HB-04-Greek

Greek Religion

The last century has seen a thorough revision of earlier ideas of classical Greek religion. Homer is no longer taken at face value. His pantheon, described with his bright and wing6d words and in conception poetically unsurpassed, was for many centuries accepted in the West as an accurate rendering of early Greek religion. In the light of recent scholarship it is not that at all. We see now that the scholars who read off the characteristics of the Greek gods from the statues of the classic age and the lines of Homer should have paid more attention to "the crude and tangled superstitions of the peasantry of the mainland,"" half‑revealed and half‑concealed in the poetry of Hesiod. It is clear from a study of these superstitions that much that was primitive lay at the base of Greek religion. The beauty and balance of the Homeric pantheon was in truth a triumph of unification and sublimation.

In brief, we have here another case of tribal amalgamations accompanied by a mingling and reordering of the gods.

The Gathering of the Gods in Early Hellas

The determinative fact in the formation of early Greek religion is the northern invasions beginning about the twentieth century B.C. The invaders were formidable horse‑borne warriors of Aryan or Indo-European speech, who came down from the northern parts of Greece in their chariots to establish themselves as masters of the earlier, so‑called Helladic peoples. Historians are not certain of the origins of all the groups involved, but they are fairly agreed that the earliest true civilizations, those of the Minoans in Crete (who flourished about 2200‑1100 B.C.) and of the Bronze Age Aegeans of the Greek archipelago and mainland (2 5 00‑1100 B.C.), known to the later Greeks as "Pelasgians," were pre‑Greek. The Minoan civilization began to decay about 1400 B.C., perhaps as the result of invasions (by Achaeans?) from the mainland. At all events, the Cretan palace of Cnossus fell, and never recovered its earlier glory and wealth. The Cretan culture, however, had earlier spread to the Greek mainland, and produced in the northeastern parts of the Peloponnesus and further north the Mycenaean civilization, of which the Homeric (or Achaean) Age was probably a late form. {It is likely that the Achaeans‑leaders among the long‑haired, light‑skinned invaders from the north‑adopted the Mycenaean culture after mastering its creators, both in Greece and in Crete.} Finally, about the twelfth century B.C. another great wave of northerners‑the formidable Dorians and their allies‑overthrew the Mycenaean civilization, thus causing a widespread displacement that resulted in Greek settlements along the coast of Asia Minor, composed of Ionians and Aeolians, and of Dorians, too. When everyone had settled down again, the historic Greek city‑states came into being, and the patterns of Greek religion, now so familiar to us, began to form.

These new patterns in religion were combinations of many different elements. The Indo‑European invaders contributed to the divine sunoikismos, or "mingling-together," at least these deities: their chief god Zeus, the sky‑father and rain‑maker (called Dyaus Pitar by the Indo‑Aryans andjupiter by the Romans); Demeter, the earth‑mother; and Hestia (the Vesta of the Romans), virgin goddes's of the hearth, sister of Zeus, and a goddess from the far Indo‑European past, honored with libations at the beginning and end of every sacrifice. But many of the gods had no such distant origin. Rhea seems to have been Minoan, Athena Mycenaean (at least when we first glimpse her), and Hermes and Hera Aegaean or Helladic. Apollo appears to be from Ionia, Aphrodite from Cyprus or Cythera, and Dionysus and Ares from Thrace. It was as though the gods flocked together to Olympus from all points of the compass.

And this was as true of cities as it was of Greece as a whole.

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 [Lord] corresponding with her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was united and brought under the lead of the 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 northeast, 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 Kor6 from Eleusis, Theseus himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozen. 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.

The Classical Greek's Interaction with His Gods

It is thus quite evident that the Greek of classical times felt himself surrounded by deities and that he needed their assistance in achieving his many purposes. He was a polytheist for reasons similar to those that made polytheists of the Egyptians and Mesopotarnians: the powers and forces dwelling in and under the earth (the chthon) and in the sky and under the sea were immediately known in daily life and were found to be diverse as well as numerous. In describing them the Greeks were anthropomorphic, for they preferred to take their analogies and symbols from human life and personality. It is important to notice that they did not think that the deities on whom they most depended were transcendent and far‑removed. Rather, they were close at hand, as close as the hearth (Hestia), the hertna or boundry of stone in the street (Hermes), the shrine before the house, which was perhaps sacred to Apollo of the Roads, the large jar in the store‑room sacred to Zeus Ktesios (guardian of the family possessions), and the courtyard, watched over by Zeus Herkeios. As H. J. Rose has said: "For everyday happenings, the gods were about everyone's path and might be invoked at any moment, to confirm an oath, avert evil, heal sickness, or bless all manner of actions."' All formal occasions required the invocation of a god or gods marriage, for instance, or the reception of a newborn baby into the family circle, or at the death and burial of members of the family. Farming and other occupations could not be successfully pursued nor a journey on land or sea attempted without the approval of the gods. The address to the gods on such occasions was simple and courteous but not servile, a natural, almost unreflective gesture of cooperation and community, not dominated by fear.

If a god was known to be far‑removed, his existence might be recognized but no prayer or sacrifice was offered to him; there was no use in sacrificing to a deity unaware of the act. Thus Hades, the god of the underworld, and Ouranos, the god of heaven, although readily believed in, were not worshiped in Greek homes. On the other hand, Zeus was often invoked because he was nearby as well as far away, and the same was true of Apollo, who, not identified with the sun until a late date, received daily honors as patron of many human arts and skills.

This down‑to‑earth interaction with the gods resulted in crediting them with complex functions.

The Complex Functions of the Major Gods

Geographically, Greece is a divided land, with small valleys and plains, each hedged in by mountains or straitened between a semi‑circle of hills and the "unharvested" sea. Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, which threw people together, Greece separated them. So that before the northern invasions, the primitive or superstitious inhabitants of Helladic Greece worshiped in their isolated territories many nature‑spirits, sought the aid of a variety of fertility‑powers, and engaged in diverse rites connected with magic, taboo, and the cult of the dead. The northerners who came flooding in imposed not only a new language and a certain hearty cheerfulness, but uniformity in the names of the gods, and thenceforth the chief gods and goddesses were identified with the local powers; that could in anywise be absorbed by them, taking over their functions, rites, and histories, while also adding their own qualities.

Then, and for a loon time later, the chief developments in religion occurred in cities (or city‑states), each with its own public cult and its own calendar of religious ceremonies and festivals. The great gods may be, said to have, come to the. towns as "the real thing" and were accepted there as identical with the gods and godlings that had been locally known for many generations under local names. Amalgamation therefore took place within each local tradition.

Zeus is an instructive instance of how the invader's god takes over the duties of local divinities. Because he began as the great sky‑father, ruler of the upper air and the giver of rains, as he made his way through Greece lie was identified with many mountain tops. Not only was be Zeus, of 'Olympus, but Zeus Lykaios in Arcadia, Zeus Laphystios in southern Thessaly, and Zeus Kidrairon. in Boeotia. But he also assumed other, down‑to‑earth, duties, He was the god of fertility in many districts, and in at least three places a deity of the underworld, As Zeus Polieus he was the guardian of several city‑states, As Zeus Aphiktor he was the, united cry of the suppliants, itself' became a deity and forcibly beating its way to heaven. At Athens he was Zeus Phratrios, and received on his altar the votes cast by the members of the phratrv when a father brought his child for enrolment. At Dodona he spoke oracles through the murmuring leaves of the sanctuary Oak. Generally, of course, he was the Cloud‑Compeller, the Rain‑Maker, carrying his bright thunderbolt, hurled amid earthshaking tremors, but the thunderbolt sometimes had the judicial use of punishing the wickedness of men. The source of genius, his offspring by goddesses and women was numerous; he fathered a large progeny of heroes, kings, and founders of cities. {Deification of heroes and kings was widespread in the Hellenic world.} Nor was Hera his first wife. When he first arrived in the north at Dodonal he brought with him out of the unknown past a consort called Dione, and in other places he had other wives. But Hera was destined to become his permanent spouse.

Hera is an instance from the other side‑the side of the conquered. She brought to her union with Zeus a past of her own. It was at least as respectable as his. Her origins are obscure and dateless. Because the cow plays an important part in early legends about her, she may originally have been a cow‑goddess. In Mycenaean times she was the Argive Kore (Maiden), and sported in more than sisterly fashion on the plains of Peloponnesian Argos with Hercules, the strong young hero of that section. But she was also connected, by myth at any rate, with Argos in Thessaly, where as a matronly friend she helped Jason, another strong young hero, to launch the ship Argo, when he set out from Pagasae in search of the Golden Fleece. She seems not to have been at that time the goddess of the earth, but a majestic maiden identified with the passage of the year. For her sake Zeus parted with Dione and became her heavy-browed consort. They had their troubles. In accounting for their early quarrels, Jane Harrison has advanced the interesting theory: "The marriage of Zeus and Hera reflects the subjugation of the indigenous people by incoming Northerners. Only thus can we account for the fact that the divine husband and wife are in constant unseemly conflict. Of course, a human motive is alleged; Hera is jealous, Zeus in constant exasperation. But the real reason is racial conflict." Perhaps this explanation will do, or perhaps another: she was the queen of the hinterlands and of backward mountaineers among whom the primitive matrilinear tradition persisted, and Zeus, the lord of the patrilinear northerners, married her to win a footing. However this may be their marriage was not long unhappy. It was later declared a great success and became in Greek eyes a "holy union," the very ideal of married existence. Hera became the patroness of married women, their counselor and example.

In the person of Apollo an even greater yoking of diverse functions is seen. He was probably not Hellenic. In the Iliad, at least, he is on the side not of the Greeks but of the Trojans, an implacable and feared foe of the "bronze‑clad" warriors besieging Troy. Perhaps, as the myths suggest, he was originally from the island of Delos, or else from the plains of Asia Minor. His origin cannot be surely traced. Very early he stood for pastoral and agricultural interests. Certainly he was not originally a sun‑god. He was a shepherd for Laomedon near Troy and for Admetos in Thessaly. He may once have been a wolf‑god, but as shepherd he protected his flocks and herds from the fangs of his lupine brethren. In agricultural areas, groves and trees were under his protection; the laurel was sacred to him. Out of pastoral love of song, he drew to him with his lively playing on the lyre devoted youths and maidens. He heartily believed in youth, and was the sponsor of athletic contests, himself drawing a strong bow. He was Hekatebolos, "the shooter from afar."

Behind his shoulders hung

His bow, and ample quiver; at his back

Rattled the fateful arrows as he mov'd.

His arrows not only drew blood but pierced men with deadly sicknesses. (He was also the god of healing until he was displaced by his son Aesculapius.) He slew on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus in Greece the Python, whom he then displaced at Delphi. (Like Zeus he supplanted or absorbed many local spirits.) His exploit at Delphi was an important act, with far‑reaching results in the development of Greek religion, for as a consequence of it he became the god of revelation. No other god was the source of such direct oracles except Zeus. In the center of his temple at Delphi was the famous vent in the earth, from which issued from time to time an intoxicating vapor, and when the priestess, called Pythia, sat on the tripod amid the fumes, she muttered words that were universally thought to be from Apollo. It was in this belief that for centuries the famous men of Greece journeyed

to Delphi, where

Phoebus,* on earth's mid navel o'er the world

Enthroned, weaveth in eternal song

The sooth of all that is or is to be.

*One of Apollo's epithets. It means "bright" or "pure."

He was often asked for an oracle before a town was founded, and afterwards became its patron. Not until very late, and then perhaps as the result of Egyptian or other foreign influence, was he identified with Helios, the sun, who drives his golden car from heaven's eastern gates to the dim regions of the night.

Figure G1 ZEUS enthroned. The king of the gods sits in majesty on his throne and raises his hand aloft as if holding a scepter. He is pronouncing a judgment that he expects his hearers to accept without demur.

Figure G2 Model of DELPHI at about A.D. 160. The temple of Apollo, Parthenon‑like, dominates the scene in this suggested restoration of the famed seat of the priestesses who uttered the "Delphic Oracles” Five hundred years earlier, Socrates came to Delphi when there were fewer buildings and less wealth, but perhaps more belief .

The story of the other deities is similar. Artemis, the virginal deity of the wild, ranging through the mountains and forests with her nymphs in maidenly reserve, but thoroughly at home with the untamed animals of her domain, was also the gentle lover of children, the protectress of men and maidens, and the solicitous friend who sought to ease the pangs of childbirth. Curiously, in Ionia, where she was a favorite, she became the Artemis of Ephesus, a motherly goddess, connected with fertility, her front covered with breasts. Hermes, who came from deep in the pre‑Hellenic period, outgrew his earliest symbol, a simple cairn of stones such as peasants in the rock‑strewn land raised at the edges and corners of fields and associated with their dead. {How this came about is thus explained by M. P. Nilsson (Greek Popular Religion, Columbia University Press, 1940, p. 8): {"If our (Greek) peasant passed a heap of stones, he might lay another stone upon it. If a tall stone was erected on top of the heap, he might place before it a bit of provision as an offering. He performed this act as a result of custom, without knowing the real reason for it, but he knew that a god was embodied in the stone heap and in the tall stone standing on top of it.... Our peasant or his forefathers knew that the stone heaps sometimes covered a dead man and that the stone erected on top was a tombstone. Accordingly, the god who dwelt in the stone heap had relations with the dead. ... Perhaps our peasant wanted to look after his stock, which grazed on the meadows and mountain slopes. The god of the stone heaps was concerned with them, too." An additional fact was that cairns served in mountain tracts and elsewhere as waymarkers, and Hermes was thus thought to guide travelers to their destination.} After he became identified with a square stone pillar, called the hertna, sometimes surmounted with his head, he was, as it were, pulled up out of the ground, where he had stood immovable, and given winged feet. He led the spirits of the dead down to Hades, and as the swift messenger between Zeus and the earth below, was clothed in a long belted chiton and made to wear a cap or a broad‑rimmed hat and winged boots. Other gods showed a like complexity of function: Poseidon was god of the sea, but was originally a horse‑god guarding inland lakes and streams (was he driven into the sea by invaders?) Athena, the wise and virginal warrior‑maiden, was originally perhaps an owl‑goddess (for the owl was sacred to her, and she herself turned on occasion into a bird disappearing upward into the sky), but her most ancient image in Athens was of olive‑wood, and so she was in some way connected with the fertility of the very important olive crop; Demeter, goddess of the fertile soil, was, as mother of slender and beauteous Persephone (the Kore, the Maiden), also connected with the underworld. In all these deities many local gods and spirits were absorbed and sublimated. Even Aphrodite, the goddess of love, a, latecomer, perhaps the Western form of Ishtar of Babylon, was reborn from the foam of the sea, clear‑skinned and delicate and beautiful, still a little amoral, yet shorn of the accompaniments of temple‑prostitution and self mutilation that attended the worship of her Oriental counterparts. Only Dionysus seemed unassimilable and untamed. (Further on, we shall see why.)

The Homeric Pantheon

It is time for us to consider the artful, intellectualized picture of the gods which Homer gives us, and to judge of its character and its effects.

In Homer the gods no longer live in widely separated places. Their common home is the acropolis on high Olympus, more a heavenly region now than the, actual mountain top in Thessaly. There Zeus, the Cloud Compeller, is kind, and white‑armed Hera is his "golden‑throned" queen. The other gods may absent themselves on occasion from their cloud‑girt palaces, but usually Zeus must know where they have gone and what they have done. The gods, not without back‑talk, submit to his discipline, for he is the father of most of them. His best‑beloved daughter is grey‑eyed Athena, the maiden goddess of wisdom. A favored son is Apollo, the archer‑god, he of the flowing golden locks, who both heals and hurts. Artemis, "delighting in wild boars and swift hinds," is the shy daughter who often absents herself in the mountain fastnesses which she prefers. Ares, "piercer of shields," is the savage y warlike son whom Zeus at times scolds sternly:

"Come no more to me,

Thou wav'ring turncoat, with thy whining prayers

Of all the Gods who on Olympus dwell

I hate thee most; for thou delight'st in nought

But strife and war; thou hast inherited

Thy mother, Hera's, proud, unbending mood,

Whom I can scarce control."

Aphrodite, the enticing goddess of love, is a daughter of Zeus by Dione and is married to her half‑brother, the lame god of the forge and the fire Hephaestus, a son of Zeus by Hera, but she is unfaithful to him, and has a notorious amour with Ares. Still another son of Zeus, born of his affair with Semele, is Dionysus, but in Homer he puts in an appearance and no more. Of greater importance is Hermes, the Heavenly Guide, whose birth was the consequence of the love of Zeus and Maia. He is primarily the herald and messenger of the gods, but he is sharp and cunning and not above consorting with thieves on those occasions when he gets away by himself, as when he departs from Olympus to guide souls to and from Hades. Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Hades (Pluto), the god of the underworld, are full brothers of Zeus, born like him of Kronos and Rhea, and Demeter is his sister by the same parents, but Homer does not have her come up to Olympus.

Here then is the tight‑knit family group of the gods of Homer. On the whole they form a very aristocratic company. As gods they are in charge of natural forces, but not any longer such forces themselves, as they had been in earlier days. Their functions have been both sublimed and simplified. They are no longer primitive. The Minoan fetishes, the deities in animal form, the mother‑goddesses, are gone. The Pelasgian involvements with animal and human fertility, or with vegetation, death, and the underworld have been largely refined out of them. Their personalities are no longer portentous with vague, mysterious force; they have come into the light of day and are sharply defined, clear‑cut, distinct from one another. No two are alike. Indeed they are all but earthy men and women, with thoughts, desires, moods, and passions all too human. Though immortal, they are no longer incalculable and unknown and terrible. Aesthetically, they are attractive, charming, amusing, civilized, better proportioned and more beautiful than humans‑they were indeed Homer's priceless gift to the future artists of Greece. In marble and bronze, their stately, poised, and unblemished bodies were in time to rise in market‑places and on acropolises, their wondrous heads gazing calmly down from the pediments and pedestals of temples, lordly and aloof, as from another and more perfect world. Mortals could look at them only with wonder and envy.

And yet the awesome quality, which makes gods bear in their persons a mysterium tremendum, had left them!

Perhaps the last sentence is a little overstated. The gods in Homer do exert supernatural effects, for when Zeus nods, all Olympus shakes, and once when Poseidon hurried to Olympus in three immense strides,

Beneath th' immortal feet of Ocean's Lord

Quak'd the huge mountain and the shadowy wood.

Poseidon's cry‑and that of every god‑is thunderous:

As of nine thousand or ten thousand men,

In deadly combat meeting, is the shout.

The gods also have great power over human lives, whether for bane or blessing. By their will cities fall, men die, and armies fail. But in this they show little concern for justice in the modern sense; rather they place first their own power, strength (arete), and divine status, and thus require honors and sacrifices from men. {In Homeric times justice was central neither to gods nor to men. When the gods were "good" (agathos), this meant that they were successful in protecting whomever they favored (as when Zeus succeeded in protecting the Greeks before Troy and Apollo made good in protecting his favored ones, the Trojans). In the same sense a human father was "good" when he was a good provider. Gods and men had arete when they had the will to excellence, the virtue of vigor in pursuit of their fundamental interests. In such a scheme of things, justice, while good, was secondary to achieving one's aims. It was a kind of pioneering outlook, such as a frontiersman might have.} Men know they must go through the traditional rituals of sacrifice on every important occasion, or feel the grim wrath of the waiting gods. Aeneas, inside Troy, is sure the gods are angry with the Trojans for neglecting their sacrifices. As for the Greeks, because the builders failed to make the usual sacrifices, the "firm‑built" wall they raised to guard their ships before Troy scarcely lasted out their need of it. Almost incidentally, Zeus watches over men's morals, too. In one lone but significant passage in the Iliad he is seen pouring down

his fiercest storms in wrath to men,

Who in their courts unrighteous judgments pass,

And justice yield to lawless violence,

The wrath of Heav'n despising.

But yet, with all this, the might of the gods is gravely limited. There is something more powerful than they, to which even Zeus, the Cloud‑Compeller himself, submits, though he could change it by the power of his will. This is moira or what‑is‑allotted (fated) to each man as his share, his appointed portion in life and its happenings. Morira does not stand alone, with it operate vague powers‑Blind Folly, Terror, Strife, Turmoil, Rumor, Death. Everything considered, powerful though they are, the gods are contained within the total frame of Nature and History, like men. Though they are superhuman beings, their powers are not boundless.

The Homeric epics had a great influence in guiding the imagination of the Greeks. Recited not only to and for the aristocracy, as was first the case, but also to the masses of the people at festivals and general assemblies, they became an essential element in the education of Greek youth. And they helped to bring about a sense of unification among the Greeks, culturally and religiously. That is to say, they created a sense among the Greeks that in religion and culture all Hellas was one. And yet Homer was more satisfying for political than for religious reasons. It may be doubted whether in actual local worship, in prayer and sacrifice, the aesthetically pleasing Homeric pantheon won the people even a little away from their ancient loyalties‑and interests.

Hesiod's Theogony

Hesiod (eighth century B.C.) did no better. In a characteristic effort of Greek rationalism he tried to bring the gods into some semblance of order by raising the question of their origin (theogony).

Influenced perhaps by Near‑Eastern attempts in this direction, he declared in his Theogony that the pristine Chaos had given place by cosmic evolution to Earth (Gaea or Ge), Tartarus (the Pit), and handsome Eros (Love). Chaos itself produced Night and Darkness, and they, in turn, by the power of Eros, mated to bring forth Day and Air. Without a mating, Night gave issue to Sleep, Dream, Death, Old Age, Misery, Friendship, and Discord. Similarly, Discord of herself, without husband, gave birth to Hunger, Toil, Murder, Battle, and other forms of human strain and struggle, while Earth brought into being unaided Heaven (Ouranos or Uranus, the starry heavens), the Mountains, and the Ocean. Mating with Ocean, Earth produced creatures of the sea, and then taking as husband Ouranos, conceived the first great gods but was unable to give birth to them because Ouranos prevented his children from emerging from the mother (the depths of the earth). With her aid, however, Kronos came forth, stole upon his sleeping father, and castrated him with a sickle. The flowing blood impregnated Earth, and she brought forth the Furies (Erinyes), the Titans (Giants), and certain nymphs, while from the sea foam forming around the castrated members sprang Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The triumphant Kronos married his sister Rhea, who had now been born, but fearing overthrow himself, swallowed his children as they were born. Then Rhea, with the help of grandmother Earth, substituted a stone for Zeus, the last born, and Kronos swallowed it unknowing. Zeus was hidden by his grandmother in a cave in Crete and finally emerged to subdue his father and force him to disgorge the young gods and goddesses he had swallowed. There after Zeus began his reign as king of the gods.

This was Hesiod's attempt to bring rational order out of mythological chaos, but although he satisfied the Greeks theologically, he did not alter much the day‑to‑day practice of religion, which still defied order.

The Everyday Religion of the Household

The day‑to‑day observance of religion by the common folk of Greece was mainly a matter of household pieties and attendance at public ceremony. The man in the country was concerned with: ‑Pan, the pasturer (a frisky male with horns, pointed ears, a tail, and goat's feet); Demeter, the earth‑mother; Hermes ("he of the stone‑heap"); daimons (various kinds of spirits full of mana, some being closer than a brother‑Socrates had one, he said); keres or vague powers bringing on such harmful states as old age, death, and destructive passions like jealousy and overweening pride; erinyes, the "furies," punishers of lapses from the appointed path (moira), so often set upon the living by the disappointed or outraged dead, bent on correction or revenge; ghosts; "heroes," that is, the noble dead, half human, half divine, and still powerful and protective; and chthonian deities, dwelling underground, to be appeased in fear as having to do with death or to be reverenced for their fertility and resurrective powers. Besides all these, he concerned himself with omens, taboos, magic (by which to lay ghosts and to promote the fertility of the fields, the livestock, and womankind), and the long‑standing traditional rituals of the household.

Meanwhile, the man in the town, besides adhering to the religion and magic of the household, attended the city festivals that honored the greater gods of the pantheon. To these we turn next.

The Athenian Festivals

We know most, although not enough, about the festivals of Athens, some thirty of them. The very months of the year took their names from centrally important ones.

By and large the Athenians thought of their deities by seasons of the year. Apollo and Athena were honored principally in the summer and fall, Demeter and her daughter in late summer and fall, Dionysus and Artemis in the spring. Zeus was an exception in receiving public honors all year round, he being capable of manifold functions.

The official year began in summer with a great sacrifice to Apollo, called the Hecatombaia because a hundred head of cattle were supposed to be offered up. just before summer (May) the Thargelia honored him with a purification rite in which two filthy men, draped with black and yellow dried figs, were chased through the streets and driven as scapegoats from the city. In late summer and early fall three other festivals celebrated his power to promote neighborliness, raise up "helpers," and give aid to agriculture.

Athena, a patroness of the city, received highest honors during the Panathenaea, held every year, but every fourth year with special pageantry, to celebrate her "birthday." Performed in mid‑summer, it was one of the great festivals of the city. A long procession carried a newly embroidered mantle, mounted like a sail on a ship on wheels, to her image on the Acropolis. There were accompanying sacrifices and games. Earlier in the summer each year the Kallynteria and Plynteria purified both her temple and the city and carried an ancient image of her to the sea to be bathed.

Demeter and her daughter Persephone received honor in later summer and fall at no less than five city festivals. The first in time was the Eleusinia (not to be confused with the Eleusinian mysteries); it was held every two years and with great splendor every fourth year. In the course of its games the prize given to the winning athletes was barley from one of Demeter's holy fields, the Rarian Plain. {Games in connection with religious festivals and also at funerals were as old as Homer's Achaeans. There were Pan‑Hellenic festivals whose games or "meets" are world famous: the Olympic Games held at Olympia in Elis, the Pythian Games at Delphi, the Isthmian Games at the Isthmus of Corinth, and the Nemean Games at Zeus's shrine at Nemea. The first and last were in honor of Zeus; the second honored Apollo, the third Poseidon.} The other festivals (the Proerosia, Thesmophoria, Haloa, and Skirophoria) included a magic ploughing, a seeding of the earth with suckling pigs and sacred cakes (a kind of fertility magic), and a magical ritual during which worthy matrons made broad jokes to encourage the fertility powers.

The greatest of the spring festivals, the Diasia, was in honor of Zeus. It included a holocaust, the Greek word for a whole‑burnt offering. Hera was honored along with him in January during the Gamelia, which celebrated their "holy marriage," and there were two other festivals, one in November, another in July.

Artemis' connection with animals received notice at three fertility festivals in the spring. But the great god of the season was Dionysus. In April or May the Great Dionysia took six days to perform. It had, and still retains, great literary importance, because it was the occasion for the performance, under the supervision of the priest of Dionysus, of the immortal tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes. Religion and art were here memorably combined.

Of the other festivals honoring other gods there is no room to tell. Enough has been said to indicate with what the public ceremonies were concerned. {Of the ceremonies of the famous Eleusinian mysteries there is more to tell in the next section.} Magic was literally involved; yet there was a finer and higher magic in the poetry and drama of the splendid rites.

The Mystery Religions

The transitional developments are only dimly known to us, but after the heroic (or Achaean) age had receded into the past and the Homeric pantheon had been established throughout Greece as the group‑standard for conceiving of the appearance and behavior of the gods, an excitingly satisfying way for the Greeks to feel the gods within them, and thus to share in their immortal nature, made its appearance. This was the way of the mysteries‑a way that offered to individuals private and personal religious satisfactions and assurances not provided by the official public sacrifices to the gods.

So ardent indeed became the devotees of these cults that they practiced their rites even when great public crises impended and average citizens were thinking only of the common danger. Herodotus in a famous passage tells of a rapt group that pursued the Eleusinian rites even while Attica was being ravaged by the land army of Xerxes and the Greeks hovering off the coast were debating whether or not to hazard their fleet at Salamis. Witnesses on the Persian side were filled with superstitious dread, Herodotus says, when they saw the procession of the devotees going along the sacred way from Eleusis toward Athens, raising "a cloud of dust such as a host of thirty thousand men might raise," and singing the mystic hymn to Dionysus. One said to another:

"Demaretus, it is certain that some great calamity will fall upon the king's host. For, since Attica is deserted, manifestly it is something more than mortal, coming from Eleusis to avenge the Athenians and their allies. If it descends upon the Peloponnese, there will be peril for the king himself and his land army; but if it turns towards the ships at Salamis, the king will be in danger of losing his fleet. This feast is held by the Athenians every year for the Mother and the Maid, and any Athenian or other Greek who wishes is initiated. The sound you hear is the song of lacchos {A name of Dionysus.} which they sing at this festival."

And Demaretus answered:

"Hold your peace and tell no man of this matter, for if these words should come to the king's ears, you will lose your head, and neither I nor any man living will be able to save you.”

The mysteries were so called because they were rites which were kept secret from all except the initiates. Under the guidance of a hierophant ("the revealer of holy things") the candidates underwent (i) a preparatory purification, such as a procession to the sea and washing in it, (2) instruction in mystic knowledge, usually given behind closed doors in a mystic hall, (3) a solemn beholding of sacred objects, followed by (4) the enactment of a divine story, generally in the form of a pageant or play, in which the cult divinities were impersonated, and (s) a crowning or wreathing of each of the candidates as a full‑fledged initiate. Accompanying these acts, which might spread over a number of days, were processions and sacred revels, including night‑long ceremonies, which afforded simultaneously a release of tension and a deepening of the sense of mystic participation in supersensible realities.

The oldest and most restrained of the mysteries was the Eleusinian. The central figures in the rites were Demeter and her daughter, the Kore. As everyone knew, the Kore had been snatched away to the underworld by Hades (Pluto), that she might be his bride, but her mother, through long days of searching and mourning, had refused to make the corn grow, and at last Zeus bade Hades allow the maiden to return to earth. But the unwary maiden had eaten a pomegranate seed, cunningly given her by Hades, and when, as the hymn that has come to us from the seventh century B.c. relates, her anxious mother asked:

"Child, hast thou eaten of any food in the world below? Tell me; for if not,

Then mayest thou dwell beside me and Father Zeus,

Honored among 411 the Immortals;

But if thou hast,

Thou must go back again into the secret places of the earth

And dwell there a third part of every year,

And whensoever the earth blossoms with all sweet flowers of spring,

Then from the misty darkness thou shalt rise and come again,

A marvel to gods and men,"

alas, Persephone had to confess she had done that which required her annual return to the underworld.

The entire story of Demeter and the Maiden was elaborately re‑enacted, mostly by women. At some time Dionysus, as Demeter's associate (he being the life‑force in vegetation, the vine, and reproductive animals, including man), was introduced into the story; it is not clear when. The mystery itself was withheld from public knowledge, but the whole of Athens could see the parade to the sea to bathe the candidates, and any citizen could also witness the procession along the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis bearing along the image of the young Dionysus (Iacchos). The participants ‑hoped to obtain a "better lot," a more glorious immortality in the next world, this, apparently, not as a reward of virtue, but rather by assimilation of the resurrective powers of Demeter, the Kore, and Dionysus. {That this nonmoral hope shocked even the Greeks is evident in Plutarch's preservation of a comment attributed to Diogenes the Cynic: "Is Pataikion the thief going to have a 'better lot' after death than Epaminondas, just because he was initiated?" } According to the hymn quoted above:

Blessed among men upon earth is he who has seen these things;

But he that is uninitiate in the rites and thus has no part in them

Has never an equal lot in the cold place of darkness.

The decorous Eleusinian mystery cult was far surpassed in violence and excitement by the practices of the Dionysiac cult. These had a Thraco‑Phrygian origin and construed the intoxication that followed the ritual use of the wine of Dionysus as possession by the god. Added excitement was provided by sacramental communion with the god in the eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood of a kid or a bull identified with him and actually torn asunder‑a rite called omophagia. All Greece was familiar with the Dionysiac maenads (or Bacchae)‑women, maddened by divine possession, "rushing" or "raging" in the frenzy of tearing in pieces the sacred animal‑and knew, too, of the sad fate of Orpheus, the inventor of the mysteries of Dionysus, who, become himself the victim of the rite of omophagia, was torn to pieces by the maenads in Thrace, when in grief at his second loss of Eurydice he paid them no heed.

But if the Dionysiac cult remained incurably wild, its mild Orphic offshoot, whose conventicles spread throughout the Mediterranean world‑or wherever Greeks were‑including southern Italy, Crete, and Cyprus, had this to commend it: by eating the raw flesh of the suffering and dying god (Zagreus-Dionysus), the initiate might strengthen the divine element in him; by following the Orphic rules of purity, wearing white garments, abstaining from all meat (except that of the god in the mystery), avoiding the breaking of taboos against sex indulgence and pollution, and being generally ascetic, as Orphism demanded, he might refine the evil out of him and avoid going to the place of punishment after death. More positively, by being worthy he might hope to enjoy a better lot in the next world and at the same time increase his sense of spiritual security in this. Ultimately, he might altogether escape the necessity of rebirth, in which the Orphics believed, and go to the Isles of the Blest.

That these ideas should have had a part in the development of one of the great schools of Greek philosophy may seem at first sight surprising. But it is true that in the philosophic brotherhood that Pythagoras Founded the Orphic coloring was strong. The Pythagorean brothers believed that the major task of one's life is to purify the soul, and by following Orpheus (or perhaps Apollo) they hoped to bring their souls into i state of serenity, understanding, and godlike poise. Their studies in medicine, music, astronomy, mathematics, and pure philosophy were designed to nourish in their souls the divine elements, so that they would not hereafter have to suffer transmigration from earthbody to earth‑body, but could regain a spiritual state )f purity and insight.

This was not the only case of the search in Greek thought for higher ground.

Greek Religion and the Tragic Poets

The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides revolve upon the awful theme that man's disasters are the doom brought upon him by the gods. This is what the myths long had said, but it was not always clear whether the gods were impelled by a just purpose, by sheer willfulness, or by the decrees of an inexorable Fate to which even gods are, willy‑nilly, the ministrants. The great dramatists addressed themselves to the human problems that this confusion raises, and in so doing produced passages of moral and religious reflection that have no parallel in ancient literature outside the powerful utterances of the Old Testament prophets.

In the fifth century Aeschylus and Sophocles more or less followed the poet Pindar in exalting Zeus to the moral height of being the administrator of a cosmic justice. The other deities continue to exist alongside of Zeus, but they yield at once to his will when he overrules them in the name of the justice he is imposing. No longer is Fate blind. Aeschylus, in general places Zeus in the superior position of either commanding Fate or being served by it. It is therefore really Zeus who dispatches the avenging Furies who punish the sins of man, ever continuing and multiplying from generation to generation among the wrongdoer: Aeschylus' great trilogy, the Oresteia, indeed vigorously declares:

Zeus, the high god -- whate'er be dim in doubt,

This can our thought track out

The blow that fells the sinner is of God,

And as he wills, the rod

Of vengeance smiteth sore....

For not forgetful is the high gods' doom

Against the sons of carnage: all too long

Seems the unjust to prosper and be strong,

Till the dark Furies come,

And smite with stern reversal all his home,

Down into dim obstruction he is gone,

And help and hope, among the lost, is none!

Though in Prometheus Bound the tortured Titan who is its central figure defies Zeus as unjust, it is evident that Aeschylus thought that Zeus had learned some thing from this encounter, and was in no doubt the the king of the gods should now be approached with utmost piety as the righteous moral governor of the world.

Sophocles, the wise, tender‑hearted, and supremely poised, gave to the character of Zeus some of his own humanity of feeling. Following some hints supplied b Aeschylus, who, however, in general makes Zeus stern and fearsome in his moral fervor. Sophocles softens the great god's judgments with mercy. He makes Polynice’s for instance, in Oedipus at Colonos, begin his final plea to his royal father by reminding him that Clemency sits by the side of Zeus, sharing his throne and entering into all his decisions, a fact that should influence earthy potentates and make them more merciful. Yet Sophocles, also, is sure that the favor of Zeus is not easily gained, for one must be pure in word and deed, as Zeus indeed wills from on high, if he is to experience at all the divine clemency.

Euripides, a generation later, filled with doubts that had perhaps been raised in his mind by the Sophists or by such bold minds as Anaxagoras, lifts his voice with less conviction in behalf of obedience to the gods. Although it is a difficult thing for us to decide when Euripides is putting words into the mouths of his characters and when he is speaking his own mind, it seem certain that he had come to question the justice an integrity, if not of Zeus, at least of Apollo, Aphrodite, and others among the gods. Often he pities man stricken and hurled to earth by the unpitying gods. He makes the proud and pure‑hearted Hippolytus cry.

Ah, pain, pain, pain!

0 unrighteous curse! ...

Thou, Zeus, dost see me? Yea, it is I;

The proud and pure, the server of God,

The white and shining in sanctity!

To a visible death, to an open sod,

I walk my ways;

And all the labor of saintly days

Lost, lost without meaning !

Meanwhile a maiden of the chorus has already uttered the amazing reproof:

Ye gods that did snare him,

Lo, I cast in your faces

My hate and my scorn!

And the men have chanted in discouragement over whelming their uncertain faith:

Surely the thought of the Gods hath balm in it always, to win me

Far from my griefs; and a thought, deep in the dark of my mind,

Clings to a great Understanding. Yet all the spirit within me

Faints when I watch men's deeds matched with the guerdon they find.

For Good comes in Evil's traces,

And the Evil the Good replaces;

And Life, 'mid the changing faces,

Wandereth weak and blind.

But Euripides was by no means a total disbeliever, it would seem. He was really seeking a notion of God purged of the misconceptions of mythology and tradition. His true voice perhaps comes to us in the groping words:

Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Thron

Above the World, whoe'er thou art, unknown

And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,

Or Reason of our Reason; God, to thee

I lift my praise, seeing the silent road

That bringeth justice ere the end be trod

To all that breathes and dies.

In this "strange prayer," as the poet himself calls it, the questing spirit of Euripides, like that of his philosophic contemporaries, seems to seek a new theology.

The Philosophers and the Gods

That the philosophers would go far beyond the Homeric point of view was clear from the start. Greek philosophy began as monism: everything in the universe is some form or other of one thing. Thales said this substance was water, Anaximenes that it was air, Heraclitus that it was fire, and Anaximander that it was an indeterminate somewhat. Whatever it was, it was creative or divine, they all agreed. Xenophanes was sure that the creative power was "one god greatest among gods and men, not like mortals in form, nor yet in mind. He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over."' But men insist on seeing him in their likeness, and so have fallen into the anthropomorphic fallacy:

Homer. and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that among men are a shame and a reproach‑theft and adultery and deceiving one another.

Mortals think that the gods are begotten, and wear clothes like their own, and have a voice and a form.

If oxen or horses or lions had hands and could draw with them and make works of art as men do, horses would draw the shapes of gods like horses, oxen like oxen; each kind would represent their bodies just like their own forms.

The Ethiopians say their gods are black and flat‑nosed; the Thracians, that theirs are blue‑eyed and red‑haired.'

Plato had a different criticism. In the Republic, where he considers the education of youth, he fears the moral ill‑effects of teaching the Homeric myths in unexpurgated form:

The narrative of Hephaestus binding Hera his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer‑these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person can not judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young hear first should be models of virtuous thoughts.

A similar moral criticism is leveled by Plato against the mystery religions. The trouble with the mysteries is that they do not recommend justice for the sake of justice; they practice virtue for the sake of the rewards it brings, the "shower of benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious."

They produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour; ... the latter they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.

Plato was far from denying the existence of the gods. But they were, he said, neither as wayward and fallible as Homer pictured them nor as easily swayed from impartial justice as the mysteries implied. They were true to, and dependent in function on, a higher power. There was above them, and behind all other beings and things, a Creator, or Artisan, who had identified himself with the highest of all values, the Good. He it was who in the beginning beheld the realm of ideal forms, which not even he created, and was inspired by them to make a world that participated in their structure and that, in mountains, plains, and seas, gods, men, and animals, bodied forth the good, the beautiful, and true in various degrees. As for man, he is a soul in a body, and his soul needs to grow toward the highest good, that it may no longer have to suffer continued rebirth but go into that state in which it may, like God, behold and enjoy forever the hierarchy of the ideal forms, in all their truth, beauty, and goodness. The gods, on their part, desire none of the superstitious worships and magical rituals that men have developed in their honor. They desire and expect only that each man shall engage in the proper tendance of his soul and seek the supreme good that the high god has set before him. Firm in these beliefs, Plato in old age contended that atheism or any assertion that God is indifferent to men or can be bought off by gifts or offerings should be treated as dangerous to society.

Much more could be said both of Plato and of his fellow‑philosophers. It is of great interest, for example, to see how Aristotle, at least in his earlier period, found no need in his philosophy for the traditional gods of the Greeks, but yet, in considering the highest kind of being, had to posit God the Prime Mover, that is, a being causing all the movements of celestial and terrestrial bodies by attraction toward himself, while being himself actually without motion. Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neo‑Platonists were as much emancipated as Plato from the confining bonds within which their lesser countrymen were straining toward a fuller, freer life and greater wisdom.