Note 136.1 — Chapter VII · The Deities as Social-Powers.

I cannot here give a detailed account of the social functions of Greek religion; and some of its more interesting phenomena I have tried to analyse in detail in my Hibbert Lectures and in various chapters of my Cults: one of the most important of the special questions, the social or political influence of the cults of ancestors, entered into the course that I delivered last year. I will only attempt here a brief indication of the salient facts that will repay special study, confining myself as far as possible to those that belong to the proto-Hellenic period. Our knowledge, of course, of the relation of religion to the social order of life, law, and morality in the second millennium in Greece, is only dim and hypothetical: here and there Homer affords us glimpses; for the rest, we have legends and cult evidence which must be carefully and tactfully used. I have already touched on the religious character of the ancient kingship, and the evidence of the religious origin of some of the Hellenic πόλεις. It is probable that some of the deities had already in the proto-Hellenic period a political character, as deities of the assembly or the “agora.” Thus Apollo Ἀγυιεύς, at first a divine leader of the invasion, becomes, when the conquerors settle on the land, at once a divinity of the city; and some scholars would derive his very name from the ἀπέλλα, the political assembly. In order to ensure the settlement and development of law, the debates and judgments in the market-place must be secured from armed disturbance such as frequently threatened the peace of the Icelandic Thing: therefore, in pre-Homeric days the market-place was consecrated as a holy place, and the elders who give judgment “hold in their hands the sceptres of clear-voiced heralds.”136.1 These words probably refer to the κηρύκειον, the badge of Hermes, the god of the market-place, which as a religious amulet confers inviolability on the bearer. The same fetich-badge, giving security to the herald and ambassador, assisted the development of international law; and the only spiritual sanction of treaties and covenants with other communities was a religious one, the force of the oath sworn and the ordeal-ritual which accompanied the conclusion of a treaty or contract. The temple on the borderland of different tribes served as a secure place for intertribal intercourse, commercial and festive, and might become the centre of an Amphictyony, or federal union of tribes. The constitution of the Delphic Amphictyony points back to the proto-Hellenic period. The oracles were beginning in the second millennium to play a political part, as they did with greater effect in the first. For Zeus was already at Dodona, and Apollo, the political god par excellence, at Pytho.