THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
OF THE GREEKS
I
HOMER AND HESIOD
“Homer and Hesiod created the generations of the gods for the Greeks; they gave the divinities their names, assigned to them their prerogatives and functions, and made their forms known.” So Herodotus describes the service of these poets to the centuries which followed them.[1] But the modern historian of Greek religion cannot accept the statement of the father of history as wholly satisfactory; he knows that the excavations of the last forty years have revealed to us civilizations of the third and second millenia before Christ, the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, of which the historical Greeks were hardly conscious, but which nevertheless made large contributions to religion in the period after Homer. Yet at the most the Mycenaean and Minoan Ages were for the Greek of the sixth and fifth centuries only a kind of dim background for the remote history of his race. The Homeric poems represented for him the earliest stage of Hellenic social life and religion. We are justified, then, in taking the Iliad and Odyssey as starting points in our present considerations. These matchless epics cast an ineffable spell over the imaginations of the Greeks themselves and influenced religion hardly less than literature.
It is obvious that in this course of lectures we cannot consider together all the multitudinous phases of Greek religion: it will be impossible to discuss those large primitive elements in the practices and beliefs of the ancient Greek folk which are so attractive to many students of religion today, for these things were, by and large, only survivals from a ruder past and did not contribute to the religious progress from age to age; nor can we rehearse the details of worship, or review all the varieties of religious belief which we find in different places and in successive centuries; still less can we concern ourselves with mythology. Alluring as these things are they do not concern our present purpose. I shall invite you rather to trace with me the development of Greek religious thought through something over a thousand years, from the period of the Homeric poems to the triumph of Christianity. In such a survey we must be occupied for the most part with the larger movements and the higher ranges of Greek thought, with the advance which was made from century to century; and we shall try to see how each stage of religious development came to fruition in the next period. To accomplish this purpose we must take into due account the social, economic, and political changes in the Greek world which influenced the course of Hellenic thinking. Ultimately, if our study is successful, we shall have discovered in some measure, I trust, what permanent contributions the Greeks made to our own religious ideas. With these things in mind, therefore, let us return to the Homeric Poems.
Whatever the date at which the Iliad and the Odyssey received their final form, the common view that they belong to a period somewhere between 850 and 700 b.c. is substantially correct. They represent the culmination of a long period of poetic development and picture so to speak on one canvas scenes and deeds from many centuries. Yet the composite life is wrought by poetic art into one splendid whole, so that the ordinary reader, in antiquity as today, was unconscious of the variety and contradictions in the poems; only the analytic mind of the scholar detects the traces of the varied materials which the epic poet made his own. It is important that we should realize the fact that the Homeric poems made the impression of a consistent unity upon the popular mind in antiquity, for the influence of these epics through the recitations of rhapsodes at great public festivals and through their use in school was enormous. The statement of Herodotus, with which I began, was very largely true.
These poems were composed to be recited at the courts of princes in Ionia for the entertainment of the nobles at the banquet or after the feast was over. This purpose naturally influenced the poet in depicting life and religion, for the incidents chosen, the adventures recounted, all the life represented, of necessity had to be consonant with the interests and life of the bard’s audience. His lays were for the ears of men who had not yet lost the consciousness that they were in a new land, who knew that they were living in stirring times, and who feeling the spirit of adventure still fresh within them responded joyously to tales of heroic combat. This fact explains in part why it is that we find so little that is primitive or savage in Homer. Such elements were deliberately left out by the bard as unsuited to his audience; he chose to neglect them, not because of any antagonism toward them, but because they did not agree with his artistic aim. Again, the antiquity of the themes, even at the time of composition, made a freedom and picturesqueness of treatment possible, which a narrative of contemporaneous events could never have possessed. Furthermore since the peoples of Ionia, on migrating from the mainland of Greece, had left behind their sacred places and had carried with them their gods, severed from their ancient homes, the epic poet could treat religion with a liberty and could exercise a freedom of selection among the divinities, could use his poetic imagination to modify forms and to emphasize certain attributes, as he never could have done if singing for a people long resident in an ancient home where their gods had been localized and fixed in character time out of mind. A poet singing of Hera in the Argolid would have found himself bound by the traditions of the Heraeum where the goddess had been domiciled from prehistoric time, but the Homeric bard in Ionia was under no such limitation.
Therefore we find that the Iliad and Odyssey present to us a picture of life and religion composed of selected elements and so universalized that it was understood everywhere and at all later times. Exactly as the Homeric dialect, probably never spoken in any place or period, was universally comprehended, so the contents of the poems seemed nothing strange or difficult to audiences in the remotest parts of the Greek world; in the Greek colonies in Sicily, along the western shores of the Mediterranean, or on the borders of the Black Sea, the epic tales were as easily understood as at Delos, Olympia, or Athens.
Yet we have no warrant for using the Homeric poems as sources for the full history of Greek religion in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c. We must remember that the epic bard was least of all composing systematic treatises about religion; on the contrary he was narrating heroic tales, such as the wrath of Achilles, the death of Hector and the ransoming of his body, and the return of Odysseus; he introduced the gods solely as mighty actors in the struggles and adventures of his mortal heroes. The divinities who play their parts in the Iliad, for example, were summoned, like the Achaean princes, so to speak, from many places to take part in the combat before Troy, and in the Odyssey only those gods appear who are required by the story. In short, the poet used the gods and religion exactly as he used his other materials, drawing from a great stock of beliefs and practices that which suited his tale, disregarding all the rest, and troubling little about consistency. Homer’s aim, like that of most poets, was primarily artistic, and least of all didactic.