Note 131.1 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

Religion in first half of fourth century B.C.—Yet it is hazardous and probably false to say that the public religion of Greece was decaying visibly throughout the first half of the fourth century. Athens is as usual our chief witness. The restored democracy was all the more strenuous in matters of religion as scepticism was considered a mark of the new culture of the oligarchically-minded. The trial of Socrates is an indication of this temper. We have also evidence from this period of the occasional severity of the Athenian people against those who tried to introduce unauthorised and un-Hellenic cults. The Hellenic tradition is still strong against the contagion of the orgiastic spirit of the Anatolian religion, and it was with difficulty that the Athenian public could tolerate the wild ritual of Sabazios and the Phrygian Mother, nor even in the time of Demosthenes were the participants in it secure from danger. The early fourth-century art still exhales the religious spirit and serious ethos of the Pheidian school; and it created the type, and almost succeeded in establishing the cult, of the new Goddess of Peace, Eirene, for whose presence among them the wearied Athenians might well yearn; it also perfected the ideal of Demeter, the Madre Dolorosa of Greek myth, whose Eleusinian rites with their benign promise of salvation added power and significance to the later polytheism. The literature of this period attests the enduring vitality of the popular religion. The Attic oratory of the fourth century was more religious in its appeal than any modern has been, as might be expected of a time when there was yet no divorce conceivable between Church and State. It is not a question of the religious faith of the individual orator, but of the religious temper of the audience which is attested by many striking passages in the speeches. According to Antiphon, the punishment of sinners and the avenging of the wronged is specially the concern of the deities of the nether world131.1; Andokides avers that foul misconduct was a more heinous sin in a man who had been in the service of the Mother and the Maid of Eleusis132.1; the speech against Aristogeiton is almost as much a religious as a juridical utterance. Demosthenes may have been a sceptic at heart, believing in chance—as he once says—as the governing force of our life; but otherwise he is glowingly orthodox in respect of Attic religion and mythology, and the greatest of his speeches closes with a fervent and pious prayer.132.2 And again it is well to remind ourselves that the political or forensic orator is a truer witness to the average popular belief than the poet or the philosopher.