Note 150.1 — Chapter VIII · Religion and Morality.

Looking now at the moral code as regulating the relations of members of the same tribe or community, we cannot doubt that clan-morality was already highly developed in the proto-Hellenic period: the rights and duties of kinsmen are the basis of this morality, and these were consecrated by the worship around the altar of Zeus “in the courtyard,” which may have been a primitive religious gathering-place for the kinsfolk of the early Aryan household. Homer is our first witness for the cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος,150.1 but it is evident that it had been long in existence before his time. The earliest moral duty that the tie of kinship imposes is the maintenance of peace and goodwill, and as the kindreds grow into a political community, this becomes the basis of political morality and the corner-stone of the religion of the city. The Homeric age, and probably their predecessors, have attained this ethical religious idea; and though Homer is the first to give voice to it, we will not suppose that he discovered it: “outcast from clan, from holy law, and holy hearth is he who longs for bitter battle among the people of his own township.”150.2 And to this early age we must also impute the religious morality of the monogamic family: the son fears the curse of the father and of the mother, even of the elder brother: “thou knowest that the powers of judgment defend the right of the elder-born”—Iris says warningly to Poseidon.150.3 The Erinyes are specially charged with the preservation of the morality of the family and clan, and with the punishment of the two chief offences against the sacred blood of the kin, murder and incest. Of the first, enough has been said; the religious view of the earliest Greeks concerning the second is first attested by Homer, who mentions “the woes of Oedipus that the Furies of his mother bring to pass for him”;150.4 he is thinking more of the incestuous marriage than of the parricide. As regards ordinary adultery, it is only from the later period of Greek literature that we hear protests against it as a sin, though the sentiment of moral indignation against the adulterer is no doubt pre-Homeric. One or two Greek myths that may reflect very early thought express the severe reprobation on the part of the father of unchastity in his unmarried daughter; myths telling of cruel sentences of death imposed for the offence. But these suggest no religious feeling; the sentiment may well have arisen from the fact that under the patriarchal system the virgin-daughter was the more marriageable and commanded a higher bride-price.