Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

A summary sketch of so manifold a theme as that with which this short handbook deals will be of more value if it can present the facts in some kind of chronologic sequence.

We may conveniently distinguish four periods: the first, the prehistoric, falling mainly in the second millennium B.C. and closing with the epoch marked by the Homeric poems; the second, extending from 900 to 500 B.C., beginning with the colonial expansion of Hellas and ending before the Persian invasion; the third, from 500 to 338 B.C., including the greatest century of Greek history and closing with the battle of Chæronea and the establishment of Macedonian supremacy; the fourth and last, the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period.

The chronologic statement is embarrassed by the absence of any record of date for the institution and diffusion of most of the cults and for the growth of certain religious ideas; nor can we safely date a religious fact by the date of the author who first mentions it; a detail of ritual, a myth, a religious concept, only attested by Pausanias or a late scholiast, may descend from an age centuries before the Homeric. And our earliest inscriptions do not as yet reach back to a period earlier than the beginning of the seventh century.

For determining our view of Greek religion in the second millennium B.C., when Hellenism was in the making, the poems of Homer and Hesiod are of priceless value if they are used with cautious and trained criticism. We depend greatly also on the general inductions of comparative religion and anthropology, which may sometimes guide us rightly in this matter, especially if the anthropological comparison is drawn from more or less adjacent communities rather than from the Antipodes. We depend also on the evidence of the monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, revealing glimpses of the practices and faith of a people of high culture, whom no one would dare now to call, at least in the earlier stage of their life, Hellenic, but from whom the earliest Hellenes doubtless adopted much into their own religion.

Sketch of Homeric religion.—The poems of Homer present us with an advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. The anthropomorphic bias is dominant in the poems, plastically shaping the figures of all the divinities, except occasionally some of the lower grade, such as the river-god Skamandros. Even the vague group of nymphs, female ‘daimones’ of the rill and the mountain, while lacking individual characterisation, bear the anthropomorphic name, ‘Brides,’ or ‘young women,’ which is the root-meaning of Νύμφη. Though the gods and goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves in the form of any animal—birds by choice—yet their abiding type is human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera, still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’—the term is a complimentary epithet of women—and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions and ethical as well as artistic emotions. The highest among them are not imagined as Nature-powers, bound up with or immanent in the forces and departments of the natural world, for such a description applies only to his wind-Gods and nymphs and gods of river and sea; also, though more loosely, to his Helios, the God of the Sun; to beings in fact that count little in his religious world. It scarcely applies to Poseidon, for though his province is the sea, and some of his functions and appellatives ‘the girdler of the earth,’ ‘the earth-shaker,’ ‘he of the dark blue locks’ are derived from it, he is also the builder of the walls of Troy, the family deity of the house of Nestor, and the God of horses. It does not describe at all his mode of imagining and presenting Apollo, Hera, Athena, Hermes and others. There is no hint that these divinities were conceived by him as nature-powers or as evolved from any part of the natural world. The High God, Zeus, though specially responsible for the atmospheric and celestial phenomena, is not identified with the thunder or even with the sky, though a few phrases may reveal the influence of an earlier animistic conception of the divine sky. His religious world, in short, is morphologically neither a system of polydaimonism nor one of pantheism in which a divine force is regarded as universally immanent in the world of things; but is constructed on the lines of personal theism.

We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not notably different from the Homeric.

Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the cause of all their evils.

Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism. We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe; it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear.

This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a product of a much later period, and that the religion which they enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of Peisistratos certain religious forces were rife, and certain religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.

Still less reasonable is it to imagine that Homer constructs a religious world out of his own brain. We must suppose that he reflects something real and contemporary. Only we must guard ourselves from the serious error of supposing that he reflects the whole. Much is doubtless missing in his account which we may be able to supply from Hesiod and other sources by means of reasonable hypotheses.

The assumption is, then, that the Homeric poems present us with a part-picture of the religion that prevailed among some of the leading Greek communities before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and the Ionic colonisation of Asia Minor.

We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness.

We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived from the life of the family could be applied to them; although we can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine relationships—the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance—do not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.

We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena, Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already ‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to the Olympian family, are equally warm on the side of Troy and are treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he was therefore supposed to guard.

But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of the composite whole.

Proto-Hellenic period.—The very high development of this Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful analysis of the later cult-records.

Family religion.—Society in the latter half of the second millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had evolved the monogamic family. Demeter—whose Aryan descent is proved by her name—was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the religion of the family, which was the life-source of much of the private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.

Again, the wider kinship-groups of the φρατρίαι and γένη are obviously pre-Homeric, and doubtless these had been consecrated by aboriginal religion, though we cannot date precisely the emergence of such cult-forms as Zeus Φράτριος and Athena Φρατρία, the deities who were specially concerned with the constitution and rights of the kindred-group.

Political religion.—Further, it is fairly clear that already in this first stage the religion had become closely interfused with the higher political and social life. Although the greater part of the population lived still under the tribal system in scattered villages—κωμηδόν—yet the ‘polis’ had already arisen; and in certain cases we may surmise for it a religious origin, where its name is derived from the personal name or the shrine of some divinity. Examples are ‘Athenai,’ Alalkomenai, Potniai, perhaps Megara. In these cases the temple must have been the nucleus around which grew up the secular habitations; and the deity of the temple would become supreme in the political religion. Athena had won this position at Athens and probably elsewhere in the immemorial pre-Homeric past; and this explains her character in the Homeric poem as the divinity who more than all others inspires political wisdom and counsel. Various indications point in fact to the belief that the earliest development of the city life was closely bound up with the cults of Zeus and Athena; for no other divinity was ever styled Polieus or Polias by any Greek State; and this agrees mainly with the presentation of them in the Homeric poems. The unanimity of the tradition points back to the second millennium, as the period when this political characterisation of the two deities was determined. And this view is strikingly confirmed by the records concerning the ritual and the establishment of the cult of Zeus ‘Polieus’ on the Athenian Akropolis, an institution attributed to Kekrops and marking probably the Hellenisation of Attica; the singular features of the ritual and the association preserved in its legend of Attica with Crete indicate a high antiquity, when agriculture was the economic basis of the political as well as the religious life.

We may believe that other cults besides the two just mentioned played their part in the political growth of the pre-Homeric world. The marketplace, the cradle of political oratory, had become sacred ground, as Homer himself attests; and this consecration was probably marked by the presence of some ‘agalma,’ a sacred stone of Hermes, for instance. Apollo, also, had early divested himself of the aboriginal character of the god of the wood and of the homeless migratory host, had become a builder of cities, and had established himself in the city’s streets with a change in the meaning of his title, Αγυιεύς, once an appellative of the Way-God who guided the host through the wild, now of the deity who guarded the ways of the city. And already, before Homer, his shrine at Pytho was beginning to acquire wealth and political importance as an oracular centre of consultation.

Art an aspect of religion.—And other parts of the higher activity of man had been consecrated by the polytheism of which Homer inherits and develops the tradition. The earliest imagination of the Hellenes appears to have perceived a daimoniac potency—a ‘numen’ as we may say—in the arts of song and music; and this had sometimes crystallised into the personal forms of divinities, into such interesting embodiments as the Muses or the Charites, who must have belonged to the pre-Homeric popular theism. The latter group had grown up at the Bœotian Orchomenos, an old centre of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture. It may be that at one time they had no other than the purely physical significance of vegetation-powers; but we only understand their value for Homer if we suppose that before his time they had come to be associated with the arts and the delight of human life. We discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher and lower religions it was unique in this.

Proto-Hellenic ritual.—It seems, then, that even in the earliest period the polytheism was no longer on the most primitive plane. And we gather the same impression from what is revealed to us of the earliest forms of Greek ritual. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are full of information concerning the liturgy or cult-service with which the poets were familiar; what they tell us avails first of all for the period of the eleventh to the eighth century. But ritual takes long to develop, and once fixed is the most abiding element in religion. It is not too bold, then, to take the Homeric account as vouching for a tradition that goes back at least to the later centuries of the second millennium.

It is a difficult question how we are to estimate and how far we can trust the Homeric evidence on this important point of religion. Even if we trust it so far as to say that the Achæans at least practised no real worship of the dead, it yet remains probable that they found it existing here and there in the lands in which they settled.

But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of terror. And although in the earliest period certain demoniac personages such as Medousa—identical in form and perhaps in character with the snake-locked horse-headed Demeter—may have loomed large and terrible in popular cult, and afterwards faded wholly from actual worship or survived in the lower strata of ineffectual folklore, yet the more civilising imagination had also been operative in the religion of the second millennium. The monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion reveal scarcely an element of terror. And at some period before Homer the kindly deity, Hermes, had assumed the function of the leader of souls. As regards the eschatological views of the prehistoric Greek we can say little, unless we believe that Homer was his spokesman; and such belief would be very hazardous. The earliest communities may have had no special hopes concerning the departed soul; we have no reason for thinking that the mysteries which came to offer some promise of happiness in the world to come had as yet proclaimed such a doctrine; the earliest form of the Eleusinia may have been that of a secret society organised for agrarian purposes. But, on the other hand, there is no proof that the primitive mind of the Hellene brooded much on the problem of death, or was at all possessed with morbid feeling about it; and in pre-Homeric times he must have been freer from care in this matter than he was in the later centuries, if we accept the view of certain scholars that the elaborate ritual of ‘Katharsis’ or purification, which was mainly dependent on the idea of the impurity of death, ghosts and bloodshed, was wholly the creation of post-Homeric days.

Cruder religious conceptions in the earliest period.—So far, the religious phenomena discoverable with some certainty or some probability in the earliest period of Greek history indicate a theistic system of a somewhat advanced type. But doubtless we must reckon with the presence of much else that was cruder and more savage. When we find in the later records ample evidence of the lower products of the religious imagination, the products of ‘animism’ or ‘fetichism’ or ‘theriomorphism’ or ‘polydaimonism,’ more inarticulate and uncouth embodiments of the concept of divinity, or darker and more cruel ritual than that which Homer describes, such as human sacrifice, the driving out of the scapegoat, blood-magic for controlling winds or finding water, no reasonable critic will call all these things post-Homeric because they may not be mentioned in Homer, or suppose that the pure-minded Hellenes were seduced into borrowing them from the Orientals, or that they were spontaneous products of a later degenerate age. The view taken of them by those who have in recent times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a higher enlightenment; no fanatic prophet arose, and the protests of philosophy were comparatively gentle and ineffective. Only a few religious forms of an undeveloped society that might shock a more civilised conscience were gradually abandoned; most of them were tolerated, some in a moribund condition, under a more advanced religion, with which they might be seen to clash if any one cared to reason about them. Therefore a chapter or a statement in Pausanias may really be a record of the pre-Homeric age; and in this way we can supplement the partial picture that has been given above.

Magic.—Now that which is here called ‘animatism’ is a religious feeling which may inspire real worship, but is more liable than pure theism to be associated with magic; and it is reasonable to believe that magic was in vogue in prehistoric Hellas, not necessarily in antagonism to religion, but practised for purposes of the community as well as for private ends.

Human sacrifices.—This attempted presentation of the first era of Greek religion must raise the question as to the practice within it of the ritual of human sacrifice. For we are apt to associate this with a primitive society and with a crude or savage religion. But this association is not borne out by the religious history of mankind. The practice has been found in societies highly developed both in morality and civilisation; and the a priori argument is dangerous, whether we apply it in one way or the other.

Summary account of the first period.—A detailed account of the pre-Homeric religious age must at many points remain doubtful and hypothetical; but certain definite and important facts may be established. Anthropomorphism, in a degree not found in the earliest Roman religion, was already prevalent, even dominant; and nearly all the leading personal divinities of the later polytheism had already emerged; only Dionysos had not yet crossed the border from Thrace; Asklepios, dimly known to Homer, was merely the local deity of a small Thessalian community, Pan merely the daimon of flocks in remote Arcadia. Cretan religion, also personal in its imagination and mainly anthropomorphic, had left its deep imprint on the mainland; and its divine personalities, such as Rhea, the Mother of the Gods, and Aphrodite were soon adopted by the northern immigrants, but not at first into high positions. The deity was generally imagined not as a spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism than to polytheism.

Finally a study of all the facts and probabilities may convince a careful student that the origin of Greek polytheism as a whole from simpler forms cannot be found in this earliest period. In the second millennium, which is the starting-point for Hellenic history proper, we cannot discern the ‘making of a God’ (unless we mean the building-up of his more complex character), nor do we start with a godless period. We may well believe that in the history of mankind theism was evolved from animism or polydaimonism; we may believe the much more doubtful theory that anthropomorphism arises from a previous theriomorphism, and there may still be some who are convinced that theriomorphism implies a totemistic society. But, at any rate, these various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two strains—the Northern and the Mediterranean—had blended into the Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the simpler, forms of religious imagination operate together throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. And the attempt to unlock many of its mysteries by the key of totemism has been abandoned by those who recognise that many of the views concerning this social phenomenon and its religious importance, prevalent in a former generation, were erroneous.