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Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray, [1925], at sacred-texts.com

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II

THE OLYMPIAN CONQUEST

I. Origin of the Olympians

The historian of early Greece must find himself often on the watch for a particular cardinal moment, generally impossible to date in time and sometimes hard even to define in terms of development, when the clear outline that we call Classical Greece begins to take shape out of the mist. It is the moment when, as Herodotus puts it, 'the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarian, as more intelligent and more emancipated from silly nonsense'.39_1 In the eighth century b. c., for instance, so far as our remains indicate, there cannot have been much to show that the inhabitants of Attica and Boeotia and the Peloponnese were markedly superior to those of, say, Lycia or Phrygia, or even Epirus. By the middle of the fifth century the difference is enormous. On the one side is Hellas, on the other the motley tribes of 'barbaroi'.

When the change does come and is consciously felt we may notice a significant fact about it. It does not announce itself as what it was, a new thing in the p. 40 world. It professes to be a revival, or rather an emphatic realization, of something very old. The new spirit of classical Greece, with all its humanity, its intellectual life, its genius for poetry and art, describes itself merely as being 'Hellenic'—like the Hellenes. And the Hellenes were simply, as far as we can make out, much the same as the Achaioi, one of the many tribes of predatory Northmen who had swept down on the Aegean kingdoms in the dawn of Greek history.40_1

This claim of a new thing to be old is, in varying degrees, a common characteristic of great movements. The Reformation professed to be a return to the Bible, the Evangelical movement in England a return to the Gospels, the High Church movement a return to the early Church. A large element even in the French Revolution, the greatest of all breaches with the past, had for its ideal a return to Roman republican virtue or to the simplicity of the natural man.40_2 I noticed quite lately a speech of an American Progressive leader claiming that his principles were simply those of Abraham Lincoln. The tendency is due in part to the almost insuperable difficulty of really inventing a new word to denote a new thing. It is so much easier to take an existing word, especially a famous word with fine associations, and twist it into a new sense. In part, no doubt, it comes from mankind's natural love p. 41 for these old associations, and the fact that nearly all people who are worth much have in them some instinctive spirit of reverence. Even when striking out a new path they like to feel that they are following at least the spirit of one greater than themselves.

The Hellenism of the sixth and fifth centuries was to a great extent what the Hellenism of later ages was almost entirely, an ideal and a standard of culture. The classical Greeks were not, strictly speaking, pure Hellenes by blood. Herodotus, and Thucydides41_1 are quite clear about that. The original Hellenes were a particular conquering tribe of great prestige, which attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it, imitate it, and call themselves by its name. The Spartans were, to Herodotus, Hellenic; the Athenians on the other hand were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain time 'changed into Hellenes and learnt the language'. In historical times we cannot really find any tribe of pure Hellenes in existence, though the name clings faintly to a particular district, not otherwise important, in South Thessaly. Had there been any undoubted Hellenes with incontrovertible pedigrees still going, very likely the ideal would have taken quite a different name. But where no one's ancestry would bear much inspection, the only way to show you were a true Hellene was to behave as such: that is, to approximate to some constantly rising ideal of what the true Hellene should be. In all probability if a Greek of the fifth century, like Aeschylus or even Pindar, had met a group of the real Hellenes or Achaioi of the Migrations, he would have set them down as so many obvious and flaming barbarians.

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We do not know whether the old Hellenes had any general word to denote the surrounding peoples ('Pelasgians and divers other barbarous tribes'42_1) whom they conquered or accepted as allies.42_2 In any case by the time of the Persian Wars (say 500 b. c.) all these tribes together considered themselves Hellenized, bore the name of 'Hellenes', and formed a kind of unity against hordes of 'barbaroi' surrounding them on every side and threatening them especially from the east.

Let us consider for a moment the dates. In political history this self-realization of the Greek tribes as Hellenes against barbarians seems to have been first felt in the Ionian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, where the 'sons of Javan' (Yawan = Ἰάων) clashed as invaders against the native Hittite and Semite. It was emphasized by a similar clash in the further colonies in Pontus and in the West. If we wish for a central moment as representing this self-realization of Greece, I should be inclined to find it in the reign of Pisistratus (560-527 b. c.) when that monarch made, as it were, the first sketch of an Athenian empire based on alliances and took over to Athens the leadership of the Ionian race.

In literature the decisive moment is clear. It came when, in Mr. Mackail's phrase, 'Homer came to Hellas'.42_3 The date is apparently the same, and the p. 43 influences at work are the same. It seems to have been under Pisistratus that the Homeric Poems, in some form or other, came from Ionia to be recited in a fixed order at the Panathenaic Festival, and to find a canonical form and a central home in Athens till the end of the classical period. Athens is the centre from which Homeric influence radiates over the mainland of Greece. Its effect upon literature was of course enormous. It can be traced in various ways. By the content of the literature, which now begins to be filled with the heroic saga. By a change of style which emerges in, say, Pindar and Aeschylus when compared with what we know of Corinna or Thespis. More objectively and definitely it can be traced in a remarkable change of dialect. The old Attic poets, like Solon, were comparatively little affected by the epic influence; the later elegists, like Ion, Euenus, and Plato, were steeped in it.43_1

In religion the cardinal moment is the same. It consists in the coming of Homer's 'Olympian Gods', and that is to be the subject of the present essay. I am not, of course, going to describe the cults and characters of the various Olympians. For that inquiry the reader will naturally go to the five learned volumes p. 44 of my colleague, Dr. Farnell. I wish merely to face certain difficult and, I think, hitherto unsolved problems affecting the meaning and origin and history of the Olympians as a whole.

Herodotus in a famous passage tells us that Homer and Hesiod 'made the generations of the Gods for the Greeks and gave them their names and distinguished their offices and crafts and portrayed their shapes' (2. 53). The date of this wholesale proceeding was, he thinks, perhaps as much as four hundred years before his own day (c. 430 b. c.) but not more. Before that time the Pelasgians—i. e. the primitive inhabitants of Greece as opposed to the Hellenes—were worshipping gods in indefinite numbers, with no particular names; many of them appear as figures carved emblematically with sex-emblems to represent the powers of fertility and generation, like the Athenian 'Herms'. The whole account bristles with points for discussion, but in general it suits very well with the picture drawn in the first of these essays, with its Earth Maidens and Mothers and its projected Kouroi. The background is the pre-Hellenic 'Urdummheit'; the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropomorphic Olympian family, as defined in the Homeric epos and, more timidly, in Hesiod. But of Hesiod we must speak later.

Now who are these Olympian Gods and where do they come from? Homer did not 'make' them out of nothing. But the understanding of them is beset with problems.

In the first place why are they called 'Olympian'? Are they the Gods of Mount Olympus, the old sacred p. 45 mountain of Homer's Achaioi, or do they belong to the great sanctuary of Olympia in which Zeus, the lord of the Olympians, had his greatest festival? The two are at opposite ends of Greece, Olympus in North Thessaly in the north-east, Olympia in Elis in the south-west. From which do the Olympians come? On the one hand it is clear in Homer that they dwell on Mount Olympus; they have 'Olympian houses' beyond human sight, on the top of the sacred mountain, which in the Odyssey is identified with heaven. On the other hand, when Pisistratus introduced the worship of Olympian Zeus on a great scale into Athens and built the Olympieum, he seems to have brought him straight from Olympia in Elis. For he introduced the special Elean complex of gods, Zeus, Rhea, Kronos, and Gê Olympia.45_1

Fortunately this puzzle can be solved. The Olympians belong to both places. It is merely a case of tribal migration. History, confirmed by the study of the Greek dialects, seems to show that these northern Achaioi came down across central Greece and the Gulf of Corinth and settled in Elis.45_2 They brought with them their Zeus, who was already called 'Olympian', and established him as superior to the existing god, Kronos. The Games became Olympian and the sanctuary by which they were performed 'Olympia'.45_3

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As soon as this point is clear, we understand also why there is more than one Mount Olympus. We can all think of two, one in Thessaly and one across the Aegean in Mysia. But there are many more; some twenty-odd, if I mistake not, in the whole Greek region. It is a pre-Greek word applied to mountains; and it seems clear that the 'Olympian' gods, wherever their worshippers moved, tended to dwell in the highest mountain in the neighbourhood, and the mountain thereby became Olympus.

The name, then, explains itself. The Olympians are the mountain gods of the old invading Northmen, the chieftains and princes, each with his comitatus or loose following of retainers and minor chieftains, who broke in upon the ordered splendours of the Aegean palaces and, still more important, on the ordered simplicity of tribal life in the pre-Hellenic villages of the mainland. Now, it is a canon of religious study that all gods reflect the social state, past or present, of their worshippers. From this point of view what appearance do the Olympians of Homer make? What are they there for? What do they do, and what are their relations one to another?

The gods of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The most they ever did was to conquer it. Zeus and his comitatus conquered Cronos and his; conquered and expelled them—sent them migrating beyond the horizon, Heaven knows where. Zeus took the chief dominion and remained a permanent overlord, but he p. 47 apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and confirmed various of his children and followers in lesser fiefs. Apollo went off on his own adventure and conquered Delphi. Athena conquered the Giants. She gained Athens by a conquest over Poseidon, a point of which we will speak later.

And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do they promote agriculture? Do they practise trades and industries? Not a bit of it. Why should they do any honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them. They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war.

A few deductions may be from this statement, but they do not affect its main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. Yes: a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a gang of warriors needed to have by them; and they preferred him lame, so that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of Admetus; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon. Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements; but in any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punishment. Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on agriculture and on justice: they destroy the harvests of those who offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic p. 48 Age itself—if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick's convenient title for the Age of the Migrations—chieftains and gods probably retained some vestiges of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times; and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these gods are not real people with a real character. They never existed. They are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it is pronounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any one god would be mixed up with traditions and associations drawn from the surrounding populations and their gods; and by the time they come down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have passed through the minds of many different ages and places, especially Ionia and Athens.

The Olympians as described in our text of Homer, or as described in the Athenian recitations of the sixth century, are mutatis mutandis related to the Olympians of the Heroic Age much as the Hellenes of the sixth century are to the Hellenes of the Heroic Age. I say 'mutatis mutandis', because the historical development of a group of imaginary concepts shrined in tradition and romance can never be quite the same as that of the people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is apt both to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life. Romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent perfections. But the gods of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show p. 49 traces of the process through which they have passed: of an origin among the old conquering Achaioi, a development in the Ionian epic schools, and a final home in Athens.49_1

For example, what gods are chiefly prominent in Homer? In the Iliad certainly three, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, and much the same would hold for the Odyssey. Next to them in importance will be Poseidon, Hera, and Hermes.

Zeus stands somewhat apart. He is one of the very few gods with recognizable and undoubted Indo-germanic names, Djëus, the well-attested sky- and rain-god of the Aryan race. He is Achaian; he is 'Hellanios', the god worshipped by all Hellenes. He is also, curiously enough, Pelasgian, and Mr. A. B. Cook49_2 can explain to us the seeming contradiction. But the Northern elements in the conception of Zeus have on the whole triumphed over any Pelasgian or Aegean sky-god with which they may have mingled, and Zeus, in spite of his dark hair, may be mainly treated as the patriarchal god of the invading Northmen, passing from the Upper Danube down by his three great sanctuaries, Dodona, Olympus, and Olympia. He had p. 50 an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the various objects of aboriginal worship which he found in his path. The story of Meilichios above (14) is a common one. Of course, we must not suppose that the Zeus of the actual Achaioi was a figure quite like the Zeus of Pheidias or of Homer. There has been a good deal of expurgation in the Homeric Zeus,50_1 as Mr. Cook clearly shows. The Counsellor and Cloud-compeller of classical Athens was the wizard and rainmaker of earlier times; and the All-Father surprises us in Thera and Crete by appearing both as a babe and as a Kouros in spring dances and initiation rituals.50_2 It is a long way from these conceptions to the Zeus of Aeschylus, a figure as sublime as the Jehovah of Job; but the lineage seems clear.

Zeus is the Achaean Sky-god. His son Phoebus Apollo is of more complex make. On one side he is clearly a Northman. He has connexions with the Hyperboreans.50_3 He has a 'sacred road' leading far into the North, along which offerings are sent back from shrine to shrine beyond the bounds of Greek knowledge. Such 'sacred roads' are normally the roads by which the God himself has travelled; the offerings are sent back from the new sanctuary to the old. On the other side Apollo reaches back to an Aegean matriarchal Kouros. His home is Delos, where he has a mother, Leto, but no very visible father. He leads the ships of his islanders, sometimes in the form of a dolphin. He is no 'Hellene'. In the fighting p. 51 at Troy he is against the Achaioi: he destroys the Greek host, he champions Hector, he even slays Achilles. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo we read that when the great archer draws near to Olympus all the gods tremble and start from their seats; Leto alone, and of course Zeus, hold their ground.51_1 What this god's original name was at Delos we cannot be sure: he has very many names and 'epithets'. But he early became identified with a similar god at Delphi and adopted his name, 'Apollôn', or, in the Delphic and Dorian form, 'Apellôn'—presumably the Kouros projected from the Dorian gatherings called 'apellae'.51_2 As Phoibos he is a sun-god, and from classical times onward we often find him definitely identified with the Sun, a distinction which came easily to a Kouros.

In any case, and this is the important point, he is at Delos the chief god of the Ionians. The Ionians are defined by Herodotus as those tribes and cities who were sprung from Athens and kept the Apaturia. They recognized Delos as their holy place and worshipped Apollo Patrôos as their ancestor.51_3 The Ionian Homer has naturally brought us the Ionian god; and, significantly enough, though the tradition makes him an enemy of the Greeks, and the poets have to accept the tradition, there is no tendency to crab or belittle him. He is the most splendid and awful of Homer's Olympians.

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The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it leads to a somewhat surprising result. What Apollo is to Ionia that, and more, Athena is to Athens. There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan and Ionian, some Northern.52_1 But her whole appearance in history and literature tells the same story as her name. Athens is her city and she is the goddess of Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Korê. In Athens she can be simply 'Parthenos', the Maiden; elsewhere she is the 'Attic' or 'Athenian Maiden'. As Glaucopis she is identified or associated with the Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens. As Pallas she seems to be a Thunder-maiden, a sort of Keraunia or bride of Keraunos. A Palladion consists of two thunder-shields, set one above the other like a figure 8, and we can trace in art-types the development of this 8 into a human figure. It seems clear that the old Achaioi cannot have called their warrior-maiden, daughter of Zeus, by the name Athena or Athenaia. The Athenian goddess must have come in from Athenian influence, and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the poems that influence must have reached. If we try to conjecture whose place it is that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her regular epithet, 'daughter of Zeus', belongs in Sanskrit to the Dawn-goddess, Eôs.52_2 The transition might be helped by some touches of the Dawn-goddess that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The rising Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from p. 53 the head of Zeus. Also she was born amid a snowstorm of gold. And Eôs, on the other hand, is, like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant Pallas.53_1

Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves very easily. A body of poetry and tradition, in its origin dating from the Achaioi of the Migrations, growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, and reaching its culminating form at Athens, has prominent in it the Achaian Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, the Athenian Korê—the same Korê who descended in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his throne.53_2

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We need only throw a glance in passing at a few of the other Olympians. Why, for instance, should Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a puzzling figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother of Zeus in Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian or Aegean god present in him. He is closely connected with Libya; he brings the horse from there.54_1 At times he exists in order to be defeated; defeated in Athens by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, in Argos by Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though he continues to hold the Isthmus. In Trozen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with Athena.54_2 Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls his own hands had built.54_3 These problems we need not for the present face. By the time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a sea-god, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens and Ionia. He is the father of Neleus, the ancestor of the Ionian kings. His temple at Cape Mykale is the scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as a religious centre of the Ionian tribes. He has intimate relations with Attica too. Besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession of the land, he appears p. 55 as the father of Theseus, the chief Athenian hero. He is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erechtheus. He is the special patron of the Athenian knights. Thus his prominence in Homer is very natural.

What of Hermes? His history deserves a long monograph to itself; it is so exceptionally instructive. Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was simply an old upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular Pelasgian sex-symbol of procreation. Set up over a tomb he is the power that generates new lives, or, in the ancient conception, brings the souls back to be born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the Psychopompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. If you have a message for the dead, you speak it to the Herm at the grave. This notion of Hermes as herald may have been helped by his use as a boundary-stone—the Latin Terminus. Your boundary-stone is your representative, the deliverer of your message, to the hostile neighbour or alien. If you wish to parley with him, you advance up to your boundary-stone. If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory, you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone, the last sign that remains of your own safe country. If you are killed or wronged, it is he, the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you.

Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to Homer. It was not decent; it was not quite human; and every personage in Homer has to be both. In the Iliad Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful creation or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-goddess, takes his place as the messenger from heaven to earth. In the Odyssey he is admitted, but so changed and castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm p. 56 in the beautiful and gracious youth who performs the gods' messages. I can only detect in his language one possible trace of his old Pelasgian character.56_1

Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In speaking of Hermes among the other 'Workers', who were 'pillars in square form', he says, 'As to Hermes, the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of the departed to Hades'.56_2 In the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old functions; he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos Daimon. But thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism.

Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious past behind her. She has certainly ousted the original wife, Dione, whose worship continued unchallenged in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended upon Greek lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems to have left Dione behind and wedded the Queen of the conquered territory. Hera's permanent epithet is 'Argeia', 'Argive'. She is the Argive Korê or Year-Maiden, as Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. But Argos in Homer denotes two different places, a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief goddess of Peloponnesian Argos in historic times, and had brought her consort Herakles56_3 along with her, but at one time she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos.

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She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship Argo, and they launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the Argonautica she is a beautiful figure, gracious and strong, the lovely patroness of the young hero. No element of strife is haunting her. But in the Iliad for some reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, and a jealous wife. Why? Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the time of the invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she the native queen of the land.57_1 It may be, too, that the Ionian poets who respected their own Apollo and Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as representing some race or tribe that they disliked. A goddess of Dorian Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It seems to be for some reason like this that Aphrodite, identified with Cyprus or some centre among Oriental barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect; that Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-god and War-god, is treated as a mere bully and coward and general pest.57_2

There is not much faith in these gods, as they appear to us in the Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless common folk.57_3 And p. 58 it was not likely that the bards of cultivated and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life.

Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and gods of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid adventure. The traits that were at all tolerable were idealized; those that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform.

II. The Religious Value of the Olympians

Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at the Panathenaea, produced what I will venture to call exactly a religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work.

In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matrilinear customs of the Aegean or Hittite races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their agricultural rites, their sex-emblems and fertility goddesses. Contrast for a moment the sort of sexless Valkyrie who appears in the Iliad under the name of Athena with the Korê of Ephesus, strangely called Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, p. 59 covered with innumerable breasts. That suggests the contrast that I mean.

Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic; they are the literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superstition. True, the poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris, or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric gods and the gods found outside Homer is well compared by Mr. Chadwick59_1 to the difference between the gods of the Edda and the historical traces of religion outside the Edda. The gods who feast with Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or comitatus, seem to be the gods of the kings, distinct from the gods of the peasants, cleaner and more warlike and lordlier, though in actual religious quality much less vital.

Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the 'Urdummheit'. For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition, in having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians are the descendants of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their homes, tribes, and tribal traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic sepulchres of unknown kings, which the fugitives to Asia had left behind them and half forgotten.59_2

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Again, when the Ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said, of something that was Hellenic, as distinct from something else that was barbaric, and the Hellenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck them as superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in knowledge and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its rise in Ionia.

Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it? We are again reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the 'beggarly elements' towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the incursions of mana snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters, but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers, wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably higher.

For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like p. 61 storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas against the brute world.61_1

The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man over beast: that was the aim, but was it ever accomplished? The Olympian gods as we see them in art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving, that what I am now about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a telos or completion but a movement and effort of life.

We may analyse the movement into three main elements: a moral expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly p. 62 an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the three in order.

In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, or at least covered with a decent veil, that great mass of rites which was concerned with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation of generative processes.62_1 It left only a few reverent and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta. The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid centuries, the worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere of megalomania and blood-lust.62_2 These things return with the fall of Hellenism; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws and bound to reckon with the same death.

So much for the moral expurgation: next for the bringing of intellectual order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, 'In the early religion all things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them'.

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We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μἴα, 'one form of many names'. Each tribe, each little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste—the Children of the Bards, the Children of the Potters—had its own special gods. Now as soon as there was any general 'Sunoikismos' or 'Settling-together', any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different historical circumstances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his proper function and there was no overlapping—one Korê, one Kouros, one Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythêra or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Korê or the Delian or the Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of Cyprus, Cythêra, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility Korê of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some p. 64 half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like.

As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Korê or Kouros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons; they melted easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard. They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the gods all being one, 'Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as Dionysus',64_1 but the amalgamation only takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious mysticism.

The best document preserved to us of this attempt to bring order into Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. There are three poems, all devoted to this object, composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a quasi-Homeric dialect and under a quasi-Olympian system to bring together vast masses of ancient theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The Theogony attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the Gods; The Catalogue of Women and the Eoiai, p. 65 preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural God. The Works and Days form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the most valiant failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity of it are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty and its extraordinary historical interest. The Hesiodic system when compared with that of Homer is much more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay the lordly warrior-gods of the Heroic Age, at the back of Hesiod the crude and tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the mainland. Also the Hesiodic poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light of Athens.

The third element in this Homeric reformation is an attempt to make religion satisfy the needs of a new social order. The earliest Greek religion was clearly based on the tribe, a band of people, all in some sense kindred and normally living together, people with the same customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds and fields. This tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself unchanged at the great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.65_1 It p. 66 certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the heroic age. It bowed its head beneath the sceptre of its own divine kings and the armed heel of its northern invaders, only to appear again almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain.

But it no longer suited its environment. In the age of the migrations the tribes had been broken, scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased to exist as important social entities. The social unit which had taken their place was the political community of men, of whatever tribe or tribes, who were held together in times of danger and constant war by means of a common circuit-wall, a Polis.66_1 The idea of the tribe remained. In the earliest classical period we find every Greek city still nominally composed of tribes, but the tribes are fictitious. The early city-makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal basis. Every local or accidental congregation of people who wish to act together have to invent an imaginary common ancestor. The clash between the old tribal traditions that have lost their meaning, though not their sanctity, and the new duties imposed p. 67 by the actual needs of the Polis, leads to many strange and interesting compromises. The famous constitution of Cleisthenes shows several. An old proverb expresses well the ordinary feeling on the subject:

Now in the contest between city and tribe, the Olympian gods had one great negative advantage. They were not tribal or local, and all other gods were. They were by this time international, with no strong roots anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some native god; they were full of fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to be made 'Poliouchoi', 'City-holders', of any particular city, still more ready to be 'Hellânioi', patrons of all Hellas.

In the working out of these three aims the Olympian religion achieved much: in all three it failed. The moral expurgation failed owing to the mere force of inertia possessed by old religious traditions and local cults. We must remember how weak any central government was in ancient civilization. The power and influence of a highly civilized society were apt to end a few miles outside its city wall. All through the backward parts of Greece obscene and cruel rites lingered on, the darker and worse the further they were removed from the full light of Hellenism.

But in this respect the Olympian Religion did not merely fail: it did worse. To make the elements of p. 68 a nature-religion human is inevitably to make them vicious. There is no great moral harm in worshipping a thunder-storm, even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite recklessly. There is no need to pretend that the Lightning is exercising a wise and righteous choice. But when once you worship an imaginary quasi-human being who throws the lightning, you are in a dilemma. Either you have to admit that you are worshipping and flattering a being with no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck. And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal, becomes capricious and cruel.

When the Ark of Israel was being brought back from the Philistines, the cattle slipped by the threshing floor of Nachon, and the holy object was in danger of falling. A certain Uzzah, as we all know, sprang forward to save it and was struck dead for his pains. Now, if he was struck dead by the sheer holiness of the tabu object, the holiness stored inside it like so much electricity, his death was a misfortune, an interesting accident, and no more.68_1 But when it is made into the deliberate act of an anthropomorphic god, who strikes a well-intentioned man dead in explosive rage for a very pardonable mistake, a dangerous element has been introduced into the ethics of that religion. A being who is the moral equal of man must not behave like a charge of dynamite.

Again, to worship emblems of fertility and generation, as was done in agricultural rites all through the Aegean p. 69 area, is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropomorphic god of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften its grossness has resulted in its moral degradation. This result was intensified by another well-meant effort at elevation. The leading tribes of central Greece were, as we have mentioned, apt to count their descent from some heroine-ancestress. Her consort was sometimes unknown and, in a matrilinear society, unimportant. Sometimes he was a local god or river. When the Olympians came to introduce some order and unity among these innumerable local gods, the original tribal ancestor tended, naturally enough, to be identified with Zeus, Apollo, or Poseidon. The unfortunate Olympians, whose system really aimed at purer morals and condemned polygamy and polyandry, are left with a crowd of consorts that would put Solomon to shame.

Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning. It is curious how near to monotheism, and to monotheism of a very profound and impersonal type, the real religion of Greece came in the sixth and fifth centuries. Many of the philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and others, asserted it clearly or assumed it without hesitation. Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, in their deeper p. 70 moments point the same road. Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to make any particular difference between οἱ θεοί and ὁ θεός or τὸ θεῖον. They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between 'he' and 'it', or between 'one' and 'many', apply to the divine. Certainly Greek monotheism, had it really carried the day, would have been a far more philosophic thing than the tribal and personal monotheism of the Hebrews. But unfortunately too many hard-caked superstitions, too many tender and sensitive associations, were linked with particular figures in the pantheon or particular rites which had brought the worshippers religious peace. If there had been some Hebrew prophets about, and a tyrant or two, progressive and bloody-minded, to agree with them, polytheism might perhaps actually have been stamped out in Greece at one time. But Greek thought, always sincere and daring, was seldom brutal, seldom ruthless or cruel. The thinkers of the great period felt their own way gently to the Holy of Holies, and did not try to compel others to take the same way. Greek theology, whether popular or philosophical, seldom denied any god, seldom forbade any worship. What it tried to do was to identify every new god with some aspect of one of the old ones, and the result was naturally confusion. Apart from the Epicurean school, which though powerful was always unpopular, the religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a sort of apotheosis of good taste, in which the great care was not to hurt other people's feelings, or else it collapsed into helpless mysticism.

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The attempt to make Olympianism a religion of the Polis failed also. The Olympians did not belong to any particular city: they were too universal; and no particular city had a very positive faith in them. The actual Polis was real and tangible, the Homeric gods a little alien and literary. The City herself was a most real power; and the true gods of the City, who had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply the City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as mother and guide and lawgiver, the worshipped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend even to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from the social group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the band of suppliants, in like fashion ἡ Πολιάς or ὁ Πολιεύς emerged as a personification or projection of the city. ἡ Πολιάς in Athens was of course Athena; ὁ Πολιεύς might as well be called Zeus as anything else. In reality such beings fall into the same class as the hero Argos or 'Korinthos son of Zeus'. The City worship was narrow; yet to broaden it was, except in some rare minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible to love his next-door neighbours except by siding with them against the next-door-but-one.

It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have gods that would appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On the Acropolis at Athens there seem originally to have been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was united and brought under the lead of its central city, the gods of the outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the thunder-maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint personality with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north-east, p. 72 on the way from Delos to Delphi, had for its special god a 'Pythian Apollo'; when Oinoe became Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis. Dionysus came from Eleutherae, Demeter and Korê from Eleusis, Theseus himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozên. They were all given official residences on Athena's rock, and Athens in return sent out Athena to new temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and various colonies.72_1 This development came step by step and grew out of real worships. It was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body of non-national, poetical gods: yet even this development was too artificial, too much stamped with the marks of expediency and courtesy and compromise. It could not live. The personalities of such gods vanish away; their prayers become prayers to 'all gods and goddesses of the City'—θεοῖς καὶ θεῇσι πᾶσι καὶ πάσῃςι; those who remain, chiefly Athena and Theseus, only mean Athens.

What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian religion really achieve? First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of Greece—not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the 'Urdummheit', for the most part, to a romantic memory, and made religion no longer a mortal danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it generally permitted progress; it encouraged not only the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that saves from disaster, that p. 73 knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosynê.

Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek communities. It is, after all, a good deal to say, that in Greek history we find almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many weaknesses, it built up something like a united Hellenic religion to stand against the 'beastly devices of the heathen'. And after all, if we are inclined on the purely religious side to judge the Olympian system harshly, we must not forget its sheer beauty. Truth, no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many matters beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know is that when the best minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful. It was a great thing that men should envisage the world as governed, not by Giants and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by some human and more than human Understanding (Ξύνεσις),73_1 by beings of quiet splendour like many a classical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If Olympianism was not a religious faith, it was at least a vital force in the shaping of cities and societies which remain after two thousand years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high endeavour. Even the stirring of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power to produce something of the same result; for the p. 74 classicism of the Italian Renaissance is a child, however fallen, of the Olympian spirit.

Of course, I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith. There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus; the old liturgy of the dying and re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If Religion is that which brings us into relation with the great world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this home-coming Bride of the underworld, life with its broken hopes, its disaster, its new-found spiritual joy: life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing continuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death, life as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed.

'But stay,' a reader may object: 'is not this the Persephone, the Athena, of modern sentiment? Are these figures really the goddesses of the Iliad and of Sophocles?' The truth is, I think, that they are neither the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of ancient reflection and allegory; the goddesses, that is, of the best and most characteristic worship that p. 75 these idealized creations awakened. What we have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact that they have no roots in any particular soil, little hold on any definite primeval cult, has turned out to be their peculiar strength. We must not think of allegory as a late post-classical phenomenon in Greece. It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, perhaps as early as Hesiod; for Hesiod seems sometimes to be turning allegory back into myth. The Olympians, cut loose from the soil, enthroned only in men's free imagination, have two special regions which they have made their own: mythology and allegory. The mythology drops for the most part very early out of practical religion. Even in Homer we find it expurgated; in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Xenophanes it is expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths survive chiefly as material for literature, the shapes of the gods themselves chiefly as material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of imagination. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it twines itself still around these gracious and ever-moving shapes; the Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo, all have their long spiritual history. They are but little impeded by the echoes of the old frivolous mythology; still less by any local roots or sectional prejudices or compulsory details of ritual. As the more highly educated mind of Greece emerged from a particular, local, tribal, conception of religion, the old denationalized Olympians were ready to receive her.

The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion to the City itself. It is expressed p. 76 often in Aeschylus and Sophocles, again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the danger-point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might face again to-morrow. It was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be 'one great City of gods and men', the only Gods with which Greece could satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old Olympians.

They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one p. 77 believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident—though perhaps an invariable accident—that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this, I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god;77_1 p. 78 so the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light.

FOOTNOTES: