Corinth and settled in Elis.^ They brought with them their Olympian Zeus and established him as superior to the existing god, Kronos. The Games became Olympian and the sanctuary by which they were performed ' Olympia '.^ As soon as this point is clear, we understand also why there is more than one Mount Olympus. We can all think of two, one in Thessaly and one across the Aegean in Mysia. But there are many more ; some twenty- odd, if I mistake not, in the whole Greek region. Whatever the original meaning of ' Olympus ' may be, it seems clear that the Olympian gods, wherever their worshippers moved, tended to dwell in the highest mountain in the neighbourhood, and the mountain thereby became Olympus. The name, then, explains itself. The Olympians are the mountain gods of the old invading Northmen, the chieftains and princes, each with his comitatus or loose following of retainers and minor chieftains, who broke in upon the ordered splendours of the Aegean palaces and, still more important, on the ordered sim- plicity of tribal life in the pre-Hellenic villages of the ^ I do not here raise the question how far the Achaioi have special affinities with the north-west group of tribes or dialects. See Thumb, Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte (1909), p. 166 f. The Achaioi must have passed through South Thessaly in any case. 2 That Kronos was in possession of the Kronion and Olympia generally before Zeus came was recognized in antiquity ; Paus. v. 7. 4 and 10. Also Mayer in Roscher's Lexicon, ii, p. 1508, 50 ff. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 65 mainland. Now, it is a canon of religious study that all gods reflect the social state, past or present, of their worshippers. From this point of view what appearance do the Olympians of Homer make ? What are they there for ? What do they do, and what are their relations one to another ? The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The most they ever did was to conquer it. Zeus and his comitatus conquered Cronos and his ; conquered and expelled them — sent them migrating beyond the horizon, Heaven knows where. Zeus took the chief dominion and remained a permanent overlord, but he apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and confirmed various of his children and followers in lesser fiefs. Apollo went off on his own adventure and conquered Delphi. Athena conquered the Giants. She gained Athens by a conquest over Poseidon, a point of which we will speak later. And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what do they do ? Do they attend to the government ? Do they promote agriculture ? Do they practise trades and industries ? Not a bit of it. Why should they do any honest work t They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music ; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them. They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war. p. P- 648 E 66 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii A few deductions may be made from this statement, but they do not affect its main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. Yes : a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a gang of warriors needed to have by them ; and they preferred him lame, so that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of Admetus ; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon. Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements ; but in any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punish- ment. Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on agriculture and on justice : they destroy the harvests of those who offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic Age itself — if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick's convenient title for the Age of the Migrations — chieftains and gods probably retained some vestiges of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times ; and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these gods are not real [people with a real character. They never existed. They are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it is pronounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any one god would be mixed up with traditions and associa- tions drawn from the surrounding populations and II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 6^ their gods ; and by the time they come down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have passed through the minds of many different ages and places, especially Ionia and Athens. The Olympians described in our text of Homer, or as described in the Athenian recitations of the sixth century, are mutatis mutandis related to the Olympians of the Heroic Age much as the Hellenes of the sixth century are to the Hellenes of the Heroic Age. I say ' mutatis mutandis \ because the historical development of a group of imaginary concepts shrined in tradition and romance can never be quite the same as that of the people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is apt both to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life. Romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent perfections. But the gods of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show traces of the process through which they have passed : of an origin among the old conquering Achaioi, a development in the Ionian epic schools, and a final home in Athens.^ 1 I do not touch here on the subject of the gradual expurgation of the Poems to suit the feelings of a more civilized audience ; see Rise of the Greek Efic,^ pp. 141-67. Many scholars believe that the Poems did not exist as a written book till the public copy was made by Pisistratus ; see Cauer, Grundfragen der Homerkritik 2 (1909), pp. 113- 45; i?. G.£., p. 320; Lesii, Iliad, vol. i, p. xvi. This view is tempting, though the evidence seems to be insufficient to justify a pronouncement either way. If it is true, then various passages which show a verbal use of earlier documents (like the Bellerophon passage, R. G. E., p. 197-9) cannot have been put in before the Athenian period. E 2 68 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii For example, what gods are chiefly prominent in Homer ? In the Iliad certainly three, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, and much the same would hold for the Odyssey. Next to them in importance will be Poseidon, Hera, and Hermes. Zeus stands somewhat apart. He is one of the very few gods with recognizable and undoubted Indo- germanic names, Djeus, the well-attested sky- and rain-god of the Aryan race. He is Achaian ; he is * Hellanios ', the god worshipped by all Hellenes. He is also, curiously enough, Pelasgian, and Mr. A. B. Cook^ can explain to us the seeming contradiction. But the Northern elements in the conception of Zeus have on the whole triumphed over any Pelasgian or Aegean sky- god with which they may have mingled, and Zeus, in spite of his dark hair, may be mainly treated as the patriarchal god of the invading Northmen, passing from the Upper Danube down by his three great sanctuaries, Dodona, Olympus, and Olympia. He had an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the various objects of aboriginal worship which he found in his path. The story of Meilichios above (p. 28) is a common one. Of course, we must not suppose that the Zeus of the actual Achaioi was a figure quite like the Zeus of Pheidias or of Homer. There has been a good deal of expurgation in the Homeric Zeus,^ as Mr. Cook clearly shows. The Counsellor and Cloud- compeller of classical Athens was the wizard and rain- ^ In his forthcoming work, Zeus, the Indo-European Sky -God. 2 A somewhat similar change occurred in Othin, though he always retains more of the crooked wizard. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 69 maker of earlier times ; and the All-Father surprises us in Thera and Crete by appearing both as a babe and as a Kouros in spring dances and initiation rituals.^ It is a long way from these conceptions to the Zeus of Aeschylus, a figure as sublime as the Jehovah of Job ; but the lineage seems clear. Zeus is the Achaean Sky-god. His son Phoebus Apollo is of more complex make. On one side he is clearly a Northman. He has connexions with the Hyperboreans.^ He has a ' sacred road ' leading far into the North, along which offerings are sent back from shrine to shrine beyond the bounds of Greek knowledge. Such ' sacred roads ' are normally the roads by which the God himself has travelled ; the offerings are sent back from the new sanctuary to the old. On the other side Apollo reaches back to an Aegean matriarchal Kouros. His home is Delos, where he has a mother, Leto, but no very visible father. He leads the ships of his islanders, sometimes in the form of a dolphin. He is no ' Hellene '. In the fighting at Troy he is against the Achaioi : he destroys the Greek host, he champions Hector, he even slays Achilles. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo we read that when the great archer draws near to Olympus all the gods tremble and start from their seats ; Leto alone, and of course Zeus, hold their ground.^ What 1 Themis, chap. i. On the Zeus of Aeschylus cf. R. G. E., pp. 291-5 ; Gomperz, Greek Thi?ikers, ii. 6-8. 2 Farnell, Cults^ iv. 100-4. See, however, Gruppe, p. 107 f. ^ Hymn. Ap. init. Cf. Wilamowitz's Oxford Lecture on ' Apollo ' (Oxford, 1907). .^ 70 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii this god's original name was at Delos we cannot be sure : he has very many names and ' epithets '. But he early became identified with a similar god at Delphi and adopted his name, ' Apollon,' or, in the Delphic and Dorian form, ' Apellon ' — evidently the Kouros projected from the Dorian gatherings called ' apellae '.-^ As Phoibos he is a sun-god, and from classical times onward we often find him definitely identified with the Sun, a distinction which came easily to a Kouros. In any case, and this is the important point, he is at Delos the chief god of the lonians. The lonians are defined by Herodotus as those tribes and cities who were sprung from Athens and kept the Apaturia. They recognized Delos as their holy place and wor- shipped Apollo Patroos as their ancestor.^ The Ionian Homer has naturally brought us the Ionian god ; and, significantly enough, though the tradition makes him an enemy of the Greeks, and the poets have to accept the tradition, there is no tendency to crab or belittle him. He is the most splendid and awful of Homer's Olympians. The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it leads to a somewhat surprising result. What Apollo is to Ionia that, and more, Athena is to Athens. There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan ^ Themis, p. 439 f. Other explanations of the name in Gruppe, p. 1224 f., notes. 2 Hdt. i. 147 ; Plato, Euthyd. 302 c : Socrates. ' No Ionian recognizes a Zeus Patroos ; Apollo is our Patrcos, because he was father of Ion.' II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 71 and Ionian, some Northern.^ But her whole appearance in history and literature tells the same story as her name. Athens is her city and she is the goddess of Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Kore. In Athens she can be simply ' Parthenos ', the Maiden ; elsewhere she is the ' Attic ' or ' Athenian Maiden '. As Glaucopis she is identified or associated with the Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens. As Pallas she seems to be a Thunder-maiden, a sort of Keraunia or bride of Keraunos. A Palladion consists of two thunder-shields, set one above the other like a figure 8, and we can trace in art-types the development of this 8 into a human figure. It seems clear that the old Achaioi cannot have called their warrior-maiden, daughter of Zeus, by the name Athena or Athenaia. The Athenian goddess must have come in from Athenian influence, and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the poems that influence must have reached. If we try to conjecture whose place it is that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her regular epithet, ' daughter of Zeus,' belongs in Sanskrit to the Dawn-goddess, Eos.^ The transition might be helped by some touches of the Dawn-goddess that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The rising Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from the head of Zeus. Also she was born amid a snow-storm of gold. And Eos, on the other hand, is, ^ See Gruppe, p. 1206, on the development of his 'Philistine thunderstorm-goddess '. 2 Hoffmann, Gesch. d. griechischen Sprache, Leipzig, 191 1, p. 16. Cf. Find. OL vii. 35 ; Ov. Metani. ix. 421 ; xv. 191, 700, &c. 72 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant Pallas.i Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves very easily. A body of poetry and tradition, in its origin dating from the Achaioi of the Migrations, growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, and reaching its culminating form at Athens, has prominent in it the Achaian Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, the Athenian Kore — the same Kore who descended 1 As to the name, 'AOrjvaia is of course simply ' Athenian ' ; the shorter and apparently original form 'A^ava, kOrjvr] is not so clear, but it seems most likely to mean ' Attic '. Cf. Meister, Gr. Dial. ii. 290. He classes under the head of Oertliche Bestimmungen : a ^€09 d Ila^ta (Collitz and Bechtel, Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, 2, 3, 14% ^, 15, 16). ' In Paphos selbst hiess die Gottin nur d ^eog oder d fdvaaaa ; — d ^165 d ToXyla (61) — d 6*109 d 'A^dva d Trep 'H8dAtoi/ (60, 27, 28), ' die Gottin, die Athenische, die iiber Edalion (waltet)'; "A^-dva ist, wie J. Baunack {Studia Nicolaitana, s. 27) gezeigt hat, das Adjectiv zu (* 'Acro-t9 ' Seeland ') : ''ATT-t9 ; ^krO-i^ ; * 'A^-t9 ; also 'AO-dva = 'Att-lkyj, ^AO-rjvai urspriinglich 'AO-rjvat Kw/xat.' Other derivations in Gruppe, p. 1194. Or again ai 'AOyvau may be simply ' the place where the Athenas are ', like ot IxOves, the fish-market ; ' the Athenas ' would be statues, like ot 'Ep/xa2 — the famous ' Attic Maidens ' on the Acropolis. This explanation would lead to some interesting results. We need not here consider how, partly by identification with other Korae, like Pallas, Onka, &c., partly by a genuine spread of the cult, Athena became prominent in other cities. As to Homer, Athena is far more deeply imbedded in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, I am inclined to agree with those who believe that our Odyssey was very largely composed in Athens, so that in most of the poem Athena is original. (Cf. O. Seeck, Die Quellen der Odyssee (1887), pp. 366-420 ; Mulder, Die Ilias und ihre Quellen (1910), pp. 350-5.) In some parts of the Iliad the name Athena may well have been substituted for some Northern goddess whose name is now lost. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 75 in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his throne.-^ We need only throw a glance in passing at a few of the other Olympians. Why, for instance, should Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a puzzHng figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother of Zeus in Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian or Aegean god present in him. He is closely connected with Libya ; he brings the horse from there.^ At times he exists in order to be defeated ; defeated in Athens by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, in Argos by Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though he continues to hold the Isthmus. In Trozen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with Athena.^ Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls his own hands had built.^ These problems we need not for the present face. By the time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a sea- god, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens 1 It is worth noting also that this Homeric triad seems also to be recognized as the chief Athenian triad. Plato, Etithyd. 302 c, quoted above, continues : Socrates. ' We have Zeus with the names Herkeios and Phratrios, but not Patroos, and Athena Phratria/ Dionysodorus. * Well, that is enough. You have, apparently, Apollo and Zeus and Athena ? ' Socrates. ' Certainly.'— Apollo is put first because he has been accepted as Patroos. 2 Ridgeway, Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse, 1905, pp. 287-93 ; and Early Age of Greece, 1901, p. 223. 3 Cf. Plut. Q. Conv. ix. 6 ; Paus. ii. I. 6 ; 4. 6 ; 15. 5 ; 30. 6. * So in the non-Homeric tradition, Eur. Troades init. In the Iliad he is made an enemy of Troy, like Athena, who is none the less the Guardian of the city. 74 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii and Ionia. He is the father of Neleus, the ancestor of the Ionian kings. His temple at Cape Mykale is the scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as a religious centre of the Ionian tribes. He has intimate relations with Attica too. Besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession of the land, he appears as the father of Theseus, the chief Athenian hero. He is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erech- theus. He is the special patron of the Athenian knights. Thus his prominence in Homer is very natural. What of Hermes? His history deserves a long mono- graph to itself ; it is so exceptionally instructive. Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was simply an old upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular Pelasgian sex-symbol of procreation. Set up over a tomb he is the power that generates new lives, or, in the ancient conception, brings the souls back to be born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the Psycho- pompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. If you have a message for the dead, you speak it to the Herm at the grave. This notion of Hermes as herald may have been helped by his use as a boundary- stone — the Latin l^erminus. Your boundary-stone is your representative, the deliverer of your message, to the hostile neighbour or alien. If you wish to parley with him, you advance up to your boundary-stone. If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory, you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone, the last sign that remains of your own safe country. If you are killed or wronged, it is he, the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 75 Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to Homer. It was not decent ; it was not quite human ; and eveiy personage in Homer has to be both. In the Iliad Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful creation or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-goddess, takes his place as the messenger from heaven to earth. In the Odyssey he is admitted, but so changed and castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm in the beautiful and gracious youth who performs the gods' messages. I can only detect in his language one possible trace of his old Pelasgian character.-^ Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In speaking of Hermes among the other ' Workers ', who were ' pillars in square form ', he says, ' As to Hermes, the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of the departed to Hades.' ^ In the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old functions ; he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos Daimon. But thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism. Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious past behind her. She has certainly ousted the original wife, Dione, whose worship continued unchallenged in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended upon Greek lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems to have left Dione behind and wedded the Queen of the conquered territory. Hera's permanent epithet is ' Argeia ', ' Argive.' She is the Argive Kore, or Year- 1 Od. H 339 ff. 2 See Paus. viii. 32. 4. Themis, pp. 295, 296. ^6 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii Maiden, as Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. But Argos in Homer denotes two different places, a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief goddess of Peloponnesian Argos in historic times, and had brought her consort Herakles ^ along with her, but originally she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos. She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship Argo^ and they launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the Argonautica she is a beautiful figure, gracious and strong, the lovely patroness of the young hero. No element of strife is haunting her. But in the Iliad for some reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, and a jealous wife. Why ? Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the time of the invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she the native queen of the land.^ It may be, too, that the Ionian poets who respected their own Apollo and Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as representing some race or tribe that they disliked. A goddess of Dorian Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It seems to be for some reason like this that Aphrodite, identified with Cyprus or some centre among Oriental ^ For the connexion of "Hpa ^^pw? 'HpaKA^s ('HpvKaXos in Sophron, fr. 142 K) see especially A. B. Cook, Class. Review, 1906, pp. 365 and 416. The name"Hpa seems probably to be an ablaut form of wpa : cf. phrases like "Hpa reXcta. Other literature in Gruppe, pp. 452, 1122. ^ Prolegomena, p. 315, referring to H. D. Miiller, Mythologie d. gr. Stdmme, pp. 249-55. Another view is suggested by Mulder, Die Ilias und ihre Quellen, p. 136. The jealous Hera comes from the Heracles-saga, in which the wife hated the bastard. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ^^ barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect ; that Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-god and War-god, is treated as a mere bully and coward and general pest.^ There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear to us in the Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless common folk.^ And it was not likely that the bards of cultivated and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life. Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and gods of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of reckless brutality became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid adventure. The traits that were at all tolerable were idealized ; those that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform. ^ P. Gardner, in Numismatic Chronicle^ N.S. xx, ' Ares as a Sun-God.' ^ Chadwick, Heroic Age, especially pp. 414, 459-63. 78 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii II. l^he Religious Value of the Olympians Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at the Panathenaea, pro- duced what I will venture to call exactly a religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work. In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehe- mently distinct from the matrilinear customs of the Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their agricultural rites, their sex-emblems and fertility goddesses. Contrast for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the Iliad under the name of Athena with the Kore of Ephesus, strangely called Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered with innumerable breasts. That suggests the contrast that I mean. Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic ; they are the literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superstition. True, the poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris, or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric gods and the gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr. Chadwick ^ to the difference ^ Chap, xviii. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 79 between the gods of the Edda and the historical traces of rehgion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or comitatus, seem to be the gods of the kings, distinct from the gods of the peasants, cleaner and more war- like and lordlier, though in actual religious quality much less vital. Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the Urdummheit. For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition, in having much the same inward freedom. The lonians are the descendants of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their homes, tribes, and tribal traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic sepulchres of unknown kings, which the fugitives to Asia had left behind them and half forgotten.-^ Again, when the lonians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said, of something that was Hellenic, as distinct from some- thing else that was barbaric, and the Hellenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck them as superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in knowledge 1 Introduction to his edition of the Choephori, p. 9. 8o THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its rise in Ionia. Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it ? We are again reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the ' beggarly elements' towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the incursions of mana snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters, but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers, wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably higher. For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us : the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas against the brute world.^ ^ The spirit appears very simply in Eur. Ifh. Taiir. 386 ff., where Iphigenia rejects the gods who demand human sacrifice : These tales be false, false as those feastings wild Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 8i The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man over beast : that was the aim, but was it ever accom- plished? The Olympian gods as we see them in art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving, that what I am now about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a telos or completion but a movement and effort of life. We may analyse the movement into three main elements : a moral expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the three in order. In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, , Dr at least covered with a decent veil, that great mass Df rites which was concerned with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation This land of murderers to its gods hath given Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. Ytt just before she has accepted the loves of Zeus and Leto without Dbjection. ' Leto, whom Zeus loved, could never have given birth to ;uch a monster ! ' Cf. Plutarch, Vit. Pelop. xxi, where Pelopidas, in rejecting the idea of a human sacrifice, says : ' No high and more than human beings could be pleased with so barbarous and unlawful I sacrifice. It was not the fabled Titans and Giants who ruled the world, but one who was a Father of all gods and men.' Of :ourse, criticism and expurgation of the legends is too common to need illustration. See especially Kaibel, Daktyloi Idatoi^ 1902, p. 512. p. P. 648 F 82 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii r of generative processes.^ It left only a few reverent and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy, and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi- barbarous, it was often bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un- Homeric Sparta. The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid centuries, the worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere of megalomania and blood-lust.^ These things return with the fall of Hellenism ; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws and bound to reckon with the same death. So much for the moral expurgation : next for the bringing of intellectual order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, ' In the early religion all things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them.' We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as ttoWcop ovofMaTcou fiopiftr) ju-ia, ' one form of many names.' Each tribe, each little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste ^ I have touched on this subject in an article, * Olympian Houses/ in the Albany Review^ ^9^7 f P- 201. ^ ^ q £^ pp^ 158-61. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 85 — the Children of the Bards, the Children of the Potters — had its own special gods. Now as soon as there was any general ' Sunoikismos ' or ' Settling- together ', any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different historical circum- stances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his proper function and there was no overlapping — one Kore, one Kouros, one Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imagina- tions had been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythera or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Kore or the Delian or the Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of Cyprus, Cythera, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility Kore of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like. 84 THE 0LYA4PIAN CONQUEST ii As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Kore or Kouros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons ; they melted easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard. They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary tem- perature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the gods all being one, ' Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as Dionysus,' ^ but the amalgamation only takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious mysticism. The best document preserved to us of this attempt to bring order into Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. There are three poems, all devoted to this object, composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a quasi- Homeric dialect and under a quasi-Olympian system to bring together vast masses of ancient theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The Theogony attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods ; 7he Catalogue of Women and the Eoiai, ^ Justin. Cohort, c. 15. But such pantheistic language is common in Orphic and other mystic literature. See the fragments of the Orphic ALadrJKai (p. 144^^. in Abel's Hymni). II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 85 preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. The Works and Days form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the most valiant failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity of it are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty and its extraordinary historical interest. The Hesiodic system when compared with that of Homer is much more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay the lordly warrior-gods of the Heroic Age, at the back of Hesiod the crude and tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the mainland. Also the Hesiodic poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light of Athens. The third element in this Homeric reformation is an attempt to make religion satisfy the needs of a new social order. The earliest Greek religion was clearly based on the tribe, a band of people, all in some sense kindred and normally living together, people with the same customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds and fields. This tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself unchanged at the great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.^ It ^ I have not attempted to consider the Cretan cults. They lie historically outside the range of these essays, and I am not competent 86 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the heroic age. It bowed its head beneath the sceptre of its own divine kings and the armed heel of its northern invaders, only to appear again almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain. But it no longer suited its environment. In the age of the migrations the tribes had been broken, scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased to exist as important social entities. The social unit which had taken their place was the political community of men, of whatever tribe or tribes, who were held together in times of danger and constant war by means ot a common circuit-wall, a Polis.-^ The idea of the tribe remained. In the earliest classical period we find every Greek city still nominally composed of tribes, but the tribes are fictitious. The early city- ' makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal basis. Every local or accidental congregation of to deal with evidence that is purely archaeological. But in general I imagine the Cretan religion to be a development from the religion described in my first essay, affected both by the change in social structure from village to sea-empire and by foreign, especially Egyptian, influences. No doubt the Achaean gods were influenced on their side by Cretan conceptions, though perhaps not so much as Ionia was. Cf . the Cretan influences in Ionian vase-painting, and e.g. A. B. Cook on 'Cretan Axe-cult outside Crete', Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religion, ii. 184. See also Sir A. Evans's striking address on ' The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in Hellenic Life', just published in J. H. S. xxxii. 277-297. 1 See R. G. E., pp. 78-80. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 87 people who wish to act together have to invent an imaginary common ancestor. The clash between the old tribal traditions that have lost their meaning, though not their sanctity, and the new duties imposed by the actual needs of the Polis, leads to many strange and interesting compromises. The famous constitu- tion of Cleisthenes shows several. An old proverb expresses well the ordinary feeling on the subject : * Whatever the City may do ; but the old custom is the best.' Now in the contest between city and tribe, the Olympian gods had one great negative advantage. They were not tribal or local, and all other gods were. They were by this time international, with no strong roots anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some native god ; they were full of fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to be made * Poliouchoi ', ' City-holders ', of any particular city, still more ready to be ' Hellanioi ', patrons of all Hellas. In the working out of these three aims the Olympian religion achieved much : in all three it failed. The moral expurgation failed owing to the mere force of inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local cults. We must remember how weak any central government was in ancient civilization. The power and influence of a highly civilized society were apt to end a few miles outside its city wall. All through 88 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii the backward parts of Greece obscene and cruel rites lingered on, the darker and worse the further they were removed from the full Ught of Hellenism. But in this respect the Olympian Religion did not merely fail : it did worse. To make the elements of a nature-religion human is inevitably to make them vicious. There is no great moral harm in worshipping a thunderstorm, even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite recklessly. There is no need to pretend that the Lightning is exercising a wise and righteous choice. But when once you worship an imaginary quasi-human being who throws the light- ning, you are in a dilemma. Either you have to admit that you are worshipping and flattering a being with no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck. And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal, becomes capricious and cruel. When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines, the cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nachon, and the holy object was in danger of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang forward to save it and was struck dead for his pains. Now, if he was struck dead by the sheer holiness of the tabu object, the holiness stored inside it like so much electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting accident, and no more.^ But when it is made into the deliberate act of an anthropomorphic god, who ^ 2 Sam. vi. 6. See S. Reinach, Orpheus^ p. 5 (English Translation, P-4)- II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 89 strikes a well-intentioned man dead in explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element has been introduced into the ethics of that religion. A being who is the moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite. Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, as was done in agricultural rites all through the Aegean area, is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropo- morphic god of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. This result was intensified by another well-meant effort at elevation. The leading tribes of central Greece were, ^ as we have mentioned, apt to count their descent from j some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes unknown and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. Sometimes he was a local god or river. When the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity among these innumerable local gods, the original tribal ancestor tended, naturally enough, to be identified with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The unfortunate Olympians, whose system really aimed at purer morals and condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with a crowd of consorts that would put Solomon to shame. Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfac- tory end of that effort would have been monotheism. 90 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning. It is curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism of a very profound and impersonal type, the real reli- gion of Greece came in the sixth and fifth centuries. Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and others, asserted it clearly or assumed it without hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper moments point the same road. Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to make any particular difference between ol Oeoi and 6 6e6<; or to Oelov. They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between ' he ' and ' it ', or between ' one ' and ' many ', apply to the divine. Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried the day, would have been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal monotheism of the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard- caked superstitions, too many tender and sensitive associations, were linked with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rites which had brought the worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and bloody-minded, to agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and iMt O^ A 1 ^ A. J r ' 'L II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 91 did not try to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular or philosophical, seldom denied any god, seldom forbade any worship. What it tried to do was to identify every new god with some aspect of one of the old ones, and the result was naturally confusion. Apart from the Epicurean school, which though powerful was always unpopular, the religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a sort of apotheosis of good taste, in which the great care was not to hurt other people's feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless mysticism. The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the Polis failed also. The Olympians did not belong to any particular city : they were too universal ; and no particular city had a very positive faith in them. The actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric gods a little alien and literary. The City herself was a most real power ; and the true gods of the City, who had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply the City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as mother and guide and lawgiver, the worshipped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend even to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from the social group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the band of suppliants, in like fashion rj lloXtag or 6 IloXteus emerged as a personification or projection of the city. 7] UoXids in Athens was of course Athena ; 6 IToXtev? might as well be called Zeus as anything else. In reaHty such beings fall into the same class as the hero Argos or ' Korinthos son of Zeus '. The City worship was narrow ; yet to broaden it was, except in some 92 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii rare minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible to love his next-door neighbours except by hating those who are next-door-but-one. It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have gods that would appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On the Acropolis at Athens there seem originally to have been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was united and brought under the lead of its central city, the gods of the outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the thunder- maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint personality with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north- east, on the way from Delos to Delphi, had for its special god a ' Pythian Apollo ' ; when Oinoe became Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis. Dionysus came from Eleutherae, Demeter and Kore from Eleusis, Theseus himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozen. They were all given official residences on Athena's rock, and Athens in return sent out Athena to new temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and various colonies.-^ This development came step by step and grew out of real worships. It was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body of non-national, poetical gods : yet even this develop- ment was too artificial, too much stamped with the marks of expediency and courtesy and compromise. It could not live. The personalities of such gods vanish away ; their prayers become prayers to ' all 1 Cf. Sam Wide in Gercke and Norden's Handbuch, ii. 217-19. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 95 gods and goddesses of the City ' — ^eot? kol Oefcn iracrL Koi TTacrrjcri ; those who remain, chiefly Athena and Theseus, only mean Athens. What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian religion really achieve ? First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of Greece — not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the ' Urdummheit ', for the most part, to a ro- mantic memory, and made religion no longer a mortal danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it generally permitted progress ; it encouraged not only the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that saves from disaster, that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosyne. Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek communities. It is, after all, a good deal to say, that in Greek history we find almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many weaknesses, it built up something like a united Hellenic religion to stand against the ' beastly devices of the heathen '. And after all, if we are inclined on the purely religious side to judge the Olympian system harshly, we must not forget its sheer beauty. Truth, no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many matters beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know is that when the best minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful. It was a great thing that men 94 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii should envisage the world as governed, not by Giants and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by some human and more than human Understanding (Bvvecri';),^ by beings of quiet splendour like many a classical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If Olym- pianism v^as not a religious faith, it was at least a vital force in the shaping of cities and societies which remain after two thousand years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high endeavour. Even the stirring of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power to produce something of the same result ; for the classicism of the Italian Renaissance is a child, however fallen, of the Olympian spirit. Of course I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith. There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery ; the ideal of wisdom, of inces- sant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ^ The Hw€(7t9 to which Euripides prays in Ar. Frogs, 893, and in which the Chorus finds it hard to beHeve, Hippolytus, 1105. Cf. Ipk. Jul. 394, 1 189 ; Here. 655 ; also the ideas in Suppl. 203, Eur. Fr. 52, 9, where Ewco-is is implanted in man by a special grace of Go4. II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 95 ranks of Olympus ; the old liturgy of the dying and re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If Religion is that which brings us into relation with the great world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this home-coming Bride of the underworld, life with its broken hopes, its disaster, its new-found spiritual joy: life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing con- tinuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death, life as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed. ' But stay,' a reader may object : ' is not this the Persephone, the Athena, of modern sentiment? Are these figures really the goddesses of the Iliad and of Sophocles ? ' The truth is, I think, that they are neither the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of ancient reflection and allegory ; the goddesses, that is, of the best and most characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened. What we have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact that they have no roots in any particular soil, little hold on any definite primaeval cult, has turned out to be their peculiar strength. We must not think of allegory as a late post-classical phenomenon in Greece. It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, perhaps as early as Hesiod : for Hesiod seems sometimes to be turning allegory back into myth. The Olym- pians, cut loose from the soil, enthroned only in men's free imagination, have two special regions which they have made their own : mythology and allegory. The mythology drops for the most part very early out of practical religion. Even in Homer we find it 96 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii expurgated ; in Pindar, Aeschylus and Xenophanes it is expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths survive chiefly as material for literature, the shapes of the gods themselves chiefly as material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of imagi- nation. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it twines itself still round these gracious and ever-moving shapes ; the Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long spiritual history. They are but little impeded by the echoes of the old monstrous mythology ; still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or compulsory details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind of Greece emerged from a particular, local, tribal, conception of religion, the old denationalized Olym- pians were ready to receive her. / The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles, again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and Plato ; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the danger- point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 97 face again to-morrow. It was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be * one great City of gods and men ', the only Gods with which Greece could satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old Olympians. They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories ; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them ? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that the difference between Religion and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth ? It is only an accident — though perhaps an invariable accident — that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious p. r. 648 G 98 THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST ii you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of things, inadequate ; the truth is not in you but beyond you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this, I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and strengthen his higher aspirations ; but at heart they knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god ; ^ ^ Cf . the beautiful defence of idols by Maximus of Tyre, Or. viii (in Wilamowitz's Lesehuch, ii, 338 ff.). I quote the last paragraph : ' God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature — just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved, but for remembrance' sake they will be happy in the §ight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pass judgement about Images ? Let men know what is divine {to Bfiov yeVos), let them know : that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, II THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST 99 so the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before them. Mean- time they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light. another by fire — I have no anger for their divergences ; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.* G 2 Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE Any one who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian : it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome./ It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism ; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort ; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation ; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures ; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions ; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve. 104 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii Now this antithesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration ; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact. The historical reasons for it are sug- gested above, in the first of these essays. My description of this complicated change is, of course, inadequate, but not, I hope, one-sided. I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this movement by describing the movement itself as a * failure of nerve '. Mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and deeper knowledge of the world : the patient and sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it. But probably most Christians are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure, without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain the religious life. I can imagine an historian of this temper believing that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of human pride, a Preparatio Evangelic a} ^ Mr. Marett has pointed out that this conception has its roots deep in primitive human nature : 7he Birth of Humility^ Oxford, 1910, p. 17. ' It would, perhaps, be fanciful to say that man tends to run away from the sacred as uncanny, to cower before it as secret, and to prostrate himself before it as tabu. On the other hand, it seems plain Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 105 I am concerned in this paper with the lower country- lying between two great ranges. The one range is Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato, Aristotle, the / Porch, and the Garden ; the other is Christianity, culminating in St. Paul and his successors. The one is the work of Hellas, using some few foreign elements ; the second is the work of Hellenistic culture on a Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are Greek, the philosophical background is Hellenistic, the result of the interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy, of religious ideas derived from Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is carried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking work- men of the great manufacturing and commercial cities. that to these three negative qualities of the sacred taken together there corresponds on the part of man a certain negative attitude of mind. Psychologists class the feehngs bound up with flight, covi^ering, and prostration under the common head of " asthenic emotion ". In plain English they are all forms of heart-sinking, of feeling unstrung. This general type of innate disposition would seem to be the psycho- logical basis of Humility. Taken in its social setting, the emotion will, of course, show endless shades of complexity ; for it will be excited, and again will find practical expression, in all sorts of ways. Under these varying conditions, however, it is reasonable to suppose that what Mr. McDougall would call the "central part" of the experience remains very much the same. In face of the sacred the normal man is visited by a heart-sinking, a wave of asthenic emotion.' Mr. Marett con- tinues : ' If that were all, however. Religion would be a matter of pure fear. But it is not all. There is yet the positive side of the sacred to be taken into account.' It is worth remarking also that Schleier- macher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence without attempting to define the object towards which it was directed. io6 THE FAILURE OF NERVE m The first preachers are Jews : the central scene is set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how a period of religious history, which seems broken, is really continuous, and to trace the lie of the main valleys which lead from the one range to the other, through a large and imperfectly explored territory. The territory in question is the so-called Hellenistic Age, the period during which the Schools of Greece were ' hellenizing ' the world. It is a time of great enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high impor- tance to history. It is a time full of great names : in one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void. There are practically no com- plete books preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently in the search for informa- tion about this age we must throw our nets wide. Beside books and inscriptions of the Hellenistic period proper I have drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their teachers and masters. I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and the Mithras Liturgy. Among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Diete- rich, Cumont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein. The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a tabula rasa^ on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 107 write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life — ^what Herodotus would call their ^Historic '. For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism ; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. Now a religious belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden. This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polls, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. But the Polls too fell "^ with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of its own ; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness ; but simply because there now existed another social whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polls lost its reality when the PoHs, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a mihtary despot, who might, of course, io8 THE FAILURE OF NERVE in be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer. What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a Nation has of making men of alien birth its com- patriots. A Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the civic rights of Rome : he could never have been made an Italian or Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as ' one great City of Gods and Men ' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation. What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept bare and made ready for new sowing ; skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground, and even within the original walls the weeding had been hasty and incomplete. At the end of a few generations all was a wilderness of weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful, with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE lOg here and there in the tangle of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion? Is philo- sophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds ? Well, think what a weed is. It is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and will live without the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty ; the weeds are what conquer us. It has been well observed by Zeller that the great weakness of all ancient thought, not excepting Socratic thought, was that instead of appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective sense of fitness. There were exceptions of course : Democritus, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, and to a great extent Aristotle. But in general there was a strong tendency to follow Plato in supposing that people could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner consciousness. One result of this, no doubt, was a tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement. It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that quite often a large number of people who know nothing about a subject will all agree and all be wrong. Yet we find the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously dominated by the argument ex consensu gentium. It is hard to find two more uncompromising thinkers than Zeno and Epicurus. Yet both of them, when they are almost free from the popular superstitions, when they have constructed complete systems which, if not absolutely logic-proof, are calculated at least to keep out the weather for a century or so, open curious side-doors at the last moment and let in all no THE FAILURE OF NERVE m the gods of mythology.-^ True, they are admitted as suspicious characters, and under promise of good behaviour. Epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody ; Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all- ruling Unity ; both parties get rid of the myths. But the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous principle. The general consensus of humanity, they say, shows that there are gods, and gods which in mind, if not also in visual appearance, resemble man. Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted nothing more. But the Stoics presently found them- selves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more dangerous elements still. I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools. On the whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of superstition, or, if you like to put it in other language, against the dumb demands of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness ; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have yielded one inch of ground to the common foe. ^ Usener, Epcurea (1887), pp. 232 ff. ; Diels, Doxographi Graeci i^^79)y P- 306; Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903-5), Chrysippus 1014, 1019. Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE in The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of super- stitions. There is an infinite supply of other super- stitions always at hand ; and the mind that desires such things — that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipHne of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations. Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being in- fluenced by normal human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad, though doubtless they tended too much to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not. Speaking broadly, what was left when this concep- tion proved inadequate ? If it was not these personal gods who made things happen, what was it ? If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the gods so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling ? The answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say : ' It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense : ' It fell because of 112 THE FAILURE OF NERVE m a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. It was bound to fall.' There is no real difference in these statements, at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world. But in the Hellenistic Age, when Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially over vast semi-barbarous populations whose minds were not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this ; every one knew so much : it happened by Chance. That is. Chance or Fortune willed it. And Tuche became a goddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, the great transformations of the mediterranean world which marked the Hellenistic period, had a strong influence here. If Alexander and his generals had practised some severely orthodox Macedonian religion, it would have been easy to see that the Gods of Mace- don were the real rulers of the world. But they most markedly did not. They accepted hospitably all the religions that crossed their path. Some power or other was disturbing the world, that was clear. It was not exactly the work of man, because sometimes the good were exalted, sometimes the bad ; sometimes the Greek, sometimes the barbarian. It was just Fortune. Happy is the man who knows how to placate Fortune and make her smile upon him ! It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground for superstition is a society in which the fortunes of Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 115 men seem to bear practically no relation to their m.erits and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does tend, speaking roughly, to ensure that the Virtuous and Industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life, while the Wicked and Idle Apprentice fails. And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable or visible chains of causation. But in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat of a war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindli- ness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry god that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. The Hellenistic period pretty certainly falls in some degree under all of these categories. And one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of Fortune. Of course there was always a protest. There is the famous Nullum numen habes si sit prudentia : nos te, Nos facimus, For tuna, deam, taken by Juvenal from the Greek. There are many unguarded phrases and at least three corrections in Polybius.^ Most interesting of all perhaps there is the first oration of Plutarch on the Fortune of Alexander.^ 1 Juv. X. 365 f. ; Polyb. ii. 38. 5 ; x. 5. 8 ; xviii. II. 5. 2 Cf. also his Consolatio ad Apllonium. The earliest text is perhaps the interesting fragment of Demetrius of Phalerum (fr. 19, p. p. 648 H 114 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii A sentence in Pliny's Natural History, ii. 22, seems to go back to Hellenistic sources. ' Throughout the whole world, at every place and hour, by every voice Fortune alone is invoked and her name spoken : she is the one defendant, the one culprit, the one thought in men's minds, the one object of praise, the one cause. She is worshipped with insults, counted as fickle and often as blind, wandering, inconsistent, elusive, changeful, and friend of the unworthy. . . . We are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our god.' The word used is first Fortuna and then Sors, This shows how little real difference there is between the in F. H. G. ii. 368), written about 317 B.C. It is quoted with admira- tion by Polybius xxix. 21, with reference to the defeat of Perseus of Macedon by the Romans : ' One must often remember the saying of Demetrius of Phalerum . . . in his Treatise on Fortune ..." If you were to take not an indefinite time, nor many generations, but just the fifty years before this, you could see in them the violence of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you suppose that either the Macedonians or the King of Macedon, or the Persians or the King of Persia, if some God had foretold them what was to come, would ever have beheved that by the present time the Persians, who were then masters of almost all the inhabited world, would have ceased to be even a geographical name, while the Mace- donians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all ? Yet this Fortune, who bears no relation to our method of life, but trans- forms everything in the way we do not expect and displays her power by surprises, is at the present moment showing all the world that, when she puts the Macedonians into the rich inheritance of the Persian, she has only lent them these good things until she changes her mind about them." Which has now happened in the case of Perseus. The words of Demetrius were a prophecy uttered, as it were, by inspired lips.' Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE us two apparently contradictory conceptions. — ' Chance would have it so.' ' It was fated to be.' The sting of both phrases — their pleasant bitterness when played with, their quality of poison when believed — lies in their denial of the value of human endeavour. Yet on the whole, as one might expect, the believers in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than the worshippers of Chance. It requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to rise to the conception that nothing really happens without a cause. It is the begin- ning, perhaps, of science. Ionic philosophers of the fifth century had laid stress on the 'AvdyKr) (j^ucrto?,^ what we should call the Chain of causes in Nature. After the rise of Stoicism Fate becomes something less physical, more related to conscious purpose. It is not Ananke but Heimarmene. Heimarmene, in the striking simile of Zeno,^ is like a fine thread running through the whole of existence — the world, we must remember, was to the Stoics a live thing — like that invisible thread of life which, in heredity, passes on from generation to genera- tion of living species and keeps the type alive ; it runs causing, causing for ever, both the infinitesimal and the infinite. It is the Adyo? rov KoorfJiov,^ the Nov? Ato9, the Reason of the World or the mind of Zeus, rather difficult to distinguish from the Pronoia or Providence, which is the work of God and indeed the very essence of God. Cleanthes in one of his finest hymns prays to rj TreTTpcofxivrj — the Path that is Ordained.* ^ Eur., Tro. 886. Literally it means ' The Compulsion in the way Things grow '. ^ Zeno, fr. 87, Arnim. 3 Chrysippus, fr. 913, Arnim. ^ Cleanthes, 527, Arnim. H Z ii6 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii That is a noble conception. But the vulgar of course can turn Kismet into a stupid idol, as easily as they can Fortune. And Epicurus may have been right when he exclaimed that he would sooner be a slave to the old gods of the vulgar, than to the Destiny of the philosophers.^ So much for the result in superstitious minds of the denial, or rather the removal, of the Olympian Gods. It landed men in the worship of Fortune or of Fate. Next, let us consider what happened when, instead of merely rejecting the Gods en masse ^ people tried carefully to collect what remained of religion after the Olympian system fell. Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He held that the origins of man's knowledge (Ivvoia) of the Divine were twofold,^ the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul. It is very much what Kant found two thousand years later. The spectacle of the vast and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer's armies before Troy. Behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious mind capable Koo-fJLTJcraL linrovf; re kol avepa<; do-TTtStwra?. To order steeds of war and mailed men. It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, and stars as themselves divine, and it is a step which ^ Epicurus, Third Letter, Usener, p. 6^, 12 = Diog. La. x. 134. 8 Aristotle, f r. 1 2 ff , Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 117 both Plato and Aristotle, following Pythagoras and followed by the Stoics, take with confidence. Chrysip- pus gives practically the same list of gods : ' the Sun, Moon, and Stars and Law : and men who have turned into Gods.' ^ Both the wandering stars and the fixed stars are ' animate beings, divine and eternal ', self- acting subordinate gods. As to the divinity of the soul or the mind of man, the earlier generations are shy about it. But in the later Stoics it is itself a portion of the divine life. It shows this ordinarily by its power of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming ii^Oeos, or ' filled with God ', in its exalted moments of pre- vision, ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself is divine, there is something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least more surprisingly divine. Let us follow the history of both these remaining substitutes for the Olympian gods. First for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be made divine, we can hardly stop there. The Earth is also a divine being. Old tradition has always said so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, so surely are the other elements, the Stoicheia, Water, Air, and above all. Fire. For the Gods themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire, and the Stars visibly are so. Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really not our Fire at all, but a Tre/xTrroz^ o-w/xa, a 'Fifth Body', seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed. This is persuasive enough and philosophic ; but ^ e.g. Chrysippus, fr. 1076, Arnim. ii8 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii whither has it led us? Back to the Olympians, or rather behind the Olympians ; as St. Paul puts it (Gal. iv. 9), to ' the beggarly elements '. The old Kore, or Earth Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of time all over the Aegean area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with her two lions ; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus ; in Sparta with her great marsh birds ; in Boeotia with her horse. She runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and post- Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father and the Son : that is ancient and natural. But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the Pneuma. Since the word for ' spirit ' is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, ' Ruah,' is mostly feminine. In the meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this goddess. In the old religion of Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a Maiden, then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is evidence also for a third stage, the widowhood of withering autumn.-^ To the classical Greek this motherhood was quite as it should be, a due fulfilment of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and Neo- Platonist it connoted a ' fall ', a passage from the glory of Virginity to a state of Sin. The Kore becomes a fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or even a female devil ; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the 1 Themis, p. 180, n. i. II THE FAILURE OF NERVE 119 Redeemer.-^ As far as I have observed, she loses most of her earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene or even Helen she keeps up her affinity with the Moon. Almost all the writers of the Hellenistic Age agree in regarding the Sun, Moon and Stars as gods. The rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus, before going on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards the same goal, he clinches his argument by observing that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we call them by different names in all languages.'-^ But the belief does not seem to have had much religious in- tensity in it, until it was reinforced by two alien influences. First, we have the ancient worship of the Sun, implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the Refublic^ where the Sun is the author of all light and life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the ideal world. This worship came gradually into con- tact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of Persia. The final combination took place curiously late. It was the Roman conquests of Cilicia, Cappa- docia, Commagene, and Armenia that gave the decisive 1 Bousset, Hauptprohleme der Gnosis, 1907, pp. 13, 21, 26, 81, &c. ; pp. 332 ff. She becomes Helen In the beautiful myth of the Simonian Gnostics — a Helen who has forgotten her name and race, and is a slave in a brothel in Tyre. Simon discovers her, gradually brings back her memory and redeems her. Irenaeus, i. 23. 2. 2 De hide et Osiride, 6j. (He distinguishes them from the real God, hovi^ever, just as S alius tius would.) 120 THE FAILURE OF NERVE m moment.-^ To men who had wearied of the myths of the poets, who could draw no more inspiration from their Apollo and Hyperion, but still had the habits and the craving left by their old Gods, a fresh breath of reaHty came with the entrance of ''HXto? a^i/cr^ros MiOpas, * Mithras, the Unconquered Sun.' But long before the triumph of Mithraism as the military religion of the Roman frontier, Greek literature is permeated with a kind of intense language about the Sun, which seems derived from Plato.^ In later times, in the fourth century a.d. for instance, it has absorbed some more full-blooded and less critical element as well. Secondly, all the seven planets. These had a curious history. The planets were of course divine and living bodies, so much Plato gave us. Then come arguments and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit ? The latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us : we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury as "Epfxov dcTTrjp, It is the star of Hermes, and Hermes is the spirit who guides it.^ Even Plato in his old age had much to 1 Mithras was worshipped by the Cilician Pirates conquered by Pompey. Plut., Fit. Pomp. 24. ^ €Kyovos Tov TvpoiTov Ocov. Plato (Diels, 305); Stoics, ib. 547, 1. 8. Aristotle (Diels, 450). oo-as 8e ett'ai ra? or^aipa?, to(tovtovs virdp- X€iv Kttt Tov ^5* ^^• 432 a, 10. 122 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii and a irew one rises in the morning. All kinds of explanations are possible, and none certain. Movov 6 fxvOo<; arreo-TO). In any case, as you value your life and your reason, do not begin making myths about them ! On other lines came what might have been the effective protest of real Science, when Aristarchus of Samos (250 B.C.) argued that the earth was not really the centre of the universe, but revolved round the Sun. But his fellow astronomers were against him ; Cleanthes the Stoic denounced him for ' disturbing the Hearth of the Universe ', and his heresy soon died away. The planets in their seven spheres surrounding the earth continued to be objects of adoration. They had their special gods or guiding spirits assigned them. Their ordered movements through space, it was held, produce a vast and eternal harmony. It is beautiful beyond all earthly music, this Music of the Spheres, beyond all human dreams of what music might be. The only pity is that — except for a few individuals in trances — nobody has ever heard it. Circumstances seem always to be unfavourable. It may be that we are too far off, though, considering the vastness of the orchestra, this seems improbable. More likely we are merely deaf to it because it never stops and we have been in the middle of it since we first drew breath.^ The planets also become Elements in the Kosmos, Stoicheia. It is significant that in Hellenistic theology the word Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon ^ Pythagoras in Diels, p. 555, 20 ; the best criticism is in Pseudo- Aristotle, De Caeloj chap. 9 (p. 290b). Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 125 — as Megethos, Greatness, means an Angel.^ But behold a mystery ! The word Stoicheia, ' elementa ', had long been used for the Greek ABC, and in particular for the seven vowels a e -q i o v co. That is no chance, no mere coincidence. The vowels are the mystic signs of the Planets ; they have control over the planets. Hence strange prayers and magic formulae innumerable. Even the way of reckoning time changed under the influence of the Planets. Instead of the old division of the month into three periods of nine days, w^e find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. The history of the Planet week is given by Dio Cassius, xxxvii. 18, in his account of the Jewish campaign of Pompeius. But it was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy and planet-worship. For here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to minds reluctantly and super- ficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. Even in the old days Aeschylus had called the planets 'bright potentates, shining in the fire of heaven', and Euripides had spoken of the ' shaft hurled from a star '.^ But we are told that the first teaching of astrology in ^ See Diels, Elementum, 1899, p. 17. These magic letters are still used in the Roman ritual for the consecration of churches. 2 Aesch., Ag. 6 ; Eur., Hip. 530. 124 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii Hellenic lands was in the time of Alexander, when Berossos the Chaldaean set up a school in Cos. And the philosopher Theophrastus is reported by Proclus ^ as saying that ' the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore of the Chaldaeans, who foretold not only events of public interest but even the lives and deaths of individuals '. One wonders slightly whether Theo- phrastus spoke with as much implicit faith as Proclus suggests. But the chief account is given by Diodorus, ii. 50 (perhaps from Hecataeus). ' Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. It is so recent and so constantly changing. They have traditions which come from vast antiquity and never change. Notably the Chaldaeans have collected obser- vations of the Stars through long ages, and teach how every event in the heavens has its meaning, as part of the eternal scheme of divine forethought. Especially the seven Wanderers, or Planets, are called by them Hermeneis, Interpreters : and among them the Inter- preter in chief is Saturn. Their work is to interpret beforehand ttji' tcop Oecov evvoiav^ the thought that is in the mind of the Gods. By their risings and settings, and by the colours they assume, the Chaldaeans pre- dict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty Gods of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth ; every ten days a messenger or Angel star passes from above below and another from below above. Above these gods are twelve Masters, who are the twelve signs of the Zodiac ; and the planets pass through all ^ Proclus, In Timaeum, 285 F. Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 125 the Houses of these twelve in turn. The Chaldaeans have made prophecies for various kings, such as Alex- ander who conquered Darius, and Antigonus and Seleucus Nikator, and have always been right. And private persons who have consulted them consider their wisdom as marvellous and above human power.' Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people. Every one was ready to receive the germ. The Epicureans, of course, held out, and so did Panaetius, the coolest head among the Stoics. But the Stoics as a whole gave way. They formed with good reason the leading school of philosophy, and it would have been a service to mankind if they had resisted. But they were already committed to a belief in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of Heimarmene, or Destiny. They believed in the pervading Pronoia,^ or Fore- thought, of the divine mind, and in the tvfjLTrdOeLa to)v okoiv — the Sympathy of all Creation,^ so that what- ever happens to any one part, however remote or insignificant, affects all the rest. It seemed only a natural and beautiful illustration of this Sympathy that the movements of the Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also appealed to the general belief in prophecy and divination.^ If a prophet ^ Chrysippus, 1187-95. Esse divinationem si di sint et providentia. 2 Cicero, De Nat. De. iii. 11, 28; c^Y'^ciAXj De Divinatione, ii. 14, 34; 60, 124 ; 69, 142. * Qua ex cognatione naturae et quasi concentu atque consensu, quam crvfjcTrdOeLav Graeci appellant, convenire potest aut fissum iecoris cum lucello meo aut meus quaesticulus cum caelo, terra rerumque natura ? ' asks the sceptic in the second of these passages. ^ Chrysippus, 939-44. Vaticinatio probat fati necessitatem. 126 THE FAILURE OF NERVE in can foretell that such and such an event will happen, then it is obviously fated to happen. Foreknowledge implies Predestination. This belief in prophecy was, in reality, a sort of appeal to fact and to common sense. People could produce then, as they can now, a large number of striking cases of second sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual prophecy and the like ; ^ and it was more difficult then to test them. The argument involved Stoicism with some question- able allies. Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy might well mock at the sight of a great man like Chry- sippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his religion on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine ' medium '. Still the Stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of prophecy and predestination which, however the incredulous might rail at it, possessed at least great antiquity and great stores of learning, which was respectable, recondite, and in a way subHme. In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,^ repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of ' the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores ', or Lords of the Universe, and seems, under their influence, to go off into its ' Seven Maidens with heads of ser- pents, in white raiment ', and its divers other Sevens. ^ Chrysippus, 1 2 14, 1200-6. 2 Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1903. The MS. is 574 Supplement Grec de la Bibl. Nationale. The formulae of various religions were used as instru- ments of magic, as our own witches used the Lord's Prayer backwards, Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 127 The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by Hippolytus/ and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his Somnium Scipioms, are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path ; still more perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as , well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, j the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To \ some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion- headed God, the evil Jehovah.^ The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets. In author after author, in one community after another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the sport of Fate ; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still. We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant. Chance — to say nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity ; there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers ^ Refiitatio Omnium Haeresium, v. 7. ^ Bousset, p. 351. The hostility of Zoroastrianism to the old Babylonian planet gods was doubtless at work also. lb. pp. 37-46. 128 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth region — they call it simply the Ogdoas — the home of the ultimate God,^ whatever He is named, v^hose being was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an aTroppoia rcov dcTTpcov, an effluence of the stars : it comes direct from the first and ultimate God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers them unterrified : iycj elfjn (jvixirXavo^ vixiv acmjp, ' I am your fellow Wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the same boast : First, ' I am the child of Earth and of the starry Heaven ; ' then later, ' I too am become God.' ^ The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home. That journey awaits us after death ; but in the meantime? In the meantime there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. To see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death. But to see Him after due purifica- tion, to be led to Him along the true Way by an 1 Or, in some Gnostic systems, of the Mother. 2 Harrison, Prolegomena, Appendix on the Orphic tablets. Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 129 initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We have one in the Mithras- Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum. Apuleius ^ tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how he was initiated to Isis and became ' her image '. After much fasting, clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the threshold of Death and passed through all the Elements. The Sun shone upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods of Heaven and of Hades. In the morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it. There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St. Paul, we may remem- ber, knew personally a man who had actually been snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words ; ^ whether in the body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells ^ Ap. Metamorphoses, xi. 2 2 Cor. xii. 2 and 3 (he may be referring in veiled language to himself) ; Gal. i. 12 ff. ; Acts ix. 1-22. On the difference of tone and fidelity between the Epistles and the Acts see the interesting remarks of Prof. P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paid^ pp. 5 ff. p.p. 648 I 150 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii us, was united with God in trance four times in five years.^ We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek religion. Yet most of the movement has been, and perhaps not quite unconsciously, a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of man with God came regularly through Ekstasis — the soul must get clear of its body — and Enthousiasmos — the God must enter and dwell inside the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these 1 Porphyry, Vita Plotini, 23. * We have explained that he v/as good and gentle, mild and merciful ; we who lived with him could feel it. We have said that he was vigilant and pure of soul, and always striving towards the Divine, which with all his soul he loved. . . . And thus it happened to this extraordinary man, constantly lifting himself up towards the first and transcendent God by thought and the ways explained by Plato in the Symposium, that there actually came a vision of that God who is without shape or form, established above the understanding and all the intelligible world. To whom I, Porphyry, being now in my sixty-eighth year, profess that I once drew near and was made one with him. At any rate he appeared to Plotinus " a goal close at hand ". For his whole end and goal was to be made One and draw near to the supreme God. And he attained that goal four times, I think, while I was living with him — not potentially but in actuality, though an actuaHty which surpasses speech.' Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 151 rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kouretes with their Zeus Koures^ and those strange hierophants of the ' Men's House ' whose enigmatic message is written on the rocks of Thera, would have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of Hellenism. ' Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,^ ' that thou mayst be what I am and I what thou art.' ' I in thee, and thou in me ! ' is the ecstatic cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been ' Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman '.^ In almost all the Uturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself was a Mesites, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual, the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the 1 C. /. G., vol. xii, fasc. 3 ; and Bethe in Rhein. Mus., N. F., xlii, 438-475. ^ Irenaeus, i. 13. 3. 3 Bousset, chap, vii ; Reitzenstein, Mysterienreligionen, pp. 20 ff., with excursus ; Poimandres, 226 ff . ; Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie^ pp. 121 ff. I 2 152 THE FAILURE OF NERVE iii same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis, when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century B.C. established their own temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher explanation known only to the great master in Jeru- salem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some un- explored and ever-receding region of the east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a charac- teristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions. Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by a ' father ' to a ' son ', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the young priest became regularly the ' son ' of the old priest. It is a form that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe says of her cosmological doctrines, ' It is not my word but my Mother's word.' ^ It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple. In one fine Hturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with God which he himself has trodden before. At the end of the 1 Eur. fr. 484 Ill THE FAILURE OF NERVE 155 Mithras liturgy the devotee who has passed through the mystic ordeals and seen his god face to face, is told : ' After this you can show the way to others.' But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul. If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference between Man and God. Sophrosyne in religion was the mes- sage of the classical age. But the ages before and after had no behef in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first Theos. At any rate the primaeval kings and queens were treated as divine.^ Just for a few great generations it would seem humanity rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or megalo- mania. But the effort was too great for the average world ; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers — all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers — become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came about. First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of the divine element in man's soul."^ Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato. He did 1 R. G. E.^, pp. 155-60. I do not touch on the political side of this apotheosis of Hellenistic kings ; it is well brought out in Ferguson's Hellenistic Athens, e.g. p. lo8 f., also p. II f. and note. 2 Cf. il/vxn olK-qTrjpiov 8aLfjLovo