Note 26 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

It is not necessary to ask how far exactly the influence may have gone in the Iliad: the main point is that even at that stage of comparatively simple Hellenism the Asiatic environment, Karian or Phoenician, counted for something, whether in cosmogony or in furthering the process of God-grouping, or in conveying the cult of Cyprian Aphrodite,26 or haply in lending some characteristics to Zeus and Apollo and Athênê,27 an influence none the less real because the genius of the poet or poets of the Iliad has given to the whole Olympian group the artistic stamp of individuality which thenceforth distinguishes the Gods of Greece from all others. Indeed, the very creation of a graded hierarchy out of the independent local deities of Greece, the marrying of the once isolated Pelasgic Hêrê to Zeus, the subordination to him of the once isolated Athênê and Apollo—all this tells of the influence of a Semitic world in which each Baal had his wife, and in which the monarchic system developed on earth had been set up in heaven.28 But soon the Asiatic influence becomes still more clearly recognizable. There is reason to hold with Schrader that the belief in a mildly blissful future state, as seen even in the Odyssey29 and in the Theogony ascribed to Hesiod,30 is “a new belief which is only to be understood in view of oriental tales and teaching.”31 In the Theogony, again, the Semitic element increases,32 Kronos being a Semitic figure;33 while Semelê, if not Dionysos, appears to be no less so.34 But we may further surmise that in Homer, to begin with, the conception of Okeanos, the earth-surrounding Ocean-stream, as the origin of all things,35 comes from some Semitic source; and that Hesiod’s more complicated scheme of origins from Chaos is a further borrowing of oriental thought—both notions being found in ancient Babylonian lore, whence the Hebrews derived their combination of Chaos and Ocean in the first verses of Genesis.36 It thus appears that the earlier oriental37 influence upon Greek thought was in the direction of developing religion,38 with only the germ of rationalism conveyed in the idea of an existence of matter before the Gods,39 which we shall later find scientifically developed. But the case is obscure. Insofar as the Theogony, for instance, partly moralizes the more primitively savage myths,40 it may be that it represents the spontaneous need of the more highly evolved race to give an acceptable meaning to divine tales which, coming from another race, have not a quite sacrosanct prescription, though the tendency is to accept them. On the other hand, it may have been a further foreign influence that gave the critical impulse.