All these great movements must have produced many fresh currents in intellectual life too. And in fact the attempt to get free from tradition, from the long-standing culture that seemed, when reflected in the Homeric poems, so permanent and [157] complete in itself, is seen most clearly in the sphere of poetry. The poets threw off the tyranny of the epic convention. They ceased to obey its formal verse-rhythm. And with the freedom thus gained from its vocabulary of stock words, phrases, and images, it was inevitable that the point of view also should change and gain in width. The poet no longer turns his gaze away from his own time and his own person. He himself becomes the central figure of his poetry, and to express the ferment of his own emotions he invents for himself the most natural rhythm, in close alliance with music which now becomes an important and independent element in Greek life. It is as though the Greeks had just discovered the full extent of their own capacities and dared to make free use of them. In every branch of the plastic arts the hand of the artist wins in the course of the centuries an ever greater capacity to give visible shape to the imagined world of beauty. Even the ruins of that world reveal to us more plainly and impressively (because less mixed with conscious reflexion) than any literary achievement, the thing that is of permanent value in Greek art.
It was impossible that religion, alone unaffected by the general atmosphere of change, should remain unaltered in the old paths. But here, even more than in other directions, we must admit that the inward reality of the change remains hidden from us. We can see indeed many external alterations, but of the directing spirit which called them forth we hardly catch more than a glimpse. It is easy, by comparing the later condition of religion with the Homeric, to see how enormously the objects of religious worship have multiplied. We can see how much more sumptuous and elaborate ceremonial has become and observe the development in beauty and variety, in conjunction with the fine arts, of the great religious festivals of the different cities and peoples of Greece. Temples and sculpture bear unmistakable witness to the increased power and importance of religion. That an inward and far-reaching change had come over religious thought and belief might have been already guessed from the fame and importance which belonged to the oracle at Delphi, now coming into real power; and from the many new developments in Greek religious life taking their origin from this spiritual centre. At this time there grew up, under the influence of a deepening moral sense, that new interpretation of religion that we meet with in its completed form in Aeschylus and Pindar. The age was decidedly more “religious-minded” than that in which Homer lived. It is as though the Greeks then went through a period such as [158] most civilized nations go through at some time or other, and such as the Greeks themselves were to repeat more than once in after centuries—a period in which the mind after it has at least half succeeded in winning its freedom from disquieting and oppressive beliefs in invisible powers shrinks back once more. Under the influence of adversity it feels the need of some comforting illusions behind which it may take shelter and be relieved in part of the burden of responsibility.
The obscurity of this period of growth hides also from our sight the origin and development of beliefs about the soul very different from the Homeric. The results of the process are however visible enough and we can still discern how a regular cult of the disembodied soul and eventually a belief in immortality fully worthy of the name were being built up at this time. These things are the result of phenomena which partly represent the re-emergence of elements in religious life which had been submerged in the previous period, and partly the entry of fresh forces which in conjunction with the resuscitated old give rise between them to a third and new creation.
I
CULT OF THE CHTHONIC DEITIES
The chief new feature revealing itself to comparative study in the development of religion in the post-Homeric period is the worship of chthonic deities, that is, of deities dwelling in the interior of the earth. And yet it is an undoubted fact that these divinities are among the oldest possessions of Greek religious faith. Indeed, bound as they are to the soil of the country, they are the true local deities, the real gods of home and country. They are also not unknown to Homer; but epic poetry had transferred them, divested of all local limitation, to a distant subterranean region, inaccessible to living men, beyond the limits of Okeanos. There Aïdes and the terrible Persephoneia rule as guardians of the dead. From that distant and unapproachable place they can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth. Religious cult, too, only knows these deities in connexion with particular localities and particular groups of worshippers. Each of these worships the deities of the underworld as denizens of their soil and their countryside alone. They are untroubled by any considerations of a general and uniform kingdom of the gods such as the epic had set up; nor are they disturbed by similar and conflicting claims made by neighbouring [159] communities. And only in these local cults are the gods of the lower world seen in their true nature as they were conceived by the faith of their worshippers. They are the gods of a settled, agricultural, inland population. Dwelling beneath the soil they guarantee two things to their worshippers: they bless the cultivation of the ground and ensure the increase of the fruits of the soil to the living; they receive the souls of the dead into their underworld.[1] In certain places they also send up from the spirit-world revelations of future events.
The most exalted name we met with among these dwellers below the earth is that of Zeus Chthonios. This is at once the most general and the most exclusive designation of the god of the lower world; for the name “Zeus” had in many local cults thus preserved the generalized meaning of “god” in combination with a particularizing adjective. The Iliad also once speaks of “Zeus of the lower world”; though by this is meant none other than the ruler of the distant realm of the dead, Hades. Hades too, in the Hesiodic Theogony is once called “Zeus the Chthonian”.[2] But the agricultural poem of Hesiod bids the Boeotian countryman, when preparing his fields for sowing, pray for a blessing to the Chthonic Zeus. Zeus Chthonios was also sacrificed to in Mykonos for the “fruits of the earth”.[3]
But, more frequently than under this most general and exalted title,[4] we meet with the god of the living and the dead under various disguises. The gods of the underworld were generally referred to by affectionate or cajoling nicknames that laid stress on the lofty or beneficent character of their rule and threw a veil over the darkest side of their nature with conciliatory euphemism.[5] Thus Hades had many flattering titles and special names.[6] So, too, in many places Zeus of the underworld was worshipped as Zeus Eubouleus or Bouleus,[7] at other places, especially Hermione, as Klymenos.[8] Zeus Amphiaraos, Zeus Trophonios we have dealt with already in their capacity of Heroes, but they are really nothing else but such earth deities with honourable titles, who have been deprived to some extent of their full status as gods[9] and have on that account developed all the more strongly the oracular side of their powers. Hades, the ruler of that distant kingdom of darkness, is one of this class of manifestations of Zeus Chthonios that vary in name according to the different localities of their worship. The king of the shadows in Erebos as he appears in Homer has no altars or sacrifices made to him[10]; but these things belong to him as the local god of particular places. In the Peloponnese there were local centres [160] of his worship in Elis and Triphylia,[11] sites of a very ancient civilization; and it is probable enough that tribes and clans having their origin there contributed by their wanderings to the spread of their native cult of the chthonic deity in other Greek countries as well.[12] Hades, too, was for his Peloponnesian worshippers a god of the fertility of the earth just as much as a god of the dead.[13] And in the same way he was the lord of the Souls as well, in those places where “in fear of the name of Hades”[14] he was called, in honour of his beneficent powers, Plouton, Plouteus, or Zeus Plouteus.
The welfare of the living and the dead was also the concern of the female deity of the underworld called by the name of the earth itself Ge or Gaia. At the places where she was worshipped she was regarded as one who brought fruitfulness to the fields, but she held sway over the souls of the dead as well, in conjunction with whom prayers and sacrifice were offered to her.[15] Her temples remained in honour, especially at Athens and at the primeval centre of ancient worship of the gods, Olympia.[16] But her personality had never been quite reduced to definite and intelligible outline from the enormous vagueness natural to primitive deities. Earth-goddesses of more recent and intelligible form had supplanted her. She retained longest her mantic powers which she exercised from beneath the earth, the abode of spirits and souls, at ancient oracular sites—though even here she often had to give way to oracular gods of another description, such as Zeus and Apollo. A poet indeed mentions her once side by side with the great ruler of the lower world,[17] but in actual worship she was seldom found among the groups of male and female deities of chthonic nature such as were worshipped together at many places. Above all, at Hermione there flourished from primitive times a solemn cult of the lower-world Demeter in conjunction with the lower-world Zeus, under the name of Klymenos, and with Kore.[18] At other places Plouton and these two goddesses were worshipped together, or Zeus Eubouleus and the same two, etc.[19] The names of the underworld god vary indefinitely, but the names of Demeter and her divine daughter appear every time unchanged. Either alone or together, and worshipped in connexion with other related deities, these two goddesses have by far the most important place in the cult of the underworld. The fame and widespread popularity of their cult in all Greek cities of the mother-country and in the colonies proves more than anything else that since Homeric times a change must have taken place in the sphere of religious emotion and service of the gods. [161]
Homer gives no hint of the character or importance of the later cult of Demeter and Persephone. For him Persephone is simply the grim unapproachable Queen of the dead, Demeter invariably (and solely) a goddess of the fertility of crops[20]; she stands apart indeed from the rest of the Olympians, but no reference to a close association with her daughter is ever made.[21] Now, however, both goddesses appear in various and changing activity, but always closely associated, and it seems as if they had come to share some of their previously distinct characteristics. Both are now chthonic deities who together have in their protection the growth of the crops and the care of the souls of the dead. How in detail the change came about we can no longer discover. It may be that, in the times of the great migrations, from various centres of the worship of the two goddesses, such as had existed from great antiquity in the Peloponnese especially,[22] there issued forth this faith that differed so essentially from the Homeric-Ionic view of things. It must have spread just as in later times the special variety of the cult of the closely associated goddesses that was practised in Eleusis was widely propagated by regular missions. It also seems that Demeter, in whose name there was early a tendency to recognize a second “Mother Earth,” in many places took the place of Gaia in religious cult, and thereby entered into closer connexion with the realm of the souls below the earth.