§ 4
Were the Greeks, then, always so untroubled by such fears of the souls of the dead? Was there never any cult of disembodied spirits, such as was not only known to all primitive peoples throughout the world, but was also quite familiar to nations belonging to the same family as the Greeks, for instance, the Indians and the Persians? The question and its answer have more than a passing interest. In later times—long subsequent to Homer—we find in Greece itself a lively worship of ancestors and a general cult of the departed. Were it demonstrable—as it is generally assumed without proof—that the Greeks only at this late period first began to pay a religious cult to the souls of the dead, this fact would give very strong support to the oft-repeated theory that the cult of the dead arose from the ruins of a previous worship of the gods. Anthropologists are accustomed to deny this and to regard the worship of disembodied souls as one of the earliest forms (if not as originally the only form) of the reverence paid to unseen powers. The peoples, however, upon whose conditions of life and mental conceptions such views are generally based, have indeed behind them a long past, but no history. What is to prevent pure speculation and theorizing in conformity with the preconceived idea just mentioned (which is almost elevated to the position of a doctrine of faith by some comparative religionists) from introducing into the dim past of such savage peoples the primitive worship of gods, out of which the worship of the dead may then subsequently arise? But Greek religious development can be traced from Homer onwards for a long period; and there we find the certainly remarkable fact that a cult of the dead, unknown to Homer, only appears later, in the course of a long and vigorous expansion of religious ideas in after times; or, at least, then shows itself more plainly—but not, it is important to notice, as the precipitate of a dying belief in gods and worship of the gods, but rather as a collateral development by the side of that highly developed form of piety.
Are we, then, really to believe that the cult of disembodied [11] spirits was absolutely unknown to the Greeks of pre-Homeric times?
Such an assertion, if made without due qualification, is contradicted by a closer study of the Homeric poems themselves.
It is true that Homer represents for us the earliest great stage in the evolution of Greek civilization of which we have clear evidence. But the poems do not stand at the beginning of that evolution. Indeed, they only stand at the beginning of Greek Epic poetry—so far as this has been transmitted to us—because the natural greatness and wide popularity of the Iliad and the Odyssey secured their preservation in writing. Their very existence and the degree of artistic finish which they show, oblige us to suppose that behind them lies a long history of heroic “Saga” poetry. The conditions which they describe and imply point to a long course of previous development—from nomadic to city life, from patriarchal rule to the organization of the Greek Polis. And just as the maturity of material development tells its tale, so do the refinement and maturity of culture, the profound and untrammelled knowledge of the world, the clarity and simplicity of thought reflected in them. All these things go to show that before Homer, in order to reach Homer, the Greek world must have thought and learned much—must, indeed, have unlearned and undone much. As in art, so in all the products of civilization, what is simple, appropriate, and convincing is not the achievement of beginners, but the reward of prolonged study. It is prima facie unthinkable that during the whole length of Greek evolution before Homer, religion alone, the relationship between man and the invisible world, should have remained stationary at any one point. It is not from the comparison of religious beliefs and their development among kindred nations, nor even from the study of apparently primitive ideas and usages in the religious life of the Greeks themselves of later times, that we are to seek the truth about the religious customs of that remote period which is obscured for us by the intervening mass of the Homeric poems. Comparative studies of this kind are valuable in their way, but must only be used to give further support to the insight derived from less easily misleading methods of inquiry. For us the only completely satisfactory source of information about pre-Homeric times is Homer himself. We are allowed—indeed, we are forced—to conclude that there have been change in conceptions and customs, if, in that otherwise so uniform and rounded Homeric world, we meet with isolated occurrences, customs, forms of speech that contradict the [12] normal atmosphere of Homer and can only be explained by reference to a world in all essentials differently orientated from his own and for the most part kept in the background by Homer. All that is necessary is to open our eyes, freed from preconceived ideas, to the “rudiments” (“survivals”, as they are better called by English scholars) of a past stage of civilization discoverable in the Iliad and Odyssey themselves.