But we observe in many cases that the name itself was an obstacle to the emergence of a convincingly personal God or Goddess; and where this is the case the personality never could play a leading part in the advanced religion. Thus Ἑστία bore a name that denoted nothing more than ‘the Hearth,’ considered as animate and holy; Greek anthropomorphism did its utmost for her, but never or rarely succeeded in establishing her as a fully formed personal goddess. The same phenomenon is observable in regard to Ge, Helios and Selene; it was easy to regard them as animate substances or powers and as such to worship them; such worship they received throughout all periods of Greek religion, but no direction of the moral, social and spiritual progress of the race, for their names connoted so obviously substances unlike and alien to man that they could not with conviction be imagined as glorified men or women.[63.2] It was otherwise with such names as Apollo, Hera, Athena, which could become as real and individual as Miltiades or Themistokles; and it is these humanised personalities that alone dominate the higher religion of Greece. The spiritual career of Demeter only began when men forgot the original meaning of her name and half forgot that she was only Mother Earth. The ‘Anemoi’ being mere ‘Winds,’ were scarcely fitted for civic life; but Boreas, having a personal name, could become a citizen and was actually worshipped as Πολίτης ‘the Citizen’ at Thourioi.[64.1] A curious and unscientific distinction that Aristophanes makes between the religions of the Hellenes and the Barbarians[64.2] has its justification from this point of view.
Influence of the Polis on religion.—The spirit of the Polis, the dominant influence in Greek religion throughout this second period, worked in the same direction as the anthropomorphic instinct; giving complexity, varied individuality and an ever-growing social value to the idea of Godhead. The deities of the wild enter the ring-wall of the city and shed much of their wild character. Apollo Lykeios the Wolf-God, enters Argos and becomes the political leader of the State, in whose temple a perpetual fire was maintained, symbol of the perpetual life of the community.[64.3] And the advanced civic imagination tended to transform the primitive theriolatry or theriomorphic ideas that still survived. Proofs of direct animal worship in the later period are very rare and generally doubtful; for the ancient writers apply the term ‘worship’ carelessly, applying it to any trivial act of reverential treatment.[64.4] In the few cases where we can still discern the animal receiving cult, we find the anomaly explained away by some association established between the animal and the anthropomorphic deity or hero. Thus the wolf became no longer sacred in its own right—if indeed it ever was—but might be reverenced here and there as the occasional incarnation of Apollo or as his guide or companion.
The primitive population of the Troad may once have ‘worshipped’ the field-mouse, though the authority that attests it is a late and doubtful one; but when Apollo becomes in this region the civic guardian of the Æolians and the protector of their crops, he takes a title from the mouse (Σμινθεύς from σμινθός), and the mouse is carved at the side of the anthropomorphic image as a propitiatory hint to the rest of the species not to injure the corn, or as a hint to the God that mice needed regulating.[65.1]
The serpent worshipped in the cavern, or in some hole or corner of the house—vaguely, in ‘Aryan’ times, as the Earth-daimon or House-genius—became interpreted as the embodiment of the ancestor Erechtheus of Athens, or Kuchreus of Salamis, or Zeus Κτήσιος, the guardian of the household possessions, or of Zeus Meilichios, the nether God. When the very human Asklepios came to Athens towards the end of the fifth century, he brought with him certain dogs who were ministers of healing; and the Athenians offered sacrificial cakes both to the God and to his dogs who partook of his sanctity.[65.2] This may appear a strange imbecility; but at all events we discern in these facts the prevalent anthropomorphism dominating and transforming what it could not abolish of the old theriolatry; just as we see the coin-artist of Phigaleia transforming the uncouth type of the horse-headed Demeter into a beautiful human form of a goddess wearing a necklace with a horse-hoof as its pendant. The sacred animal never wholly died out of Hellas; but it could only maintain its worship by entering the service of the human gods.
The expansion of the civic system in this second period, due to extended colonisation and commerce, induced a development of law and an expansion of moral and religious ideas. One of the most vital results of the institution of the Polis was the widening of the idea of kinship. For in theory the city was a congregation of kinsmen, a combination of tribes, phratries, and families, wider or narrower associations framed on a kin-basis; and it gradually evolved the belief, pregnant of legal and moral developments, that every citizen was of kin to every other.
In consonance with the conception of the State as an extended family, we find certain ancient family-cults taken over into the religion of the Polis. As the private family was knit together by the worship of the Hearth in the hall and of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, ‘the God of the Garth,’ in the courtyard of the house, so the City has its common Hestia or Holy Hearth, upon which often a perpetual fire was maintained in its ‘Prytaneion’ or Common Hall; and the Cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος was established in ancient days on the Akropolis of Athens. The organisation of the ‘phratries’ was consecrated to the high deities, Zeus Athena and—among some Ionic communities—to Aphrodite; and the decisions of the ‘phrateres’ or ‘Brothers’ on questions of adoption and legitimacy of citizens were delivered from the altar of Zeus Phratrios; while the union of the local districts or ‘demes’ was sanctified by the cult of Zeus or Aphrodite Pandemos, the God or Goddess of ‘all the demes.’ Also, the Polis organised and maintained the kindred-festivals of commemoration proper to the family or gens or phratria, the All-Souls celebration of the dead which was held at the end of the Anthesteria; the γενέσια, the funeral feasts of the γένη; the ‘Apatouria,’ the joint festival of the phratries; while the great achievement of the consolidation of the scattered groups into the single city was celebrated at Athens by the festival of the Συνοικέσια, the ‘Union of all the Houses,’ and the Panathenaia, the all-Attic feast of Athena.
The picture that these facts present of a State-religion based on the idea of the family and of kinship is mainly drawn from Athens, of which the religious record is always the richest; but it reflects undoubtedly the system of the other Hellenic states as well. Many of their records attest the belief that some one of the high divinities was the ancestor or ancestress of the whole people, and this ancestry was understood in the physical and literal sense. Thus Apollo ‘Patroös’ was the divine ancestor, being the father of Ion, of the Ionic population of Attica, and even the non-Ionic stock of that community, desired for political purposes to affiliate themselves to this God.[67.1] In the same sense he was called Γενέτωρ, ‘the Father’ in Delos.[67.2] Zeus was the father of Arkas, the eponymous hero of the Arcadians, and was worshipped as Πατρῶος at Tegea[67.3]; Hermes also was ancestral God of part of the Arcadian land and identified with the ancestor Aipytos.[68.1] These religious fictions came to exert an important influence on morality and also to develop a certain spiritual significance which will be considered later.
Hero-cult.—This aspect of the public religion is further emphasised by the prevailing custom of hero-worship which appears to have gathered strength in this second period. The hero in the technical sense was one whose tomb was honoured with semi-divine rites and who was regarded either as a glorious man of the past or as the mortal ancestor of the State or the tribe or the clan. The first clear evidence of this in literature is in the poem of Arktinos of Miletos called the ‘Aithiopis,’ that may belong to the end of the eighth century, in which the apotheosis of Achilles was described. But there is, as has been said, strong reason for believing that the practice of ‘heroising’ the dead descended from the pre-Homeric age. Nevertheless, of the multitude of hero and ancestor cults recorded in ancient Hellas, the greater number are probably post-Homeric. We find the Delphic oracle giving vigorous encouragement to the institution of them, and in the sixth century cities begin to negotiate and dispute about the possession of the relics of heroes. Some of these in the older cults may have been actual living men, dimly remembered, some were fictitious ancestors, like Arkas and Lakedaimon, some may have been faded deities, such as were Eubouleus at Eleusis and Trophonios at Lebadeia. But all were imagined by the worshipper to have been once men or women living upon the earth. This, then, becomes a fact of importance for the religious thought of the world, for it engenders, or at least encourages, the belief that human beings might through exceptional merit be exalted after death to a condition of blessed immortality, not as mere spirits, but as beings with glorified body and soul. Furthermore, certain ancient heroes, long endeared to the people as the primeval parent or the war-leader of their forefathers, become raised to the position of the high God and merged in his being; Erechtheus shares the altar and even the title of Poseidon and Zeus, Aipytos of Arcadia becomes Hermes, Agamemnon in Laconia at last is fused with Zeus.[69.1]
Nor in this second period were such heroic honours reserved for the remote ancestor or the great king or warrior of old, but were sometimes paid to the recently dead, to the men who had served the State well by arms or by counsel. On the assumption that Lykourgos of Sparta was a real man—and no other theory that bears scrutiny has been put forward about him—his case is the earliest recorded instance of the ‘heroising’ of a personage of the historic period. A great stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. The most natural person to select for this high honour was the founder or leader of the colony, the κτίστης or ἀρχηγέτης as he was called; and we may regard it as the usual rule that, when he died, he would be buried within the city and his tomb would become a ‘ἡρῶον’ and would be visited yearly with annual offerings.
That the ordinary head of the private household in this period received posthumous honours amounting to actual worship cannot be definitely proved. The tendance of the dead had become indeed a matter of religion, and at Athens was attached to the ritual of the state by the commemorative feast of All Souls, the χύτροι, or ‘Feast of Pots,’ the last day of the Anthesteria. But nothing that is recorded of this ghost-ceremony convicts it of actual worship; the ghosts are invited to spend the day with the household that holds them in affection; they are offered pots of porridge, and then at sunset are requested or commanded to depart. Prayers are proffered in their behalf to the powers of death, but not directly to the ghosts themselves; no cult is offered them as to superior beings endowed with supernatural power over the lives of individuals and states.[70.1] Nevertheless, the passionate service of lamentation and the extravagant dedication of gifts which marked the funeral ceremonies of the eighth and seventh centuries and which certain early legislation was framed to check, reveals a feeling about the dead bordering on veneration and such as might inspire actual worship.