CHAPTER X[ToC]
GREEK RELIGION
The Gods. Polytheism.—The Greeks, like the ancient Aryans, believed in many gods. They had neither the sentiment of infinity nor that of eternity; they did not conceive of God as one for whom the heavens are only a tent and the earth a foot-stool. To the Greeks every force of nature—the air, the sun, the sea—was divine, and as they did not conceive of all these phenomena as produced by one cause, they assigned each to a particular god. This is the reason that they believed in many gods. They were polytheists.
Anthropomorphism.—Each god was a force in nature and carried a distinct name. The Greeks, having a lively imagination, figured under this name a living being, of beautiful form and human characteristics. A god or goddess was represented as a beautiful man or woman. When Odysseus or Telemachus met a person peculiarly great and beautiful, they began by asking him if he were not a god. Homer in describing the army pictured on the shield of Achilles adds, "Ares and Athena led the army, both clad in gold, beautiful and great, as becomes the gods, for men were smaller." Greek gods are men; they have clothing, palaces, bodies similar to ours; if they cannot die, they can at least be wounded. Homer relates how Ares, the god of war, struck by a warrior, fled howling with pain. This fashion of making gods like men is what is called Anthropomorphism.
Mythology.—The gods, being men, have parents, children, property. Their mothers were goddesses, their brothers were gods, and their children other gods or men who were half divine. This genealogy of the gods is what is called the Theogony. The gods have also a history; we are told the story of their birth, the adventures of their youth, their exploits. Apollo, for example, was born on the island of Delos to which his mother Latona had fled; he slew a monster which was desolating the country at the foot of Parnassus. Each canton of Greece had thus its tales of the gods. These are called myths; the sum of them is termed Mythology, or the history of the gods.
The Local Gods.—The Greek gods, even under their human form, remained what they were at first, phenomena of nature. They were thought of both as men and as forces of nature. The Naiad is a young woman, but at the same time a bubbling fountain. Homer represents the river Xanthus as a god, and yet he says, "The Xanthus threw itself on Achilles, boiling with fury, full of tumult, foam, and the bodies of the dead." The people itself continued to say "Zeus rains" or "Zeus thunders." To the Greek the god was first of all rain, storm, heaven, or sun, and not the heaven, sun, or earth in general, but that corner of the heaven under which he lived, the land of his canton, the river which traversed it. Each city, then, had its divinities, its sun-god, its earth-goddess, its sea-god, and these are not to be confounded with the sun, the earth, and the sea of the neighboring city. The Zeus of Sparta is not the same as the Zeus of Athens; in the same oath one sometimes invokes two Athenas or two Apollos. A traveller who would journey through Greece[51] would therefore meet thousands of local gods (they called them Poliades, or gods of the city). No torrent, no wood, no mountain was without its own deity,[52] although often a minor divinity, adored only by the people of the vicinity and whose sanctuary was only a grotto in the rock.
The Great Gods.—Above the innumerable legion of local gods of each canton the Greeks imagined certain great divinities—the heaven, the sun, the earth, and the sea—and these everywhere had the same name, and had their temple or sanctuary in every place. Each represented one of the principal forces of nature. These gods common to all the Greeks were never numerous; if all are included, we have hardly twenty.[53] We have the bad habit of calling them by the name of a Latin god. The following are their true names: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Athena (Minerva), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaistos (Vulcan), Hestia (Vesta), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), Poseidon (Neptune), Amphitrite, Proteus, Kronos (Saturn), Rhea (Cybele), Demeter (Ceres), Persephone (Proserpina), Hades (Pluto), Dionysos (Bacchus). It is this little group of gods that men worshipped in all the temples, that men ordinarily invoked in their prayers.
Attributes of the Gods.—Each of these great gods had his form, his costume, his instruments (which we call his attributes); it is thus that the faithful imagined him and that the sculptors represented him. Each has his character which is well known to his worshippers. Each has his rôle in the world, performing his determined functions, ordinarily with the aid of secondary divinities who obey him.
Athena, virgin of clear eye, is represented standing, armed with a lance, a helmet on the head, and gleaming armor on the breast. She is the goddess of the clear air, of wisdom, and of invention, a goddess of dignity and majesty.