Note 193.1 — Chapter XI · The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.

Such emotion and mental attitude is consonant with the Hebraic and with much of the modern religious temper; but entirely out of harmony with all that we know of the Hellenic. The religious habit of the Hellene strikes us by comparison as sober, well-tempered, often genial, never ecstatically abject, but even—we may say—self-respecting. Tears for sin, lamentations and sighs, the countenance bowed to the ground, the body cleaving to the pavement, these are not part of his ritual; the wrath of God was felt as a communal more often than as an individual misfortune, and in any case was averted, not by emotional outpourings of the individual heart, but by ritual acts, solemn choruses, soothing sacrifice and songs, or by special piacular lustrations that wiped off the taint of sin. Tears are never mentioned,193.1 except indirectly in the fictitious lamentations for some buried hero, annually and ceremoniously lamented, such as Achilles. Nor can we find in earlier Hellenic ethic the clear recognition of fear and humility among the religious virtues,193.2 while both are paraded in the inscriptions of the later Babylonian kings, even in those that reveal a monstrous excess of pride.193.3 The Hellenic god might punish the haughty and high-minded, he did not love the grovelling, but rather the man of moderate life, tone, and act. Such is God for the civic religion of the free man; while the Babylonian liturgy reflects the despotic society. The Hellene, for instance, does not try to win for himself the favour of the divinity by calling himself his slave. And the common phrase found on the Greek Christian tombs, ὁ δοῦλος τοῦ Θεοῦ, has passed into Christianity from Semitic sources.193.4 This single fact illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the different temper of the old Oriental and old European religions; and there is a curious example of it in the bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription found in Malta,194.1 commemorating a dedication to Melkarth or to Herakles Ἀρχηγέτης: the Phoenicians recommend themselves to the god as “thy slaves,” the Greeks use neither this nor any other title of subservient flattery. In this connection it is well to note the significance of marking the body of the worshipper by branding, cutting, or tattooing with some sign that consecrated him as slave or familiar follower to the divinity. The practice, which may have been of great antiquity, though the evidence is not earlier than the sixth century B.C., was in vogue in Syria, Phrygia, and in early Israel, and was adopted by some Christian enthusiasts, but no proof of it has yet been adduced from Mesopotamia. It was essentially un-Hellenic, but was apparently followed by some of the Dionysiac thiasoi as a Thracian tradition.194.2