Our indications are slight and dim; but the poet of the Odyssey seems to be aware that an ὀμφή or oracular deliverance might be used to dethrone a royal dynasty.[137.1] The dedication of a tithe of the captives taken in war to Apollo was a custom connected with the earliest settlements and migration, for Apollo disposed of his captives by colonising them on some vacant land. The practice appears to have been a very early one, for this is the legend of the pre-Dorian settlement of the Dryopes in the Peloponnese;[137.2] also there is evidence for the institution in pre-historic Greece of that religious system of colonisation which the Latins called the Ver Sacrum.[137.3] In fact, the religion of Apollo, especially the common worship of Apollo Πυθαεύς, served more than any other cult as a bond of connection between the independent communities already—I believe—in pre-Homeric days; and to this earliest epoch may belong that interesting ritual of the Hyperborean offerings brought by sacrosanct Hellenic pilgrims down from the north along the primeval routes of the Aryan immigration.[137.4]
The narrower systems of family and phratry tell the same story of the constructive power of religion. The primitive grouping into septs and phratries and tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its deep imprint on historic Greek society; and religion is intimately interwoven with the domestic and phratric cults, not only in that these are much concerned with worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high divinities also, Zeus Φράτριος, Athena Φρατρία and Ἀπατουρία, take these institutions under their charge. Hence all adoptions and admissions of new members into the phratry had to be performed at the altar. The marriage ceremony was a religious ritual—in Attica, at least, a religious communion like the Roman Confarreatio,[138.1] and the mutual duties of parents and children, kinsmen and tribesmen, were consecrated by the early ideas concerning the divine nature.[138.2]
A festival such as the Ἀπατούρια, instituted to cement a social organisation, and to all appearances of great antiquity, has nothing like it in the Babylonian festival calendar, so far as I am aware; and again, to the many political and social titles of the Hellenic divinities such as Πολιεύς, Ἀγοραῖος, Πάνδημος, Βουλαῖος, it would be hard to find parallels in the cult-terminology of Babylon.
In considering a religion under its social or legal aspects, the laws concerning homicide will often yield telling evidence. There is a whole aeon of development dividing the code of Hammurabi and the Homeric and pre-Homeric theory in this matter. The Babylonian had arrived, as we have seen,[138.3] in some indefinitely early period at the conception of murder as a crime against the whole State, at what we may call the advanced secular point of view. In Greece that conception is post-Homeric: the Homeric and pre-Homeric societies were still in the stage of law in which homicide is treated as a private affair of the kinsmen, a matter to be settled by the blood-feud or weregild. Only in certain cases it was a sin, namely, when the slain person was a suppliant or a kinsman. The religious feeling in respect of the first partly arises from the old Aryan Hearth-worship;[139.1] in respect of the second, it is associated with a primitive tribal horror of shedding kindred blood: and, though the feeling of the religious sanctity of the guest, the suppliant, and the kinsman was strong in Semitic communities, I cannot find any special Babylonian cult that is analogous to that of Zeus Μειλίχιος, or Ἱκέσιος, or Ξένιος. I have traced elsewhere the development in the ninth and eighth centuries of the more civilised legislation concerning homicide in Greece, and I have tried to indicate the precise part played by religion in aiding the evolution:[139.2] to get to the facts one must specially study the worship of Athena and Apollo. I have connected it with a growing sense of the impurity of bloodshed, which might express itself in a definite religious way, as fear of the ghost or of the offended deity. It is open to us to explain this increased sensitiveness concerning purity as a mark of Oriental influence, which was reaching Greece in the first millennium B.C. But at least we ought not to derive it from Mesopotamia until we find evidence of purifications from bloodshed as a common ritual in Babylonian religion, and the impurity of bloodshed an underlying principle of the Babylonian law of murder. But, as we have seen, we discern here only the secular result: the religious force that may have worked towards it is too far removed in the background of the past. Summarily, we must conclude that the political application of Hellenic religion seems wholly a native and independent product of the Hellenic spirit, and reflected the characteristically Hellenic forms of civic life.
CHAPTER VIII.
Religion and Morality.
The comparison must also consider the relation in these various societies between religion and morality, both social and individual. From this point of view, as we are dealing with the second millennium only, it must be a comparison mainly between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic; for except for a few Hittite letters that reveal little, there is no evidence concerning our races of the west of Asia Minor, since monuments can scarcely be direct witnesses concerning ethics; at least, the Asia Minor monuments are not, and we must await the further discovery and interpretation of Hittite literature. For the proto-Hellenic period also, it may be said, we have no explicit and direct evidence. But we have Homer, whose poems belong to the end of that period and the beginning of the second; and we cannot suppose that the average morality that they represent had all grown up in the century before them, still less that Homer had discovered it as an original teacher. Therefore, cautiously and critically handled, his poems throw some light on the moral facts of the centuries behind them. There is also some evidence to be gleaned from the rich field of Greek mythology and cult; only we must realise that we rarely can determine the date of the rise of an old Hellenic legend or the institution of an old Hellenic cult. The Mesopotamian evidence, then, is direct and explicit, depending solely on the right interpretation of documents; the Hellenic evidence concerning the earliest period is indirect and often hypothetical.
A careful study of all the sources will allow this induction, that the deities of this period in both societies are on the side of whatever morality is current, inspiring it, protecting it, and avenging the breach of it; we are dealing, in fact, with a religion of personal moral powers. Concerning the Mesopotamian, this is a trite observation to make; the most superficial glance of a few hymns confirms it. Shamash is the great god of justice, the protector of the weak; Enlil “destroyeth the evil-minded”;[142.1] Ishtar judges the cause according to right—she maintains the right of the oppressed and the downcast; Righteousness and Judgment are the sons of Shamash. Ga-tum-duga, “she who produces good,” is an appellative of Bau.[142.2] And yet this is not the whole account. The destructive and evil character of some of the deities in Mesopotamia occasionally appears in the hymns, and is expressed apparently in certain titles. This might be the case at times when those deities are addressed that were powers of death and the lower world; for instance, Nergal, the lord of destruction; Isum, a little-known deity to whom a phrase is attached that is said to mean “the exalted murderer.”[142.3] And this might be explained by the fact that these powers personified, as it were, the baneful forces of nature, or, as perhaps in the case of Martu, whom Jeremias cites as one of the evil gods, were aliens.[142.4] We find also the name of an obscure deity, “Ira,” who was a god of pestilence, and at times identified with Nergal;[143.1] but that a direct cult was attached to him in this baneful character is not shown. And it is unlikely that any Babylonian deity was worshipped definitely as an evil power: moral speculation could always explain the evil that he appeared to work as a punishment for sin or as righteous vengeance on the enemy; that is to say, the evil element becomes moralised, and the worshipper is always convinced that the god can become good to him. Thus in the same context Nergal is called the “Lord of Destruction,” and yet he is “the god of the little ones, he of the beneficent visage.”[143.2] The dark storm-god Adad, before whose wrath the high gods rise up in terror, the pitiless one, can yet be implored as “the merciful among the great gods.”[143.3] This transformation, by which a destructive nature-power could become a benevolent being, follows a law of religious psychology, which expresses itself in the quasi-magical phraseology of prayer. The worshipper wishes to get some good from his deity or some mercy: therefore he calls him good and merciful, feeling that such spell-words constrain the god to be so; and belief will arise from the continual repetition of formulae. Therefore, by the time our record begins, all the deities that the Babylonian and Assyrian worshipped are beneficent on the whole: the Epic of Creation supposes the existence of primeval bad powers, but these had been conquered, and some pardoned, by Marduk. The evil personal agencies that remained active were demons, and these were not worshipped, but exorcised or averted by the good gods.[144.1]
And this may serve as a fairly accurate description of the moral character of Greek religion at that stage of development where Homer presents it to us. The high deities are worshipped on the whole as moral beings and as beneficent: that is, as the guardians of the social morality of the period, whatever that was. The usual popular writer does not perceive this, because he is always liable to the error of confusing mythology with worship, and supposing that if the mythology is licentious or immoral, the deity is worshipped in that character. All students of mythology and religion are aware that this is false. We might be able to show that the religious imagination and statement of Homer at times fall below the level of contemporary cult, at times rise above it. At any rate, he is evidently addressing a world of religious-minded people, who impute their own moral ideals to their highest divinities, especially to their high god Zeus. Νέμεσις, the social feeling of indignation which is at the psychic basis of social morality, is the common emotion excited both in gods and men by the same acts; and though much of Greek religion was still not yet penetrated with morality, the higher personal gods were generally regarded as on the side of righteousness. One or two Greek myths, such as that of Prometheus, as Hesiod narrates it, might suggest that the deity was not necessarily conceived as the friend, but sometimes even as the enemy, of man. But Hesiod’s narrative does not strike us as primitive or popular; and, at any rate, such a view is inconsistent with the earliest stage of worship that we can discover or surmise. The poets and philosophers might dislike Ares; but the Hellenes, who worshipped him, did not worship him as an evil god, with apotropaeic rites: nor is it proved or likely that any deity to whom actual service was paid, was regarded as in his nature maleficent by his worshippers. The dread powers of the lower world were also givers of vegetation. The Erinyes had scarcely a recorded cult, and their wrath was moralised as righteous indignation; nor was ghost-cult, when it arose, merely a service of terror and aversion. It is a striking confirmation of the view here expressed, that among the very long list of cult-appellatives attached to the Greek divinities, some of which have a moral value, there are only two doubtful examples of an evil connotation attaching to the word.[145.1]
We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. The idea of the “jealous god” is non-moral, and can easily become immoral: that is, it tends to divorce the conception of the divine character from the purely human moral ideal. And this idea is palpable not only in the Hellenic and Mesopotamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and our own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apart from this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can discern it, even in its infancy, did not construct manifold forms of fear out of the dangerous powers in the nature-world, and worship them with the higher forms of cult. We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and storm gods per se (I use the term “god” advisedly): Zeus the thunderer had been civilised and moralised before Homer’s time. Poseidon had always his wild side as god of storms and earthquakes; and to the end he remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than the others; but destructive force was certainly not the centre of his personality, and in the pre-historic days he had become the father of the Minyan and Ionic people, and the guardian of their family life. The wind-powers might develop into beneficent gods or ancestors; or might occasionally be regarded from the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not admit such beings as “Ira,” the god of pestilence, or a special god of storms or earthquakes, and it is far less than the Babylonian a religion of fear. This difference will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.
One more difference strikes us in comparing the ethical character of the two religions. The Greek high divinity is a moral being, but not every divinity was moralised to such an extent as were the higher powers of Mesopotamia. A few Hellenic deities remain ethically undeveloped and crude, Ares, for instance, and in a certain sense Hestia. A salient example is the contrast between the fire-god Hephaistos and the Babylonian-Sumerian Nusku or Girru.[146.1] Both are elemental powers of fire, both are therefore concerned with the arts of metalwork; but Hephaistos remains a handicraftsman, and has little or nothing to do with moral life; whereas the Babylonian deity acquires an exalted moral and spiritual character. Dionysos becomes a most potent force in the later Hellenic world; yet an irrepressible vein of wildness and a spirit that refuses to conform to the ethical ideal of Hellas remains in him. A god so highly placed at Babylon would have been clothed with moral attributes in many an ecstatic phrase of temple liturgy.