IX
The Classical polytheism, consequently, has a style of its own which puts it in a different category from the conceptions of any other world-feelings, whatever the superficial affinities may be. This mode of possessing gods without godhead has only existed once, and it was in the one Culture that made the statue of naked Man the whole sum of its art.
Nature, as Classical man felt and knew it about him, viz., a sum of well-formed bodily things, could not be deified in any other form but this. The Roman felt that the claim of Yahweh to be recognized as sole God had something atheistic in it. One God, for him, was no God, and to this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek and Roman, for the philosophers in so far as they were pantheists and godless. Gods are bodies, σώματα of the perfectest kind, and plurality was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers and poets. The concept of ζῷον πολιτικόν was valid for gods as well as for men; nothing was more alien to them than oneness, solitariness and self-adequacy; and no existence therefore was possible to them save under the aspect of eternal propinquity. It is a deeply significant fact that in Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting. Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no cult at all. Both are merely artistic modes of expression (it is as such only that they figure in the courtly epos of Homer), elements that Varro would class in the genus mythicum and not in the genus civile. The old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man (even that of pre-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. Only concretes—hearth and door, the coppice and the plot-field, this particular river and that particular hill—condensed into Being for him. We observe that everything that has farness, everything that contains a suggestion of unbounded and unbodied in it and might thereby bring space as Ent and divine into the felt Nature, is excluded and remains excluded from Classical myth; how should it surprise, then, if clouds and horizons, that are the very meaning and soul of Baroque landscapes, are totally wanting in the Classical backgroundless frescoes? The unlimited multitude of antique gods—every tree, every spring, every house, nay every part of a house is a god—means that every tangible thing is an independent existence, and therefore that none is functionally subordinate to any other.
The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of individual thing and unitary space. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places, while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space. In the old Roman religion “Tellus Mater” is not the all-mother but the visible ploughable field itself. Faunus is the wood and Vulturnus is the river, the name of the seed is Ceres and that of the harvest is Consus. Horace is a true Roman when he speaks of “sub Jove frigido,” under the cold sky. In these cases there is not even the attempt to reproduce the God in any sort of image at the places of worship, for that would be tantamount to duplicating him. Even in very late times the instinct not only of the Romans but of the Greeks also is opposed to idols, as is shown by the fact that plastic art, as it became more and more profane, came into conflict more and more with popular beliefs and the devout philosophy.[[497]] In the house, Janus is the door as god, Vesta the hearth as goddess, the two functions of the house are objectivized and deified at once. A Hellenic river-god (like Acheloüs, who appears as a bull,) is definitely understood as being the river and not as, so to say, dwelling in the river. The Pans[[498]] and Satyrs are the fields and meadows as noon defines them, well bounded and, as having figure, having also existence. Dryads and Hamadrayads are trees; in many places, indeed, individual trees of great stature were honoured with garlands and votive offerings without even the formality of a name. On the contrary, not a trace of this localized materiality clings to the elves, dwarfs, witches, Valkyries and their kindred the armies of departed souls that sweep round o’nights. Whereas Naiads are sources, nixies and hags, and tree-spirits and brownies are souls that are only bound to sources, trees and houses, from which they long to be released into the freedom of roaming. This is the very opposite of the plastic Nature-feeling, for here things are experienced merely as spaces of another kind. A nymph—a spring, that is—assumes human form when she would visit a handsome shepherd, but a nixy is an enchanted princess with nenuphars in her hair who comes up at midnight from the depths of the pool wherein she dwells. Kaiser Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser cavern and Frau Venus in the Hörselberg. It is as though the Faustian universe abhorred anything material and impenetrable. In things, we suspect other worlds. Their hardness and thickness is merely appearance, and—a trait that would be impossible in Classical myth, because fatal to it—some favoured mortals are accorded the power to see through cliffs and crags into the depths. But is not just this the secret intent of our physical theories, of each new hypothesis? No other Culture knows so many fables of treasures lying in mountains and pools, of secret subterranean realms, palaces, gardens wherein other beings dwell. The whole substantiality of the visible world is denied by the Faustian Nature-feeling, for which in the end nothing is of earth and the only actual is Space. The fairy-tale dissolves the matter of Nature as the Gothic style dissolves the stone-mass of our cathedrals, into a ghostly wealth of forms and lines that have shed all weight and acknowledge no bounds.
The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to “strange gods.” For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods “do not exist” would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for particularly honouring the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated “to the unknown gods,” such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.[[499]] These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the generalis invocatio.[[500]] As the universe is the sum of things, and as gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his enemies, but they were gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9, 6: “di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque.” The Roman people admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods—which of course logically follows from the additive god-feeling of the Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the Great Mother of Pessinus[[501]] was received in Rome as the Sibyl commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people, with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-feeling.
This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could become a necessary element in this religious form-world. But here it is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman emperor-worship—i.e., the reverence of the “genius” of the living Princes and that of the dead predecessors as “Divi”—has hitherto been confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)[[502]] and also with the later and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all, from the deification of a thing—such as a copse or a well or, in the limit, a statue which represented a god—to the deification of an outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the day of his triumph wore the armour of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his similarity to the terra-cotta statue of the God whose “numen” he for the time being incorporated.