Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

In Greece, there was no hereditary priesthood, as in Egypt. The right of presiding at public sacrifices pertained to the highest civil office, and probably the head of each family was also its ecclesiastic; but there was no priestly combination with secular power, and no national creed. Nestor, at home, conducts religious service, aided by his sons, and Achilles offers sacrifice to the manes of Patroclus. Pausanias informs us that early in Arcadia, the twelve gods were worshiped under the forms of rude stones; and before Dædalus, the statues had eyes nearly shut, legs close together, and the arms scarcely detached from the body; but as the correlative arts and sciences improved, sculpture, like the civilization it expressed, acquired freedom, proportion, and natural action. Altars were commonly erected in the open air, and propitiatory offerings most frequently smoked before Zeus, Poseidon, Athene, and Apollo. The first three of these are better known under their Latin designations of Jupiter, Neptune, and Minerva. The supremacy of the first over all inferior deities is decisively marked. His own declaration, according to Homer, is at the same time the most affirmative on this point, and a curious indication of the social condition of the gods. Says the supreme, "If I catch any one of you helping the Trojans or the Greeks, he shall either make his escape to Olympus disgraced and bruised, or else I will seize him, and throw him into Tartarus. Then you shall know my supremacy in power. Come, now, make the trial; hang a gold chain from heaven, and fasten yourselves at the end of it, all of you, gods and goddesses; you can not pull Zeus down, but, whenever I please, I can pull you up with the earth and the sea, wind the chain round Olympus, and there you would all dangle in the air."

According to Herodotus, the Egyptians invented twelve gods, which were imported into Greece. These were, doubtless, of the lowest order of merit, but of sufficient importance to justify the report that the worship of stone images originated in the East. Venus was first adored at Paphos under the form of an ærolite fallen from heaven. It was by such circumstances that a special sanctity was conferred upon particular localities. The artistic merit of the idols was vastly improved, but still the theology of the Greeks remained purely anthropomorphous, the human form being to them the paragon of excellence. But to his whole intellectual being this was a representative, the embodiment and very identity of divinity. All the susceptibilities of his immortal nature, full of the endless enthusiasms respecting every thing splendid, so that in the estimation of an apostle, he was "very religious," were exercised to refine this image and exalt it. Living, he did this, and dying, he looked beyond the grave but to a world of men, sublimated, indeed, but still with human passions, and capable of human enjoyments. He turned with fond desire toward the radiance of the descending sun, which with genial glories seemed wooing him to another and purer earth. The great ocean stream severed the world of debasing toil from the bright sphere of not less active but nobler pursuits, and on that western shore he anticipated fairer as well as more abundant fruits than the East might behold. The great national altar on the Acropolis was exterior to the temple, and fronted the setting sun.

Egyptian worship was so closely allied to that of India, that when the sepoys in Sir Ralph Abercrombie's expedition entered the ancient temples in the valley of the Nile, they immediately asserted that their own divinities were discovered upon the walls, and worshiped them accordingly. But no such identity ever existed with the purer forms of the West. All the gods of Hellenic Greeks, from Jupiter down to Hercules, were the ancestors of the primitive Pelasgic tribes which existed in Asia Minor, Crete, and the islands of the Archipelago, but seldom in Greece itself. At its intellectual and moral centre, Egyptian fetichism had some influence on the one hand, and Indo-Germanic metaphysics a good deal on the other; still the chief element in Greek mythology was hero-worship, made as unexceptionable as it could be by a people whose religion mainly consisted in ancestral adoration. True, their whole system was a fable and an absurdity; but the puerilities which defaced its beauty were the remnant of a more barbarous state of things upon which they improved, and we may wonder most that they so for emancipated themselves.

Orpheus is said to have come from Thrace, a region of indefinite extent in the estimation of the Greek, and one which was a chief source of the Hellenic sacred rites. Both the Orphic and Pythagorean doctrines Herodotus believed to have emanated from Egypt, which would appear to support the fact of a double current of emigration, clearly proved on other grounds. This great religionist was older than Homer, and seems to have exerted a great influence on the civilization of Greece. It is said he accompanied Jason and the other Argonauts on their piratical expedition, that he visited Egypt, and brought thence the doctrine which greatly corrupted the rude but simple theology of primitive times. Many hymns attributed to him are probably spurious; but enough was authentic to the ancients to justify the conclusion that he taught the doctrine of one self-existing God, the maker of all things, and who is present to us in all His works. But this great truth was always somewhat disguised, and grew increasingly fabulous. Cudworth preserves the following specimen: "The origin of the earth was ocean; when the water subsided, mud remained, and from both of these sprang a living creature—a dragon having the head of a lion growing from it, and in the midst, the face of God; by name Hercules, or Chronos." By him an immense egg was produced, which being split into two parts, one became the heavens the other the earth. Heaven and earth mingled, and produced Titans or giants.

The Delphic oracle occupied a high position in the political and religious government of mankind. It had a powerful influence in molding the first national confederacy, and was its presiding centre. Both Strabo and Pausanias specially refer to the Amphictyonic league, as being formed for the maintenance of harmony and union among the states which composed it. The original confederacy was greatly enlarged by the Dorian accession; oracular control was thus extended throughout the Peloponnesus, and soon embraced within its influence the entire Grecian world. By this central assimilative and directing power the mighty republic was happily consummated, and its citizens first termed Hellenes. It was by the peculiarity of its oracular system, even more than by the other traits we have noticed, that the Greek religion was distinguished from that which prevailed in Egypt, and the yet remoter East. Based as it was on delusion, it still was a great improvement upon the preceding, inasmuch as it was presented in a higher character than the mere constitution of nature. According to the Delphic teaching, the supreme Deity was a moral and personal being, actively interesting himself in human affairs, and claiming authority over human volitions. Hence, while the oriental systems displayed only a crowd of mere personifications of natural powers, without moral character or substantial being, the system of the Greeks presented a divine reality for the human mind to embrace; an actual course of Providence, and deities palpably real to religious feelings. Amidst a multitude of deformities, the most marked feature of the Greek religion stood forth in enhancing, if not with ennobling beauty. The Egyptians worshiped animals, but the Greeks never sank lower than the worship of idealized man. The former were superstitious upon physical objects, their system resting upon a physical deity; but the latter adored a moral deity, and, however disastrous superstition ever is, hero-worship was not entirely void of redeeming qualities. It held up ancient worthies for the imitation of successors, rendered their memories motives to excellence, and, by the sublimating power of oracular canonization, exerted a mighty influence in the spheres of political and moral life. Lessons of respect for antiquity, and submission to authority, were constantly inculcated, the effect of which shines clearly in the Grecian character, exemplified in all the tumultuous growth and varied grandeur of her democracy. It was a lofty hero-worship, fostered by their sacred system, which fortified the sentiments of reverence and subordination in the popular mind, and supplied at once motive and restraint in every sphere of secular and religious life. Their approximation to truth took the boldest form of superstition, and indicates the working of a higher order of mind than had yet appeared. The Greeks were a nation of poets and philosophers as acutely refined in understanding as they were tender of heart, and, since we still turn their writings to a moral account, our sympathy for the worth they attained should furnish some degree of apology for the errors which they unfortunately embraced. The reality and firmness of their belief in divination was tested, for example, at Platæa, when the Greeks sustained the charge of the Persian cavalry, and "because the victims were not favorable, there fell of them at that time very many, and far more were wounded." And whether the national fleet should risk a battle at Salamis was determined in council by the appearance of an owl. How strange that when courage and wisdom had failed to persuade, superstition saved the liberties of the world! It is painful to contemplate the human mind debased by such childish absurdities, commingled with traits so fair, and excellences so great. Still, despite all its fraud and folly, the religion of Greece contained much that was both admirable in morality and profound in speculation. Hooker remarks, "The right conceit that they had, that to perjury vengeance is due, was not without good effect, as touching the course of their lives."

The tragic genius of Æschylus was imbued with religious sentiment, and found its fittest material in the simple and sublime traditions of his forefathers. He has handed down to our days clear memorials of the still popular faith, in his noble drama of Prometheus Bound; wherein he represents Jupiter as sending to beg from the tortured prophet a revelation of the yet future decrees of destiny. This mythical benefactor, the most significant of ancient religious fables, was a Japhetite, who brought his celestial fire from the remote East to man. Prometheus indignantly refuses to gratify the curiosity of his oppressor, and utters severe invectives against the new power of Jove. He alludes to wars in which he had himself assisted him, leads us back to the first colonization of Greece, and leaves us justly to conclude that the nature-worship of Orpheus had been mixed up with hero-worship also, and that the Jupiter of the poets was little better than a Cretan pirate, who, with his associates, drove out the Asian chief already beginning to civilize the people, and banished him to the wild regions of the Caucasus. The several centuries which transpired between Prometheus and Hesiod was a period long enough in legendary times to invest heroes, or benefactors of the human race, with supernatural attributes. Æschylus set forth a yet sublimer article of Athenian belief, when he represented the two Powers, immovable destiny and human consciousness, weighing the motives of the son of Agamemnon, and, under the presiding auspices of the goddess of Wisdom, leaving the ultimate decision to the Areopagus. God-conscious reason was thus called upon to sit in judgment upon the past, and to proclaim the eternal ways of infinite justice to coming generations. Herodotus, also, in the clear light of Hellenic freedom, recapitulated lapsed centuries, and foretold future destinies, through the prophetic mirror of Nemesis, that clearest reflection of Greek religiousness; and, like his predecessor, pictured the divine drama of eternal law and retribution. Thucydides followed, and became the final prophet of the great struggle of his nation, and her influence in the developments of future time.

Sophocles, of all the dramatists, was the most religious; his whole life was said to be one continual worship, and his writings are redolent of his tender spirit. The Œdipus Colonæus was a marked consecration after death; the gods conferred that honor, to show that in the terrible example they made of him, it was not personal vengeance, but a salutary admonition designed for the whole human race. That the self-condemned criminal should at last find peace in the grove of the Furies, the very spot from which guilt would instinctively shrink with acutest horror, bears a moral of profound and tranquilizing significancy.

The moral charms of domestic affection in antiquity are depicted by Homer, in what is undoubtedly an embellished, but may have been a real, scene. The manly beauty of Hector, the feminine graces of Andromache, and the budding charms of the babe Astyanax, live before us in vivid representation. Such a blending of gentleness and strength is not often seen on earth, as was manifested by him who set aside his burnished armor lest its strange dazzling should frighten his child. Paternal affection indeed sits gracefully on the plumed helmet of this bravest hero of Troy, but not even that can dissuade him from the conscientious discharge of a most comprehensive duty. Neither the entreaties of a wife, the prayers of a father, the tears of a mother, nor his own fondest parental hopes, could divert him from his devotion to country and religion. He knows and feels that inexorable fate has declared against him, but he bows to the will of the gods with a heroism equaled only by the placid self-denial which silences both inclination and interest in his bosom.

The ancient games were moral in their purpose and influence. Of the great number of athletes who gained prizes thereat, very few became famous in warlike pursuits. Their enthusiasm flowed from a higher and purer source. The vigorous, disinterested, salutary, and heaven-appointed contest was to the Greeks a thrilling symbol of an exalted life, the struggle through an emulative career of exhausting duties, in order to attain and enjoy, at the goal of consummate glory, the reward of a blissful immortality.

All the stray sybilline leaves of ancient history and legendary faith are inscribed with indications of a moral order of the universe, and encourage the expectation of perpetual progress. Pindar believed that the beginning and end of man were divinely ordained; and while many erudite teachers held to the supremacy of fate, none were ever so foolish as to suppose that accident governed the world.