an ancient Cretan story of a divine nativity in which a she-goat suckled a babe. That indicates the transition from an animal deity to an anthropomorphic one, just as does the old Mother Wolf of Roman legend. Doubtless some artistic representations of a she-goat and a she-wolf play their part in such stories. Again, Cronos is said to have tried to crush the usurper in the bud by swallowing his dangerous child, but to have swallowed a stone instead. That may cover the transition from stone-and pillar-worship. Still more instructive are the legends of contest between deities for worship at a particular shrine. The ordinary device for the introduction of Zeus was to make him the father of the local hero. “God,” says Voltaire, “first made man in His own likeness, and man has been returning the compliment ever since.” It is the secret of anthropomorphic religion that the worshipper is worshipping himself, or rather an idealised vision of himself projected upon the public conception of his god. The human heart has an unlimited power of thus adapting its faith to its habits. Anthropologists are continually telling us of the persistence of ancient cults in spite of pretended changes of faith, rituals that belong to Artemis transferred to the Virgin, dirges for Adonis transformed into mourning for Christ. Often when the polite antiquarian Pausanias asked the Greeks of his day about the objects of their worship he got conflicting answers. That is how it becomes easy to make converts if you are content to leave ritual unchanged, and that was how Apollo got himself accepted as the young man’s god all over Greece. There was, indeed, a rival young man’s god in Hermes, a very ancient deity. Remnants of antique aniconic worship attach themselves to Hermes: his statues even in classical times are three parts pillar to one part god. He is the shepherd-god of Arcady,[15] and the Arcadians represent more purely than any other peoples of Greece the aboriginal Ægean stratum. Hermes is a god of music too, but his instrument
Lyre
Cithara
is the lyre, which in shape and construction resembles the modern mandoline, for the body was made from the shell of a tortoise, an indigenous Greek creature, with a sounding-board of parchment stretched over it. Apollo properly plays on the cithara, or Northern harp. The popularity of Hermes persisted throughout because he became identified with Luck, and Luck is the one god we all worship. He is also associated with commerce; he it is who drives a sharp bargain; and, as we saw, the aboriginal stratum of Greece provided the trading element in the Hellenic races. This attribute the trade-despising warriors of the dominant race turned to his discredit, for poor Hermes in Homer, and generally in literature, becomes a sharper of the worst description. If you ask “Who stole the cows?” the answer is, “Hermes.” He is the messenger of Zeus, but he is also his spy. Hermes, then, was much too strongly planted to be uprooted by the intruding Apollo. But it seems that some male god of the older race was swallowed up and bodily incorporated under that name. For in classical Greece there are two rival Apollos, one the Delian or Cynthian Apollo, the centre of whose cult was the island of Delos, the other the true Dorian god, called Pythian Apollo, and worshipped above all at Delphi. The Delian shrine was a centre of the Ionians, and Delos afterwards became the headquarters of the maritime league of Athens and the Ionian States. Delos boasted itself to have been the god’s birthplace, and mythology presented an elaborate nativity for this Apollo and his sister Artemis. “Homeric” hymns to both Apollos are preserved, and it is interesting to notice how the Ionian bard who is praising the Apollo of Delos mentions all the centres of his worship in a longish list which tallies closely with the list of Athenian allies in the Delian confederacy. But this Delian Apollo is not the important one; in many respects he is only a pale reflection of the other, and his vogue principally depended on the extreme sanctity of the little island of Delos.
Plate 14. PANORAMA OF DELPHI ([See p. 69])