Note 48 — Chapter IV · HEROES

Here some reference might have been expected to Fustel de Coulanges’ brilliant and penetrating work La Cité antique. In that book the attempt is made to fix upon ancestor-worship, la religion du foyer et des ancêtres, as the root of all the higher types of worship (among the Greeks: only that part of the book concerns us here); and to show how out of these ancestor-worshipping aggregations, begun by the family, larger communities of ever-widening membership developed, and finally out of these the πόλις itself—the highest and most extensive political as well as religious community of all. For the author of that book the proof of his theory lies entirely in the simple logical consequence with which the details and, as far as we know it, the development of both private and public law follow from the original causes adopted by him essentially as postulates. A strictly historical proof that should not have to deduce the original causes from the results but should start from known beginnings and demonstrate the actual existence of every step was indeed an impossibility. The whole historical process must have been already finished when our knowledge first begins: for Homer shows us the πόλις and its component parts (κρῖν’ ἄνδρας κατὰ φῦλα κατὰ φρήτρας Ἀγάμεμνον) as well as the worship of the gods as fully established and developed. It is no disparagement of the valuable and fruitful suggestions made in that book if we say that its leading idea—as far as Greece is concerned—cannot be considered as more than an intuition, which though it may be just and true, must remain unproved. If there ever was a time when ancestor-worship was the only Greek religion at least we cannot see into that dim epoch long anterior to all tradition. To that remote period long before both the all-powerful religion of the gods and the earliest records of the Greek genius, even the narrow and slippery path of inference and reconstruction will hardly lead us. Natural as it might seem, therefore, so far as the subject itself is concerned to deal with such questions, I have taken no notice in the present work of any attempts to deduce Greek religion from an original sole worship of ancestors (such as have been made by many scholars besides F. de Coulanges both in England and in Germany).