We have detailed information of the manner in which Amphiaraos was worshipped, more especially in later times, when, in addition to the neighbourhood of Thebes, where the original legend of his descent beneath the earth was localized, Oropos also, the boundary town between Boeotia and Attica, was with overwhelming success identified as the place of his disappearance and made a centre of his influence.[9] We have also a certain amount of information, again from later ages, about the cult of Trophonios. With the passage of time, the details of the worship grew and multiplied, but among them all certain features stand out as especially characteristic and allow us to understand the religious ideas lying behind them. To Amphiaraos and Trophonios were offered just those sacrifices which were also paid to the Chthonic deities, i.e. those deities who dwelt in the depths of the earth.[10] Aid was not expected from them in the details of the daily life of individuals or states. Only in the actual locality of their descent were they effectual, and only there because they revealed the future. Kroisos had already, and Mardonios after him, sent inquiries to the most famous oracles of the day,[11] and among them to Amphiaraos at his ancient oracular seat near Thebes and to Trophonios at Lebadeia. Of Amphiaraos it was believed that he revealed the future by visions sent in dreams to those who after making offering laid themselves down to sleep in his temple. To question Trophonios, it was necessary to pass through a narrow passage into his cave. Inside, the inquirer expected to see Trophonios in person or, at least, to hear his instructions.[12] He dwelt, like a spirit confined to the scene of his magical existence, in bodily person at the bottom of his cave. In fact, the method of Incubation, or temple-sleep, by which Amphiaraos (like many other daimones and Heroes) was questioned, was based on the assumption that the daimon, who was only visible indeed to mortal eyes in the higher state achieved by the soul in dreams, had his permanent dwelling at the seat of his oracle.[13] That is why his appearance can only be expected at this particular place and nowhere else. Originally, too, it was only the dwellers in the depths of the earth who were thus visible in dreams to those who lay down to sleep in the temple over the place where they had their subterranean abode. Homer knows nothing of either gods or daimones who live permanently under the ground in definite places in the inhabited world, near mankind; and for that [93] reason he betrays no knowledge of Incubation-oracles.[14] There is some ground for the belief that this method, inherent in the divinatory power, of getting into touch with the spirit world, was one of the oldest types of Greek oracular art—certainly not later than the Apolline mantikê of inspiration. And it is precisely in the legend of Amphiaraos, as we may believe it to have been related as early as the cyclic poem of the Thebaïs, that we have a proof that already in the days when the quasi-Homeric poetry was still popular, people believed in deathless dwellers below the earth and in their active potency in the mantic art.
It is clear, then, that the worship of Amphiaraos and the belief in his subterranean existence was not due to the influence of the Epic. Rather the reverse was the case; the cult already existed and provided the idea of the daimon and this gave rise to the Epic narrative. The Epic found an existing cult of an oracular daimon who dwelt beneath the earth near Thebes ready to its hand. It reduced this fact to a form which it could understand in a manner typical of the relation which frequently existed between the facts of religious life and Epic poetry. The cult was connected with an event in legendary history, and so brought into harmony with the Epic outlook. The Epic knew nothing of gods attached in this way to a particular earthly spot, and so the spirit worshipped in the cult became in the epic imagination a chieftain and Seer who had not always lived beneath the earth in that place, but had only been transported there subsequently by a miraculous fiat of the supreme god, who had also accorded an eternal life in the depths to the translated hero.[15]
We may perhaps find a parallel in more recent Saga story that will throw light on the question. German mythology is perfectly familiar with such figures for ever, or until the day of judgment, alive in caverns of the mountains or subterranean chambers. Thus, Charlemagne, or it may be Charles the Fifth, still has his abode in Odenberg or in Unterberg, near Salzburg, Frederick II (or, in more recent versions of the legend, Frederick I Barbarossa) in Kyffhäuser, Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg, near Goslar. Thus, too, King Arthur, Holger Danske, and many other favourite characters of popular tradition dwell in subterranean caverns.[16] Occasionally, we can still plainly see how these were originally ancient gods who according to pagan belief dwelt in hollow mountains and whose place has been taken by these heroes and holy men “translated” beneath the earth.[17] So, too, Greek tradition allows us to see even now that those ancient [94] translated mortals, Amphiaraos and Trophonios, are only Epic substitutes for ancient deities who did not owe their everlasting life and subterranean abode to the favour of heaven, but had possessed these from the beginning. At least, at the site of his worship men knew that the prophetic dweller in the cave was a god; one of them is called Zeus Trophonios or Trephonios, not only by learned authorities, but in inscriptions from Lebadeia;[18] Amphiaraos, too, is once called Zeus Amphiaraos and more often a god.[19] In the Translation legends of Christianized people the kings have usurped the place of the ancient gods because the gods themselves, fallen into neglect, have been dethroned. For reasons not so very different from these the ancient gods on Greek soil were turned into heroes.
Surrounded by the unending multiplicity of contemporary notions of divinity the imagination of the Epic poet had fashioned for itself a generalized picture of a divine kingdom. This was at that time a solitary attempt to erect a Panhellenic theological system, but it had the greatest influence upon the mental conceptions of Greeks of every race, for the Epic poet addressed them all. He stood as though on a height looking down on all the narrow valleys and mountainous countrysides cut off from the rest of the world, and a wide prospect opened out before his eyes. He soars above all the innumerable contradictory and conflicting details of local cult and belief, and finds something universal beyond. The name and conception of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, and all the gods represented innumerable diversities in the myths and ritual of the different cities and races; their outward shapes and personalities differed widely according to their localization and the manner of their influence. Instead of all these the Epic poet sees only one Zeus, Apollo, etc., reduced in each case to a single unified personality. And just as he had looked beyond the multiplicity of local deities so he did not confine his gods to particular local habitations and centres of influence in the Greek countries; they did not belong to one locality more than another. True they worked and ruled in the world, but they were for all that free to move where they would. They dwell and meet together on the heights of Olympos, the Pierian Holy Mountain, which, however, became in the imagination of Homer, unfettered by attachment to any particular place, more and more an ideal mountain of fancy. So the broad sea is the dwelling-place of Poseidon; he is not confined to any one place. Even the rulers of the spirit world. Aïdes and Persephoneia, have their abode, not, indeed, on [95] Olympos, and certainly not here or there beneath the surface of the Greek countryside, but far away in a land of fancy; they, too, are not bound to any particular locality of the actual world. At the end of this enormous work of unification and idealization, that, out of all the infinite special manifestations of the name Zeus, each worshipped only in its narrow little circle in Greece, had evolved the single almighty figure of Zeus Father of Gods and Men—how could one who had imagined all this be able to understand, if he met with such a creature, a special Zeus, calling himself Zeus Trophonios, who passed his undying existence in a cave near Lebadeia and was only powerful in that one spot?
Of course, the inhabitant of such a holy spot would not allow himself to be deprived of the belief in the existence and presence of the god on his native soil. Though he might be ready enough in general and in respect of other men’s local deities to regulate conceptions of the nature of the gods in accordance with the Homeric picture, yet he refused absolutely to be shaken in his belief in his own local deity, however unknown to the Olympian family of gods in Homer that deity might be. The local worship in its unaltered, undisturbed persistence, witnessed to the objective truth of his belief. Thus there were preserved in the pious faith of their worshippers large numbers of local deities whose circle of influence was, however, very limited. They had not been raised with the other gods to the heights of Olympos, but had remained faithful to the soil in which they had their home,[20] witnesses to a far distant past in which the members of every remote little community had their separate god bound to the soil beyond which their thoughts did not stray. We shall see how in post-Homeric times many such ancient earth-gods, i.e. gods thought of as living below the surface of the ground, were given new and in some cases a more wide-reaching lease of life. The Epic in its prime knew nothing of these earth-dwelling deities. When it could not close its eyes to their existence it changed them into translated heroes, and beyond the immediate locality of the cult this version of them became the commonly accepted one throughout the rest of Greece.
§ 2
But the Epic was by no means uniform in intention, or carried through as a systematic unity; it was far from being the offspring of a learned reflection that could tolerate no discrepancy. Even here we find at least some few dim [96] recollections of the ancient belief in gods that can have their permanent abode in mountain hollows.
The Odyssey (xix, 178 f.) calls Minos, the son of Zeus (cf. Il. xiii, 450; xiv, 322; Od. xi, 568) who ruled in Knossos the Cretan city, “the familiar gossip of great Zeus.”[21] Very probably the poet meant by these words much the same as was understood by them in later times: that Minos was personally acquainted with Zeus, on earth, of course, and, in fact, in the cave—not far from Knossos on the side of Mount Ida—which was revered as the “Cave of Zeus”.[22] The island of Crete, overrun by the Greeks at an early period, still preserved in its remote seclusion much that was primeval in belief and legend. There, sometimes on Mount Ida, sometimes on Mount Dicte (in the east of the island) the holy cave was pointed out where (already in Hesiod) Zeus was said to have been born.[23] According to a local legend, which probably was present to the fancy of the writer of these lines of the Odyssey, the god now fully grown up still dwelt in his subterranean chamber, and was visited by individual mortals. As Minos before him, so, too, Epimenides had been allowed to hear the prophecies of the god.[24] The Zeus that dwelt in Ida was worshipped in a mystical cult;[25] every year a “throne” was “spread” for him, i.e. probably a “divine banquet” (Theoxenion) was prepared for his consumption, as for other especially Chthonic deities. The initiated then entered the cave dressed in black woollen garments, and remained within for thrice nine days.[26] Everything points to the existence of conceptions similar to those that we found expressed in the cult of Zeus Trophonios at Lebadeia. Zeus dwelling in bodily form in the depths of his cave can appear in person to those who enter his cave duly sanctified.
Then there appears, from the fourth century onwards, the strange statement, perhaps started by Euhemeros and eagerly taken up in later ages by scoffers like Lucian or Christian opponents of the old religion, that Zeus lay buried on Ida.[27] What is here called the grave of the god is nothing in reality but the cave which was generally regarded as his permanent abode.[28] The idea—always strange to the Greeks[29]—that a god could lie buried anywhere on the earth, deprived of life for ever or even for a limited period of time, is often met with in the tradition of Semitic and other non-Greek peoples.[30] We need not inquire what deeper or perhaps allegorical sense such legends may have had in the beliefs of those nations; there is no reason to suppose that such foreign legends had any influence in the formation of Greek myth. Nor does the [97] tradition in Greek lands give the slightest support to the view current among modern mythologists that the death and burial of gods is intended to symbolize the “death of Nature”. It is, in fact, plain that in the legend of the Cretan Zeus’ grave, the “grave” has simply taken the place of the cave as the everlasting abode of the undying god, and that it is a paradoxical expression intended to signify his perpetual confinement to that place. We are immediately reminded of a no less paradoxical notice of a god’s grave at Delphi. Under the navel stone (Omphalos) of the Earth-goddess (which was a vaulted piece of masonry in the Temple of Apollo recalling in its shape the ancient vaulted tombs),[31] there lay buried a divine being. Our learned authorities call this being Python, the enemy of Apollo; one and only one quite untrustworthy witness says it was Dionysos.[32] Here we have a case of one god setting up his temple and abode over the grave of another god. Apollo, the god of prophecy, thrones it over the Earth-spirit Python, the son of the Earth-goddess Gaia. Now, we have ancient and in the highest degree trustworthy traditions to the effect that there was originally at Delphi an ancient Earth-Oracle into whose place Apollo and his mantic art came later as an intruder. We are therefore justified in believing that this circumstance in the history of religion has found expression in the legend that Apollo’s temple and oracular seat stood over the place where an ancient and superseded oracle-daimon lay “buried”.[33] In the days when the primeval Earth-Oracle was still powerful its guardian would not lie dead and buried under the Omphalos of the Earth-goddess, but would have dwelt there alive underground, like Amphiaraos or Trophonios or Zeus on Ida.