The first and most obvious method, one common to all religions, is of course prayer; but the use of this channel just because it is so universal cannot be claimed as a proof of religious unity between ancient and modern Greece. It is rather in what we should deem the accompaniments of prayer that evidence of such unity must be sought. The ancient Greeks were not in general content with prayer only. It was not customary to approach the gods empty-handed. The poor man indeed, according to Lucian[901], appeased the god merely by kissing his right hand; but the farmer brought an ox from the plough, the shepherd a lamb, the goat-herd a goat, and others incense or a cake. ‘Thus it looks,’ he says, ‘as if the gods do nothing at all gratis, but offer their commodities for sale to men; one may buy of them health, for instance, at the cost of a calf, wealth for four oxen, a kingdom for a hecatomb, a safe return passage from Ilium to Pylos for nine bulls, and the crossing from Aulis to Ilium for a princess—a high price certainly, but then Hecuba was bidding Athene twelve cows and a dress to keep Ilium safe. One must suppose however that they have plenty of things to dispose of at the price of a cock, a garland, or even a stick of incense[902].’ That this is a fair account of the externals of Greek ritual can hardly be questioned; for Plato too, in more serious mood, says that ‘the mutual communion between gods and men’ is established by ‘sacrifices of all kinds and the various departments of divination[903].’ The ‘various departments of divination’ are clearly the means by which the gods communicate with men; and ‘sacrifices of all kinds’ therefore represented to Plato’s mind the means by which men communicate with their gods. Prayer, he seems to have felt, was a necessary incident in sacrifice, rather than sacrifice an unnecessary adjunct to prayer.
Now the word θυσία, which we commonly translate ‘sacrifice,’ was a term of very wide meaning in ancient Greek. In Homer the word θύειν was used of making any offering to the gods, and never denoted, though naturally it sometimes connoted, the slaughtering of animals—an act properly expressed by the verb σφάζειν. And in later times the substantive θυσία was still applied to almost any religious festival, at which undoubtedly some offerings, but not necessarily animal sacrifices, were always made. When therefore Plato speaks of θυσίαι πᾶσαι, ‘all sacrifices,’ he is clearly expressing his recognition of the fact that sacrifices (θυσίαι) are manifold in kind—and if in kind, therefore also in intention; for different rituals are the expressions of different religious motives. Communion with the gods was in general terms the object of all offerings made to them by men; but the particular aspect of such communion varied.
Offerings, we may suppose, were rarely if ever made purely for the benefit of the gods without any self-seeking on the part of the worshipper. Even when a sacrifice to some god was merely a pretext for social entertainments—and how frequently this was the case is shown by the fact that φιλοθύτης, ‘fond of sacrificing,’ came to mean simply ‘hospitable’—it is reasonable to suppose that the presentation to the god of the less edible portions of the victim was accompanied at least by an ἵλαθι, ‘be propitious,’ by way of grace before the meal; and at more strictly religious functions, at which the guests, if there were any, were secondary to the god, the dedication of the offering undoubtedly included a declaration of the offerer’s motive.
As regards the character of that motive in most cases, Lucian is right; it was frankly and baldly commercial. Homer does not blink the fact; for Phoenix even commends to the notice of Achilles the open mind displayed by the gods towards an open-handed suppliant. ‘Verily even the gods may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are greater than thine; yet even them do men, when they pray, turn from their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows, with fat and the savour of sacrifice, whensoever a man hath transgressed and done amiss[904].’ And so Greek feeling has ever remained. Offerings are the ordinary means of gaining access to the gods, of buying their goodwill and buying off their anger. The ordinary medium of exchange in such commerce was, when Greece was avowedly pagan, food, and is, now that Greece is nominally Christian, candles: for religion, ever conservative, keeps up the otherwise obsolete system of barter between men and gods, even though the priests of those gods are enlightened enough to accept of a secular modern currency. But the particular commodities in which the barter is made are of little consequence as compared with the spirit which has always animated such dealings. The substitution of candles for meat is practically the only modification which Christianity has effected in this department of religion.
Even this change in detail does not affect the whole range of such operations; candles are not by any means the only offerings of which the Church takes cognisance. In dealing with the question of divination, we have seen cases in which on some religious occasion, saint’s-day or wedding, the priest blesses a genuinely sacrificial victim[905]. We have seen too that at the laying of foundation stones, a religious ceremony conducted by a priest of the Church, some animal is immolated to appease the genius of the site[906]. We have seen again how the Church permits or encourages the dedication of those silver-foil models of various objects—ships and houses, corn-fields and vineyards, eyes and limbs—which serve at once to propitiate the saint to whom they are offered and, on the principle of sympathetic magic, to place the object, thus represented as it were by proxy, under the saint’s special care; and how also the same kind of models are frequently dedicated as thank-offerings[907]; so that indeed, in default of an inscription announcing the motive of the offerer, no one can decide how any given offerings of this kind should be classified[908].
Then too in those religious rites which have survived without ecclesiastical sanction the use and the purpose of food-offerings remain unchanged. The favour of the Fates is bought by offerings of cakes in order that they may bestow upon the women who thus propitiate them the blessing of children[909]. Nereids who have ‘seized’ children are known to withdraw their oft-times baneful influence when the mother takes a present of food to the scene of the calamity and cries to them with an Homeric simplicity, ‘Eat ye the little cakes, good queens, and heal my child[910].’ Even the malice of Callicantzari may sometimes be averted by a present of pork[911].
Thus with or without the ratification of the Church the old offerings still continue to be made in the self-same form; and even where other substitutes have been devised, the spirit which animates the dedication of them is unchanged—a spirit essentially commercial; it matters little whether the suppliant is trying to buy blessings or to get the punishment which he has deserved commuted for a fine, or again whether he is speculating in future favours or settling in accordance with a vow for favours received; in each case there is the quid pro quo, the bargaining that the Greek has never been able to forego, not even in his religion.
But while the spirit thus manifested is not wholly admirable and perhaps deserved the ridicule of Lucian, it is highly instructive. The sacrifices or offerings are the means by which the worshipper gets into touch with the worshipped, the vehicle for his thanks or petitions; the possibility of bargaining implies intercourse; commerce is a form, even though it be the lowest form, of communion.
But that there were other kinds of sacrifice which represented higher aspects of the communion between men and gods in ancient Greece is certain. The commonly accepted classification of ancient sacrifices recognises three main groups—the sacramental, the honorific, and the piacular. Of the sacramental class, in which—by a development, it appears, of totemism—some sacred animal, representing the anthropomorphic god who has superseded it in men’s worship, is consumed by the worshippers in order that by eating the flesh and drinking the blood they may partake of the god’s own life and self, no trace, so far as I know, can now be found in the popular religion. The honorific class comprises the majority of those offerings which might with less euphemism be called commercial; those however which are prompted by the desire to expiate sin, or rather to buy off the punishment which sin has merited, would, I suppose, fall under the head of piacular. But the line drawn between the honorific and the piacular seems to me far from clear, for reasons which will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter.
The view of sacrifice which I am about to propound, and which would modify chiefly our conception of so-called piacular sacrifice in antiquity, was suggested to me by a story which I had from the lips of an aged peasant of the village of Goniá (the ‘Corner’) in the island of Santorini[912]. In talking to me of the wonders of his native island he mentioned among other things a large hall with columns round it which had long since been buried—presumably by volcanic eruption. This hall was of magnificent proportions, ‘as fine,’ to use the old man’s own description, ‘as the piazza of Syra or even of Athens.’ It was situated between Kamári, an old rock-cut shelter in the shape of an exedra at the foot of the northern descent from the one mountain of the island (μέσο βουνί), and a chapel of St George in the strip of plain that forms the island’s east coast. So far my informant’s veracity is beyond dispute; for in an account of the island written by a resident Jesuit in the middle of the seventeenth century I afterwards discovered the following corroboration[913]. ‘At the foot of this mountain[914] are seen the ruins of a fine ancient town; the huge massive stones of which the walls were built are a marvel to behold; it must have taken some stout arms and portentous hands to handle them.... Among these ruins have been found some fine marble columns perfectly complete, and some rich tombs; and among others there are four which would bear comparison in point of beauty with those of our kings, if they were not damaged; several marble statues in Roman style lie overturned upon the ground. On the pedestal of the statue of Trajan there is still to be read at the present day a very fine Greek panegyric of that powerful Emperor, as also on that of the statue of Marcus Antoninus.’ Thus much as guarantee of the old man’s bona fides, which even excavation on the spot, however desirable from an archaeological standpoint, could not more clearly establish than the French writer’s corroborative testimony; now for the story associated by the aged narrator with this wonderful buried hall. At the time of the revolution, he said, a number of the Greek ships assembled off Kamári (where a fair anchorage exists), and he with some fellow-islanders all since dead was going to fight in the cause of Greek freedom. Naturally enough there was great excitement and trepidation in this remote and quiet island at the thought of adventure and war. ‘So we thought things over,’ he continued, ‘and decided to send a man to St Nicolas to ask him that our ships might prosper in the war[915].’ They accordingly seized a man and took him to this large hall. There they cut off his head and his hands, and carried him down the steps into the hall, whereupon God appeared with a bright torch in his hand, and the bearers of the body dropped it, and all present fled in terror.