Note 126.1 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

The political significance of Greek religion impresses itself upon us at a thousand points and under endless aspects. The deity belongs not to the individual but to the tribe; and as in the earliest Hellenic period the tribes were conscious of a certain community of blood, their earliest religion appears at many points to have transcended the tribal limits, and certain deities have developed a national character. Now evidence—vague and legendary, it is true, but valuable when compared with the facts of other communities—compels us to conceive of the early Hellenic kings having the same character as those that we have observed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Crete; Homer regards them as the god-born, who can exercise religious functions, whose decrees have the force of θέμις. The fire that burnt on their hearth was sacred and embodied the life of the community; and in the later period the perpetual fire that was maintained in the Prytaneum of the πόλις represented the ancient sacred hearth-fire of the king.126.1 Also, when the monarchy was generally abolished, many of the cities felt compelled to retain the title of βασιλεύς for the priest who carried on the religious functions as the shadow of the ancient priest-king. But these similar phenomena are of little ethnographic value. Primitive Hellenism was in these respects only maintaining its own inherited traditions, and following the same lines of early social evolution as those of other communities. On the other hand, the distinctness of developed Hellenism is the secular independence of its intellect; and even in its earliest mythic period we can believe that the divine character of the Basileus was less impressively felt, his association with the divinity less intimate, than was the case in Mesopotamia. Neither Agamemnon nor his predecessors would speak, we may be sure, with the same astonishing self-consciousness of their divine inspiration as the earliest and later kings of Babylon and Assyria.