We can now pursue the enquiry nearer the borderline of the historic period, as it is conventionally termed.
Introduction of worship of Dionysos.—As early as the tenth century B.C., and probably earlier, a new religion with a new and imposing divinity was intruding itself into Hellenic lands from Thrace and Macedonia.[56.1] Dionysos and the Thracian ritual-legend of Lykourgos are known to Homer; but the poems suggest that he was not yet definitely received into the Hellenic pantheon. Yet there are reasons for believing that Bœotia had received the alien worship in the ‘Minyan’ epoch, before the incoming of the ‘Boiotoi’; and Attica before the Ionic emigration; while in the Peloponnese the Argive legend associates the advent of the god with the names of Perseus and the Prœtid dynasty. In spite of local opposition and its natural antagonism to the nascent spirit of Hellenism, which was now tending to express itself in certain definite and orderly forms of mood, thought and feeling, the new religion won its way victoriously, taking Thebes for its Hellenic metropolis, and some time afterwards securing its position at Delphi, where the priesthood and the Apolline oracle become its eager champions. It was distinguished from the traditional Hellenic in regard to its idea of divine personality, its ritual and its psychic influence, that is to say, the mood that it evoked in the votary. In the first place, the figure of Dionysos belonged indeed to personal theism, certainly in Hellenic cult and probably in the Thracian; but he was less sharply defined as a concrete individual than was, for instance, Apollo or Athena; he was vaguer in outline, a changeful power conceived more in accordance with daimonistic, later with pantheistic thought, incarnate in many animal-shapes and operative in the life-processes of the vegetative world; and an atmosphere of nature-magic accompanied him.
The central motives of his oldest form of ritual were the birth and death of the God, a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology, though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenæan creed. But the death of this God was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull or the goat or the boy whom they rent and devoured was supposed to be his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage and at times cannibalistic communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act and—we may suppose—by the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants the psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy, which might show itself in wild outburst of mental and physical force, and the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment in which the worshipper escaped the limits of his own nature and achieved a temporary sense of identity with the God; and such union with divinity might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired and proclaimed for its own sake, as a more intense mood of life. This religion preached no morality and could ill adapt itself to civic life; its ideal was supranormal psychic energy. The process whereby it was half captured and half tamed by the young Hellenic spirit forms one of the most interesting chapters in Hellenism.
It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired its definite instincts and bias. The ninth and the eighth centuries witnessed the diffusion of epic literature, the rise of lyric poetry, the emergence of the ‘eikon’ or idol in religious art, and generally the development of cities and civic life; and it is essential to estimate the religious influence of these forces.
Influence of epic and lyric poetry.—That the contribution of Homeric and of the later Hesiodic literature to the shaping and fixing of Hellenic religion was most fruitful and effective cannot be doubted. Only we must not accept the exaggerating view of Herodotus[58.1] that these two poets were really the founders of the anthropomorphic religion, creating the orthodox Hellenic theogony and determining the names and functions and shapes of the special divinities. By such a statement some scholars have been misled into regarding the Homeric poems as a kind of Greek Bible, which in respect to religious matters it might be heresy to disbelieve. But we know that local temple-legend and local folklore could always maintain its independence of Homeric, or Hesiodic authority, in respect to the titles of the Gods, their relationships and genealogies. Artemis was not everywhere reputed to have the same parentage or Zeus the same spouse. The early epic poets gathered many of the ἱεροὶ λόγοι of shrines, but there was much that they did not gather and which yet survived. There was a noticeable particularism in Greek theology, and no orthodoxy and no heterodoxy in the sense that it was moral to believe or immoral to disbelieve any sacred book.
The chief religious achievement of Homer and his fellows was to intensify the anthropomorphic trend in Greek religion, to sharpen and individualise the concepts of divinity, and to diffuse throughout the Hellenic world a certain uniformity of religious imagination. To their work partly, as well as to the higher synthetic power of the Greek mind, we may ascribe the fact that in spite of local varieties of myth and cult-title, in spite of the various elements that the divine personality may have absorbed from earlier cult-figures and cult-forms in the various cult-centres, yet the sense of the individual unity of person was not lost so long as the same name was in vogue; hence Apollo Lykeios of Argos could not be a different person from the Apollo Patroös of Athens, nor could hostility arise between them. That is to say, the higher religious literature imprinted a certain precision and definiteness upon the personal names of the leading divinities and endowed them with a certain essential connotation; for example, the dogma of the virginity of Athena and Artemis, always presented in the higher poetry, prevailed so far as to suppress the maternal character that may have attached to them in the prehistoric period and of which we can still discern a glimmering in certain local cults.[60.1] And to this task of shaping the divine characters the rising lyric poetry, which was growing up with the decay of the epic, and which in obedience to the Hellenic passion for disciplined form was developing fixed types of song and music appropriate to special festivals and worships, must have contributed much. The ‘spondaic’ metre was adapted to the invocation or hymn sung at the libation—the σπονδή—to Zeus, and the solemn gravity of the spondaic fragment attributed to Terpander fittingly expresses the majesty of the high God, “the primal cause of all things, the Leader of the world.”[60.2] The pæan and the ‘nomos’ became instinct with the Apolline, the Dithyrambos with the Dionysiac spirit,[60.3] the spirit of order and self-restraint on the one hand, the spirit of ecstasy and passion on the other. The earlier Greek lyric was in fact mainly religious, being composed for public or private occasions of worship; its vogue was therefore wide and in some communities, as in Arcadia, the singing of these compositions formed part of the national training of the young.[61.1]
Idolatry.—Another phenomenon of importance at the beginning of this second period is the rise of idolatry, the prevalence of the use of the ‘eikon’ in actual worship in place of the older aniconic ‘agalma,’ which had sufficed for the Minoan and the Homeric world as a token of the divine presence or as a magnet attracting it to the worshipper. This important change in the object of cult may have been beginning in the tenth century, for we have one indication of it in the Homeric poems, and recently on one of a series of vases of the early geometric style found in a grave near Knossos of the post-Minoan period the figures of an armed God and Goddess are depicted on low bases, evidently idols, and perhaps the earliest surviving of any Hellenic divinity.[61.2] Henceforth, although the old fetich-object, the aniconic ‘agalma,’ lingered long in certain shrines and holy places, the impulse towards idolatry became imperious and almost universal, exercising a mighty influence on the religious sentiment of the Hellenes both before and after the triumph of Christianity. The worship before the idol intensified the already powerful anthropomorphic instinct of the polytheism; and was at once a source of strength and a cause of narrowness. It brought to the people a strong conviction of the real presence of the concrete and individual divinity; and, as it gave its mandate to the greatest art of the world, it evolved the ideal of divinity as the ideal of humanity, expressible in forms of beauty, strength, and majesty. On the other hand, it was a force working against the development of a more mystic, more immaterial religion, or of a consciousness of Godhead as an all-pervading spirit, such as might arise out of the vaguer religious perception of those half-personal ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ which never wholly faded from the popular creed.
Progress of anthropomorphism.—It is interesting to mark within this second period the various effects of the now regnant anthropomorphism.
Those functional ‘daimones’ mentioned above tend to leave the amorphous twilight of religious perception, in which the Roman ‘Indigitamenta’ remained, and to be attracted into the stronger life of personal theism. ‘Kourotrophos,’ once perhaps only a vague functional power that nurtured children, becomes identified with Artemis or Ge;[62.1] ‘Χλόη,’ ‘Divine verdure,’ when the cult was introduced from the Marathonian Tetrapolis to the Akropolis of Athens—if this indeed is a true account of its career, could only maintain herself as Demeter Χλόη.[62.2]
Again the name Ἥρως comes to be applied to even the most shadowy of these functional powers, to Μυίαγρος, the Fly-chaser, the most limited and momentary of them all, to Eunostos, the daimon of good harvest, about whom a very human tale is told, and to call them ‘Heroes’ implies that they were imagined as semi-divine men who once lived on the earth. Even the most immaterial forces, some of those which mark mental phases or social conditions, such as Ἐρως Love, Φιλία Friendship, Εἰρήνη Peace, became often for the religious imagination personal individuals with human relationships;[62.3] thus Eirene emerges almost as a real goddess with the traits of Demeter, Φιλία on a relief in the Jacobsen Collection is individualised as the mother of Zeus Philios, in defiance of the traditional theogony.[63.1] Others such as ‘Αἰδώς’ ‘Compassion’ remained in the borderland between animating forces and personal deities.