Five Stages of Greek Religion

by Gilbert Murray

Again, when the Ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said, of something that was Hellenic, as distinct from something else that was barbaric, and the Hellenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck them as superstitious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in knowledge and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its rise in Ionia.

Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it? We are again reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the 'beggarly elements' towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the incursions of mana snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters, but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers, wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably higher.

For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas against the brute world.[61:1]

The victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of man over beast: that was the aim, but was it ever accomplished? The Olympian gods as we see them in art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving, that what I am now about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a telos or completion but a movement and effort of life.

We may analyse the movement into three main elements: a moral expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the three in order.

In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, or at least covered with a decent veil, that great mass of rites which was concerned with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation of generative processes.[62:1] It left only a few reverent and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta. The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid centuries, the worship of the man-god, with its diseased atmosphere of megalomania and blood-lust.[62:2] These things return with the fall of Hellenism; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws and bound to reckon with the same death.

So much for the moral expurgation: next for the bringing of intellectual order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, 'In the early religion all things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them'.

We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μἴα, 'one form of many names'. Each tribe, each little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste—the Children of the Bards, the Children of the Potters—had its own special gods. Now as soon as there was any general 'Sunoikismos' or 'Settling-together', any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these innumerable gods tended to melt into one another. Under different historical circumstances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each god had his proper function and there was no overlapping—one Korê, one Kouros, one Sun-God, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythêra or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Korê or the Delian or the Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of Cyprus, Cythêra, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed a quantity more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility Korê of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like.

As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Korê or Kouros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the Roman functional gods, such beings were hardly persons; they melted easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard. They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the gods all being one, 'Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as Dionysus',[64:1] but the amalgamation only takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious mysticism.