An army in the field has no temples, and does sacrifice in the open air; indeed, even where temples exist there are abundant altars in the open air; for example, where Hector did sacrifice, "amid the crests of many-folded Ida," and at other times on the city height.[8]
Temples are not often mentioned in the Epics, where the host usually worships under the sky, and has no temples of its own; or Odysseus is wandering "in fairy lands forlorn." An army on the march or in the trenches would build no temples, nor would Odysseus find them among cannibals. But that fairy isle, Phaeacia, had its temples of the gods built by the first settler, Nausithous.[9] Altars at the siege of Troy are set up in the field, as at Orleans during the two solemn masses on the day of the raising of the siege (May 8, 1429). The Gods have their groves, whether a temple was in each of them or not. Originally it is probable that caves, as at Delos, or the Dictaean cave of Crete, or gorges, as at Delphi, were the sacred places; but Homer knows the stone threshold of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the wealth of offerings within,[10] where Agamemnon consulted the Oracle.[11] The priest, Chryses, had "roofed a shrine" for Apollo.[12] Apollo, in Troy, had a temple, with a great adyton; and Athene's temple had a sacred seated image of the goddess.[13] Athene also in Athens[14] went to the temple of Erechtheus. Given the circumstances of the heroes in both Epics, an army in the field, a wanderer in unknown lands, the rare mention of temples is no proof that, when they appear, they mark "late" passages, while the altars in the open air mark "early" passages: moreover, hecatombs could not be slain in temples, nor could a large army be accommodated in the house of a god. When the Achaeans were sacrificing several hecatombs at once to Zeus, in Aulis, they naturally could not do so in a temple, but under a fair plane tree, by a clear running stream.[15]
In the symbolical sacrifices that sanctioned the taking of oaths, the rite was extremely simple. Agamemnon cuts the hair from the lambs' heads, utters the appeal to Zeus and all powers to bear witness, then cuts the throats of the victims, and libation of wine is made. Priam carries the dead lambs away in his chariot; but when a boar is the victim, in the oath of Agamemnon to Achilles, it is thrown into the sea.[16] We see no sacrifice within the temple of a city except that in association with which Theano, a married priestess of a maiden goddess, lays a robe on the knees of Athene, while the attendant ladies raise the ὀλoλυγή.[17]
In peace, as in war, Homer's people are free from the lower superstitions, if we except the belief in augury and the omens from the flight of birds. Hector's famous phrase, "one omen is best, to fight for our own country," would have shocked most of the Generals of Republican Rome. A phantasm of the dead, as we saw, may appear only in a dream or a "border-land case," to a man in bed, if the dead man has not been cremated. The boding visions of the second-sighted man in the Odyssey, the shroud of mist about the bodies of the doomed Wooers, may indicate a superstitious belief—to those who do not believe in second sight! The fairies of Homer, nymphs of mountain and well, wood and sea, are creatures of poetry, rather than of superstition; they are fair and frail, but their kisses, unlike those of their kindred from Argyll to the Pacific, are not fatal.
Homer knows nothing of taboos. That the Achaeans "let their hair grow long" is true enough, but does not suggest that they were under a vow not to cut it till they took Troy.[18] The representations of men in many works of Aegean art, such as the gold cups of Vaphio, show them wearing clustering love-locks that fall beneath the shoulder. We might as well accuse the Spartans and the Cavaliers as the Achaeans of wearing love-locks because of a vow. That the Achaeans were tabooed from love during the siege is a fact entirely unknown to their poet. "To every man a damsel or two" is his version, and the heroes couch with their fair captives; while Agamemnon takes a solemn oath that he has never done so with Briseis, and Thetis advises Achilles to rejoice in love. A goddess would not advise the breach of a religious vow of continence.[19]
To the folklorist it is almost annoying to find, in so ancient a poet, so little of the seamy side of folklore. But the later poets of Greece apply it very abundantly: it was rampant in their temple-rites and temple-legends. Homer speaks of no witches, of no incantations save the song for the staunching of the blood of Odysseus, when his thigh had been gored by the boar. The belief in such staunching is still common in Cumberland and in Ireland, as it was when Jeanne d'Arc refused to let the charm be sung over her arrow wound at Orleans.
Magic done for the good of the crops, as in the Eleusinian and other mysteries, does not appear in the Epics. A good king has good luck, under him all things prosper; but the idea of sacrificing an unlucky king, or any other human being, would have surprised the poet. In all such matters he is on another plane than the authors of the Ionian epics, whose tales of constant human sacrifices are perhaps adapted from Märchen (where cannibalism is the horror) rather than inspired by veridical traditions. The great rite which Homer ignores, and which the pre-Achaean population probably, and certainly all post-Homeric Greece from the eighth century to the arrival of Christianity held in most regard, was the purification of manslayers by the blood of beasts. Achilles in the Cyclic poems is purified by Odysseus after the slaying of Thersites; Apollo is purified after the slaying of the dragon of Delphi.
But "the whole idea of pollution as a consequence of wrong-doing is foreign to Homer," says Mr. Monro.[20] When the house of Odysseus is cleansed of the blood of the slain Wooers, and when, on restoring Chryseis, Agamemnon "bade the folk purify themselves, so they purified themselves, and cast the defilements into the sea, and did sacrifice to Apollo,"[21] the pollution is mere physical filth of house and camp. There is no idea of magical riddance from either sin or danger at the hands of a pursuing ghost. Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, remarks, in his Homeric commentary, "on the cardinal difference between the religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) Greece...."[22] It would have been safer to discriminate between Homeric religion on one hand, and Ionian, Attic, and historic Greek religion on the other.
The idea at the root of the purification of a man-slayer by a bath of blood is not, I think, that his sin is being removed by the "sympathetic magic" of new blood, but that the swine's blood poured over him throws the avenging ghost of his victim off his scent, confusing the trail; or that the angry ghost accepts the pig's blood washed from the slayer as atonement. Plato says that the myth held that the ghost of the victim communicates its own uneasy emotions to the slayer, telepathically.[23] Scores of savage and one or two Hellenic practices aim at actually disarming or mutilating the avenging ghost, by binding or dismembering the corpse which he tenanted. Homer believes that, a man once burned and buried, his ghost is confined, powerless, to Hades. Hence his Achaeans neither worship the dead nor practise purification to avoid avenging ghosts. These rites are Ionic, Attic, and, in historic Greece, are Hellenic, also Asiatic. They make an insuperable barrier between Homeric and Ionian religion.
It is certain that among the Ionians of the seventh century B.C. a mystic purification from blood-guilt was the usual practice. Herodotus tells us that it was, in the sixth century, the practice of the Phrygians, Lydians, and, in his own day, of the Hellenes. "The manner of cleansing among the Lydians is the same, almost, as that which the Hellenes use."[24] 3 Aeschylus informs us that the blood of swine was employed in purification.[25] The purifier, in historic Greece, "washed off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, and, having stirred up the washing, poured it into a trench to the west of the tomb."[26]