Chapter V · THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

The establishment of the Macedonian Empire wrought momentous changes in the civic-political religion of Hellas; and some of these were in the direction of loss and decay, while others worked for the birth of new religious life. The political significance of Apollo of Delphi, of Zeus and Athena, the divine leaders of the Polis in its counsels and ambitions, was doomed to pass away. Athena, as the warder and counsellor, was of less avail for Athens than were the Samothracian sea-deities for the victorious Demetrios.

They show the development of the idea of a humanitarian religion in that they transcend, in most cases, the limits of the old tribal and civic religion and invite the stranger; so that the members, both men and women, associate voluntarily, no longer on the ground of birth or status, but drawn together by their personal devotion to a particular deity, to whom they stand in a far more intimate and individual relation than the ordinary citizen could stand to the divinities of his tribe and city. This sense of divine fellowship might sometimes have been enhanced by a sacrament which the members partook of together; we know that this was the bond of fellowship in the Samothracian mysteries, which were beginning to appeal widely to the early Hellenistic world. A common meal at least, a love-feast or ‘Agape,’ formed the chief bond of the ‘thiasotai,’ and this was sometimes a funeral-feast commemorative of the departed brother or sister. There was nothing to prevent the thiasos choosing as its patron-deity some one of the leading divinities of traditional polytheism, to which they must not be supposed, as Foucart supposed them, to stand in any natural antagonism; therefore, for instance, there were local reasons why Greek merchants whose central meeting-point was Rhodes should form θίασοι under the protection and in the name of Zeus Xenios, the God who protects the stranger, or of Athena Lindia, the ancient and powerful divinity of Lindos, or of Helios, the prehistoric Sun-God whose personality pervaded the whole island. So far, then, the religious importance of these societies consists in their quickening influence on personal religion, in the gratification that they afforded to the individuals craving for personal union with the Godhead, also in their organisation which aroused a keener sense of religious fellowship between the members, and which later served as a model to the nascent Christian community. But in the history of the Hellenic religion their significance is even greater on another ground, namely, that they bear a most striking testimony to that fusion of East and West which it was the object of Alexander, and the mission of his successors, to effect; for many of these religious brotherhoods, whose members and organisation were Hellenic, were consecrated to foreign deities, Sabazios, Adonis, Xousares, the Syrian Goddess; so that they played undesignedly the part of missionaries in the momentous movement sometimes called the Θεοκρασία, the blending of Eastern and Western religions and divine personalities, of which the significance will be considered a little later.

In attempting to grasp what is most elusive, the inner religious sentiment of any period, it is important to remember that the author of such expression was dear to at least the cultivated public of the Hellenistic age.

As for Epicureanism, it cannot be regarded normally as a religious force; if it touched the popular mind at all its influence must have been generally in the direction of atheism or indifferentism; the only signs that it did are occasional grave-inscriptions that breathe the Epicurean spirit of unperturbed quiescence in regard to the posthumous fate of the soul.

Non-Hellenic mysteries.—The phenomenon here indicated attests the stronger vitality at this period of personal or individual, as distinct from tribal or political religion; and this was quickened also by the growth of certain non-Hellenic mysteries in the Mediterranean area in the latter centuries of Paganism, notably by the Samothracian, those of Attis and the Great Mother, the Egyptian Isis, and finally in the last period of all of Mithras. In most of these the records allow us to discover many interesting ideas that reappear in early Christianity, such, for instance, as communion with the divinity through sacrament, the mystic death and rebirth of the Catechumen, the saving efficacy of baptism and purification. These rites could satisfy the craving of the mortal to attain to the conviction of immortality and to the ecstatic consciousness of complete or temporary self-absorption in God. But in the mysteries of Sabazios and Cybele and possibly in others this sense of divinity was conveyed to the ‘mystes’ by the simulation of a holy marriage or sex-communion with the God or Goddess; and for this reason the Pagan mysteries were generally attacked by the Christian Fathers as obscene; the charge was unjust on the whole, though the psychic effect of the special act of ritual just alluded to was probably detrimental to the moral imagination.

In these strange forms of faith and speculation the clearness and sanity of the pure Hellenic intellect appear clouded and troubled, the lineaments of the old types of the Hellenic thought and imagination almost effaced. And the learning and science of the Hellenistic age stood mainly aloof from the religious forces that moved the masses of the people.

Eschatology.—But another feature that we mark in these mystic worships and mystic societies of the Hellenistic world indicates a higher aspect of religion and marks an epoch in religious aspiration. Most of them, if not all, proclaimed the immortality of the soul, a happy resurrection, a divine life after death. The Hellene who had been initiated into the Osiris faith hoped to attain immortal happiness in and through Osiris, availing himself of Egyptian ideas and Egyptian spell-formulæ. The priest of certain mysteries, probably of Attis, comforts the congregation of the faithful, sorrowing over the death of their God, with words that aver the certainty of his resurrection and by implication the hope of their own—

θαρρεῖτε μύσται τοῦ θεοῦ σεσωσμένου

“Be of good cheer, ye of the mystery of the saved God, for after our troubles there shall be to us salvation.”

This apotheosis of the mortal, so rife in this later period, may be regarded as a moral and religious evil. Yet it must not be taken too hastily as a proof of the unreality of the prevailing polytheism. And, for better or worse, it was a momentous fact belonging to the higher history of European religion; for it familiarised the Græco-Roman world with the idea of the incarnation of the Man-God.

The above is only a panoramic sketch indicating the various elements of a singularly manifold religious system. It has been impossible to touch on all the special points of interest, such as divination and the minutiæ of ritual and of the festivals; for these the student must consult special treatises. The object of this monograph has been to present the main essential features in a chronologic survey and to assign to each its significance and relative importance. The history has been adumbrated of a religion that maintained itself for nearly two thousand years on the higher plane of polytheism; a religion which, while lacking the sublimity and moral fervour of some of the Oriental creeds, made certain unique contributions to the evolution of society and the higher intellectual life of man.

By the side of the higher growths many of the products of lower and savage culture were maintained which were mainly obliterated by Christianity. It is necessary to note and appreciate these lower facts; but there is a risk of overestimating their importance and vitality. Many of these are found in all higher religions, usually in a moribund state. It is its higher achievement that makes any particular religion of importance in the history of civilisation; and we are now aware that Greek religion can claim this importance. Nor can the lower elements as a whole be shown to be the germs of the higher within the Hellenic period proper. We cannot show the evolution of the personal anthropomorphic deities of Greece from magic ritual or totemism or theriomorphism without transcending the chronologic limits of the period within which it is allowable to speak of a Hellenic people at all. The emergence of personal Gods, from whatever region or by whatever influence they emerged, is an event of very primitive history. At least we know that of the two populations whose blending made Hellenism, the indigenous Mediterranean and the Northern or Central European invader, the former possessed a personal theism of dateless antiquity; while all the evidence points to the conviction that the Aryan tribes entered Greece with certain personal deities already evolved or acquired.

We find that anthropomorphism was the strongest bias of the Hellenic religious imagination; and with this we associate his passion for idolatry and hero-worship. It is interesting for the student of Hellenic Christianity to note the influence of these tendencies on the later history of the Greek Church; and generally it has been the result of much modern research to reveal the truth that the indebtedness of Christian dogma and ritual to the later Hellenic paganism was far greater than used to be supposed.

LITERATURE

Older works, such as Welcker’s Griechische Götterlehre (3 vols., 1857-1863), and Preller’s Griechische Mythologie (2 vols., 4th ed., by C. Robert, 1887), are only useful now for their collection of facts.

Recent literature: O. Gruppe, Griechische Culte und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen, 1887; Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, 1906; L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, 5 vols. (1896-1910); Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religiongeschichte (Greek section, 1906); Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis, a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912) (both works dealing mainly with special questions and the more primitive aspects of the religion).

Treatises on special cults and special questions: Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (1884, in progress); Paulz-Wissowa, Real Encyclopædie (1894, in progress); and Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités (1873-1917); Showerman, The Great Mother of the Gods (Wisconsin, 1901); Frazer, Attis, Adonis, Osiris (2nd ed., 1910); A. Dieterich, Mutter Erde (1905); Eitrem, Hermes und die Toten (Christiania, 1909); Immerwahr, Kulte und Mythe Arkadiens (1891); S. Wide, Lakonische Kulte (1893); Usener, Götternamen (1896); cf. paper on his theory in Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor, “The Place of the Sondergötter in Greek Polytheism,” by L. R. Farnell (1907); De Visser, De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam (Leyden, 1900); E. Fehrle, Die Kultische Keuscheit im Alterthum (Giessen, 1910); cf. L. R. Farnell, Evolution of Religion (1905), Lect. iii, “The Ritual of Purification”; Th. Wáchter, Reinheitsvorschriften im grieschischen Kult (Giessen, 1910); C. Ausfeld, De Graecorum precationibus quaestiones, in Fleckeisen’s Supplement (1903); cf. L. R. Farnell, op cit., Lect. iv, “The Evolution of Prayer”; S. Reinach, various articles on Greek cults and myths in Cultes, Mythes et Religions, 3 vols. (1904-1908).

For Eschatology, Mysteries, Thiasoi, Hero-worship: A. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, 2 vols. (1829); E. Rohde, Psyche (2nd ed., 1898); A. Dieterich, Nekyia (1893); also Eine Mithras-Liturgie (1903); Jong, Das Antike Mysterien-Wesen (Leiden, 1909); Goblet d’Alviella, Eleusinia (Paris, 1903); Foucart, “Les Grands Mystères d’Eleusis” (1900), in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, xxxvii; Pringsheim, Archäologische Beiträge zur Geschichte des Eleusinischen Kults (Munich, 1905); Foucart, Associations religieuses chez les Grecs (1873); L. Weniger, Ueber das Collegium der Thyiaden (1876); Article on “Héros,” by Deneken, in Roscher’s Lexikon; Pfister, Der Reliquien-kult im Alterthum (1910).

Greek ritual and festivals: A. Mommsen, Feste der Stadt Athen (1898); P. Stengel, “Die griechischen Sacral-alterthümer,” in Iwan von Müller’s Handbuch (vol. v, 1898); id. Opferbraüche der Griechen (1910); Fritze, Die Rauchopfer bei den Griechen (1894); L. R. Farnell, “Sacramental Communion in Greek Religion,” Hibbert Journal (1903); M. P. Nillson, Griechische Feste (1906), also Studia de Dionysiis Atticis (1900); Foucart, Le culte de Dionysos en Attique (1904); A. Thomsen, “Der Trug des Prometheus,” in Archiv für Religions-Wissenschaft (1909); Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings (1902); Bouché-Leclerq, Histoire de la divination (4 vols. 1879-1881); Deubner, De Incubatione (1900); E. Samter, Geburt Hochzeit und Tod (1911).

Greek religious thought and speculation: L. Campbell, Religion in Greek Literature (1898); Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (2 vols., 1900-1902); J. Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece (1908); Decharme, La critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs des origines au temps de Plutarque (1904).

Epigraphic material: Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (passim); special collections of inscriptions bearing on Greek religion: Dittenberger, Sylloge (vol. 2), “Res Sacrae”; J. von Prott and L. Ziehen, Leges Graecorum sacrae e titulis collectae (1896-1906, in progress).

Religious monuments: Overbeck, Griechische Kunst Mythologie (1871-1887, unfinished); L. R. Farnell, Cults; J. Harrison, op. cit.; Baumeister, Denkmäler des klassischen Alterthums (1885-1888); Roscher, op. cit.; Daremberg-Saglio, op. cit.; C. Bötticher, Über den Baumkultus der Hellenen und Römer (1856).

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