Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

We can now pursue the enquiry nearer the borderline of the historic period, as it is conventionally termed.

The central motives of his oldest form of ritual were the birth and death of the God, a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology, though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenæan creed. But the death of this God was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull or the goat or the boy whom they rent and devoured was supposed to be his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage and at times cannibalistic communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act and—we may suppose—by the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants the psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy, which might show itself in wild outburst of mental and physical force, and the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment in which the worshipper escaped the limits of his own nature and achieved a temporary sense of identity with the God; and such union with divinity might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired and proclaimed for its own sake, as a more intense mood of life. This religion preached no morality and could ill adapt itself to civic life; its ideal was supranormal psychic energy. The process whereby it was half captured and half tamed by the young Hellenic spirit forms one of the most interesting chapters in Hellenism.

It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired its definite instincts and bias. The ninth and the eighth centuries witnessed the diffusion of epic literature, the rise of lyric poetry, the emergence of the ‘eikon’ or idol in religious art, and generally the development of cities and civic life; and it is essential to estimate the religious influence of these forces.

Progress of anthropomorphism.—It is interesting to mark within this second period the various effects of the now regnant anthropomorphism.

The expansion of the civic system in this second period, due to extended colonisation and commerce, induced a development of law and an expansion of moral and religious ideas. One of the most vital results of the institution of the Polis was the widening of the idea of kinship. For in theory the city was a congregation of kinsmen, a combination of tribes, phratries, and families, wider or narrower associations framed on a kin-basis; and it gradually evolved the belief, pregnant of legal and moral developments, that every citizen was of kin to every other.

In consonance with the conception of the State as an extended family, we find certain ancient family-cults taken over into the religion of the Polis. As the private family was knit together by the worship of the Hearth in the hall and of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, ‘the God of the Garth,’ in the courtyard of the house, so the City has its common Hestia or Holy Hearth, upon which often a perpetual fire was maintained in its ‘Prytaneion’ or Common Hall; and the Cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος was established in ancient days on the Akropolis of Athens. The organisation of the ‘phratries’ was consecrated to the high deities, Zeus Athena and—among some Ionic communities—to Aphrodite; and the decisions of the ‘phrateres’ or ‘Brothers’ on questions of adoption and legitimacy of citizens were delivered from the altar of Zeus Phratrios; while the union of the local districts or ‘demes’ was sanctified by the cult of Zeus or Aphrodite Pandemos, the God or Goddess of ‘all the demes.’ Also, the Polis organised and maintained the kindred-festivals of commemoration proper to the family or gens or phratria, the All-Souls celebration of the dead which was held at the end of the Anthesteria; the γενέσια, the funeral feasts of the γένη; the ‘Apatouria,’ the joint festival of the phratries; while the great achievement of the consolidation of the scattered groups into the single city was celebrated at Athens by the festival of the Συνοικέσια, the ‘Union of all the Houses,’ and the Panathenaia, the all-Attic feast of Athena.

Nor in this second period were such heroic honours reserved for the remote ancestor or the great king or warrior of old, but were sometimes paid to the recently dead, to the men who had served the State well by arms or by counsel. On the assumption that Lykourgos of Sparta was a real man—and no other theory that bears scrutiny has been put forward about him—his case is the earliest recorded instance of the ‘heroising’ of a personage of the historic period. A great stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. The most natural person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the colony, the κτίστης or ἀρχηγέτης as he was called; and we may regard it as the usual rule that, when he died, he would be buried within the city and his tomb would become a ‘ἡρῶον’ and would be visited yearly with annual offerings.

We may safely assume that the growing interest of the States in hero-cult intensified the family aspect of the State-religion; the hero as the glorious kinsman is invited to the sacrifices of the higher deities, and to the hospitable ritual known as the ‘theoxenia’ in which the God himself is the host.

A further result of such a system is that the State-divinities become also the patrons and guardians of the family morality, Zeus and Hera, for instance, the supervisors of the human marriage and of the duties of married life; and copious records present the High God as the protector of the father’s right; of the tie that binds together the brethren, the sisters, the kinsmen. While such a religion was a living force, it was not likely that the family could assert itself as against the State; to marry healthfully and early, to beget vigorous children as defenders of the State and the family graves, to cherish and honour one’s parents, to protect the orphan, these were patriotic religious duties that were inspired by the developed State-religion and strenuously preached by the best ethical teachers of Greece. The State being the family ‘writ large,’ private morality and public could not clash. The brutal action of Kreon in the Antigone is equally an attack on the religion of the State as on that of the family; and it was not till the fifth century that the claim of private conscience as against the family and the State could arise or that the question could be asked “Whether the good man was really the same as the good citizen.”

Influence of political religion on law.—Of still greater interest is an important advance in criminal law, discernible as early as the eighth century, which may be traced partly to the growth of the City, with its extended idea of kinship, partly to the growing intensity of the belief in the power and significance of the spirits of the dead.

Influence of Delphi and Crete.—In this post-Homeric development of a system of purification from bloodshed, the legends suggest that Crete and Delphi played a momentous part. In the great island, the cradle of European culture, the cult of Zeus had early attached to itself certain Cathartic ideas, probably of Dionysiac origin. And probably in the pre-Homeric period the influence of Crete had reached Delphi; while the legend of the migration of Apollo Delphinios from Crete to Delphi, and the story that the God himself must go to this island to be purified from the blood of Python, belong to the second period with which we are dealing.

We have reason to believe that the Delphic God—through the agency of his politic priesthood—was asserting his claim in the eighth and seventh centuries to be the dictator in the matter of purification from homicide, and thus to satisfy the cravings of an awakening conscience. This claim may have been suggested partly by the fear of competition with the spreading Dionysiac religion, which also brought with it a ‘Kathartic’ message, and with which the Delphic priesthood were wise enough to agree quickly; partly also by the aboriginal nature of Apollo, who was immemorially φοῖβος or ‘pure.’ Though the claim was not universally admitted and the Apolline jurisdiction could not obliterate the function of other divinities in this matter, yet it was powerful and effective of much that was vital both to law and religion. Of the early procedure at Delphi we know nothing. If the god exercised discretion in his grant of purification, if he refused, for instance, to purify the deliberate and cold-blooded murderer, here was the opportunity for the emergence of a civilised law of homicide. It may not have been until the seventh century that any Hellenic state could express in a legal establishment its consciousness of the difference between the act of murder and the act of justifiable or accidental homicide. The earliest that we know of was the law-court, ἐπί Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the Dolphin-God”—established at Athens under the patronage of the Cretan-Delphic God to try cases where the homicide was admitted and justification was pleaded. In this, as in other Attic courts that dealt with the same offence, rites of purification were often an essential adjunct of the ceremony. The typical legend that enshrines the early ideas of ‘Katharsis’ and turns on the question of justifiable homicide is the legend of Orestes, which had spread around the Peloponnese and penetrated Attica as early as the eighth century, and later became Pan-Hellenic. Apollo, as a divine agent, appears in it first, as far as we have any literary record, in the lyric of Stesichoros, and at some indeterminate date in this period undertook the purification of the matricide.

But its chief religious achievements were to bring some principle of unity and authority into the complex and shifting aggregate of Greek polytheism, and to deepen the impression on the Hellenic mind of the divine ordering of the world; and the fruits of this teaching we gather in the works of Attic tragedy and in the history of Herodotus.

In view of the history of other temple institutions of like power among other peoples—the Mesopotamian, for instance—we may be surprised that the Delphic priesthood made no attempt to impose Apollo as the supreme God upon the Hellenic states. The author of the Homeric hymn, composed partly under Delphic influences, exalts Apollo as high as he dares; but neither in this nor in any Delphic utterance is Apollo presented as more than the minister of Zeus, the mouthpiece of the supreme Father-God, the tradition of whose supremacy among the Aryan Hellenes had been fixed fast by Homer and the Homeridai.

Nor did the Delphic Apollo succeed in achieving a monopoly of divination; for the spirit of local independence was opposed to any divine monopoly in any department of life. And other oracles, such as some of those on the Asia Minor shore, acquired considerable prestige, especially in the later period when the influence of Delphi had declined. But from the eighth till the beginning of the fifth century, the Pythian is the only one of the many mantic institutions that is to be regarded as a vital force of Pan-Hellenism.

The games of Greece.—As another important phenomenon belonging to the earlier part of this second period we note the emergence and development of the great Hellenic games. Some recent theorists have supposed that all the public athletic contests in Greece arose directly from some religious ritual belonging to the cult either of the gods or of the dead hero. The evidence is faulty and the ritualistic origin of these institutions is unproven. But a common temple-worship undoubtedly gave the opportunity and the occasion to the development of the four Great Games, and from the beginning they were placed beneath the ægis of religion. And these must be reckoned as among the strongest Pan-Hellenic influences, evoking and strengthening the consciousness of nationality. For in the sixth century the whole of Hellas, eastern and western, was represented at Olympia, Pytho, the Isthmus and Nemea; here was maintained the ‘truce of God’ between the jealous or hostile communities; and at Olympia once in every four years the Pan-Hellenes offered a common homage to their aboriginal Father-God.

We must then regard the great games and the Pythian establishment as momentous factors in the religious national life, as tending to evolve a religion of a broader compass than the narrow tribal type of the remote past. And they concern the higher mental history of the race because most of them, and notably the Pythian, included competitions of art and literature; and thus they assisted in establishing the specially Hellenic theory of the divine character of the artistic and intellectual life.

There were other festal and public meetings of a more exclusively religious purpose that also served to deepen in the various states the consciousness of spiritual unity, and often, where the great lyric poets composed hymns for the occasion, to exalt and illuminate the ideal conception of the divinity; the Pan-Ionic Delian festival of Apollo, for instance, of which the splendour developed in the early post-Homeric age and with the growing prosperity of the new Ionic colonies, must have contributed much to the building up of the peculiarly Hellenic ideal of Apollo; and the Homeric hymn, inspired by this occasion, is the earliest record of the national consciousness of the Ionic race.

Having entered Attica from Bœotia and been adopted into the Attic state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor coast, it gradually, in the eighth and seventh centuries captured most of the States of the Peloponnese, of the islands and the more distant colonies.

The Hellenic culture of Dionysos forms one of the most interesting chapters in the spiritual career of Hellenism; for the taming of the wild Thracian God, the transformation of him into a civic deity, the disciplining and the adaptation of the thiasoi of the Maenads to the uses of an orderly state-religion, were not the least among the achievements of the Hellenic genius. And as the state-religion of these centuries had no eschatologic theory, so it seems to have discarded everywhere whatever eschatologic promise the Dionysiac religion proclaimed on its entrance into Greece. Yet, in spite of the chastening influence of the civic spirit, the worship preserved much of its distinctive tone and religious power; evoking a special mood unknown in the other cults; while even the savage form of sacrament, in which the God was devoured in his human or animal-incarnation, survived with some modifications in Tenedos and Chios down to a late period. The history, then, of the Dionysiac religion concerns the account of the development of the sacramental idea in the Mediterranean. It concerns also the history of Hellenic culture; for one of its modes of expression was a peculiar type of emotional music, accompanying the Dionysiac hymn known as the dithyramb, which has been regarded, though probably erroneously, as the parent of Attic tragedy. Its main contribution to the polytheism of Greece was its stimulation of a warmer and stronger religious faith; and its special later service to popular religious theory was the refining and brightening of men’s thoughts and sentiments concerning the life after death and the powers of the lower world, with whom the mild and genial God was generally identified or associated.

Orphic thiasoi.—But its highest importance is found rather in the esoteric than in the external or popular domain of Hellenic religion. For, perhaps as early as the seventh century, the cult of Dionysos was raised to a higher power by the rise and diffusion of the Orphic brotherhoods or ‘thiasoi’ who worshipped this deity under various mystic names. The study of Orphism is of the highest interest and complexity; and it is only possible here to indicate its general features and significance. The preachers of the Orphic doctrines are the first propagandists or missionaries that we can discover in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. For they had a definite message, and ignoring the gentile and civic barriers of the old political religion, they preached it, if not to all mankind, at least to all the Hellenes. It was a message fraught with some new and momentous ideas, whose real import we have been able to gather in part from the now famous gold-tablets found in the graves of Crete and South Italy, and containing parts of a metric Orphic liturgy and creed that is a product at latest of the fifth, if not the sixth, century B.C. Combining these with some passages in Pindar’s Odes and Plato’s Dialogues, we can recover in outline the doctrine of early Orphism. It proclaimed a theory, unfamiliar to native Greek mythology and religion, that the soul of man is divine and of divine origin; that the body is its impure prison-house where it is in danger of contracting stain; that by elaborate purifications and abstinences the soul might retain its purity, and by sacramental and magic methods the pure soul might enjoy in this life and in the next full communion with God. Preoccupied with the problem of the life after death, the Orphic mystics evolved the concept of Purgatory, a mode of posthumous punishment temporary and purificatory; also, if we can trust certain indications in Pindar and Plato, the dogma of reincarnation or more specially of a triple cycle of lives both in this world and the next. Students of religious philosophy have noted here the striking resemblance to Buddhistic thought; and have considered whether Indian speculation could have cast its influence so far westward at so early a time.

Eleusinian mysteries.—The Eleusinia or Mysteries of Eleusis were a more national and Pan-Hellenic institution than the Orphica, but of somewhat similar influence and purpose. Originally they may have been merely the tribal mysteries of an agrarian society to which only the adult members of the Eleusinian community were admitted. But when our earliest record reveals them, namely, the Homeric hymn to Demeter which cannot be later than the close of the seventh century, they have already enlarged their borders and their scope. For they appear there as appealing to the whole Hellenic world, and their special promise to the initiated is the happiness of the soul after death. Having once transcended the tribal limits, they seem to have imposed no conditions on the aspirants for admission except the possession of Hellenic speech and purity from actual stain; the initiation was open to women and occasionally to slaves. Nor does their influence and the power of their appeal appear to have waned until the introduction of Christianity. Many scholars have laboured to solve the problems concerning their ritual, their doctrine and their inner significance. It has been thought that their chief attractiveness may have lain in their preservation of a higher sacramental conception of the sacrifice that had died out in the ordinary public ritual; that the initiate drank of a sacred cup in which were mystically infused the very life and substance of the kindly Earth-Mother, with whom their own being was thus transcendentally united. But more careful criticism shows that, though a simple form of sacrament was part of the preliminary service, the real pivot of the mystery was not this but a solemn pageant in which certain sacred things fraught with mystic power were shown to the eyes of the initiated, who also were allowed to witness mimetic performances showing the action and passion of a divine drama, the Abduction of the Daughter, the sorrow and long search of the Mother, the Holy Marriage of reconciliation, possibly the birth of a holy infant.

In the great mysteries the agrarian significance, though discoverable and associated with simple agrarian magic, was overshadowed by higher and more spiritual religion. And elsewhere in the State-festivals we note this same phenomenon of progress in this second period. Old-world utilitarian rites of agriculture and fertility were often taken over by the expanding Polis and received an artistic elaboration that disguised their original significance for the primitive peasant and raised them to a higher plane of social religion. This interesting process can be best studied in following the detailed records of the Laconian Karneia and Hyakinthia, the Delphic Pythia, the Attic Panathenaia: we can feelingly appreciate in these the potent influence of the lyric poetry, the music, and the art of early Greece, shaping and elevating men’s imagination of divinity.

By the close of this second period—c. 500 B.C.—the Hellenic national consciousness had realised itself in respect of intellectual culture, ethics and religion. Zeus Hellanios, the tribal God, is becoming Panhellanios. The age of the tyrants contributed much to the growth of Pan-Hellenism; Peisistratos something to the idea of a national religion, in that he seems to have worked zealously for the organisation and expansion of the Eleusinian mysteries. The cult of Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of civic worship. But the two most striking phenomena in the spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly, the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces affecting the life of the popular religion.

Yet in this early speculation of the sixth century the parting of the ways has not yet been reached for physical science and religion; the cosmic theory is expressed in spiritual and animistic rather than in materialistic terms; for Empedokles Love and Strife are creative principles, in the view of Thales the magnet has a soul and all things are full of divine potencies. The great movement of Ionic thought was indeed adaptable to a high pantheistic or animistic creed, but not to the personal polytheism of the Hellenes, though most of the philosophers do not appear to have been vehement protestants. And at first their protests could have influenced only the minds of a few; not before the fifth century was the popular State-religion obliged to take notice of it.

His worship, then, must have received a strong stimulus from this new form of literature which rapidly achieved popularity and appealed directly to a larger public than the other. And his character thus undergoes a singular transformation; the wild God of barbaric origin comes to take rank by the side of Apollo and the Graces as a divinity of culture and education, the inspirer of one of the greatest of Hellenic arts. Here again, as in the cults of Apollo, Athena and the Muses, we mark the characteristically Hellenic fusion of art and religion; and the history of the dithyramb, the Dionysiac hymn which may have been the parent of the drama and which was wedded to a peculiar mode of music and rhythm, is an important chapter in the history of European music.