Outline-history of Greek religion

by Lewis Richard Farnell

We may safely assume that the growing interest of the States in hero-cult intensified the family aspect of the State-religion; the hero as the glorious kinsman is invited to the sacrifices of the higher deities, and to the hospitable ritual known as the ‘theoxenia’ in which the God himself is the host.

It is important for the student of religion to mark the consequences of this close association of the civic religion with the idea of kinship that held together the family and tribe. These have been estimated more at length elsewhere^[71.1] and only a few general observations are possible here. Where a family bond exists between the deity and the city, the spirit of genial fellowship is likely to prevail in the ritual and religious emotions, and the family meal might become the type of the public sacrificial meal with the god. Such a religion is adverse to proselytism; for as it is the sacred prerogative of certain kindred stocks, its principle means the exclusion of the stranger. Its religious and moral feeling is naturally clannish; the whole group must share in the moral guilt of the individual, and the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children. It affords a keen stimulus to local patriotism and quickens an ardent life within the wall of the city; it has at the same time the natural defects of narrowness of view. Yet, in the course of religious evolution, we must regard the old Hellenic conception of the God the Father of the tribe or the city as pregnant of the larger idea of God as the Father of mankind, an idea which had already dawned upon Homer at a time when the tribal spirit of religion was still at its height.

A further result of such a system is that the State-divinities become also the patrons and guardians of the family morality, Zeus and Hera, for instance, the supervisors of the human marriage and of the duties of married life; and copious records present the High God as the protector of the father’s right; of the tie that binds together the brethren, the sisters, the kinsmen. While such a religion was a living force, it was not likely that the family could assert itself as against the State; to marry healthfully and early, to beget vigorous children as defenders of the State and the family graves, to cherish and honour one’s parents, to protect the orphan, these were patriotic religious duties that were inspired by the developed State-religion and strenuously preached by the best ethical teachers of Greece. The State being the family ‘writ large,’ private morality and public could not clash. The brutal action of Kreon in the Antigone is equally an attack on the religion of the State as on that of the family; and it was not till the fifth century that the claim of private conscience as against the family and the State could arise or that the question could be asked “Whether the good man was really the same as the good citizen.”

Influence of political religion on law.—Of still greater interest is an important advance in criminal law, discernible as early as the eighth century, which may be traced partly to the growth of the City, with its extended idea of kinship, partly to the growing intensity of the belief in the power and significance of the spirits of the dead.

In the most primitive period of Hellas, the shedding of kinsman’s blood was already a heinous sin; but the slaying of one outside the kindred circle was neither a sin against God nor a social crime. But as the public mind of Greece became penetrated with the feeling that all the citizens of the Polis were in some sense akin, the slaying of a citizen became a criminal act of which the State, and no longer merely the clan of the slain man, would take cognisance. And this expanded concept of law is reflected in the expansion of an ancient and most significant cult, the cult of Zeus Meilichios.^[73.1] This was the underworld God, who was angered and must be appeased when kindred blood was shed; as the idea of kinship was enlarged, any civic massacre might arouse his wrath and rites of atonement might be offered to him. This keener sensitiveness concerning the sanctity of human life was accompanied by a feeling that bloodshed might imprint a stain on the slayer that rendered him ritualistically unclean, that is, temporarily unfit to approach the Gods or men; it was also fortified by the growing fear of the ghost-world, which seems to have lain more heavily on the post-Homeric society than on Homer’s men. It is hard to give the dates for this section of the mental history of Hellas. The first record of the thought, which is nowhere explicit in Homer, that homicide in certain circumstances demands purification is derived from the Aithiopis of Arktinos, the epic poet of Miletos in the eighth century.^[73.2] Achilles, having slain the worthless Thersites, must retire from the army for a while to be purified in Lesbos by Apollo and Artemis; we mark here that the slain man was no kinsman of the slayer in any true sense of the word, but was a member of the same Achæan community, and therefore his slaying brought a religious impurity upon the hero; and we may believe that the narrative reveals the early religious law of Miletos. But we must, in passing, recognise the possibility that these apparently new manifestations may be only a revival of immemorial thought and feeling, common in the older non-Hellenic societies, and only for a time suspended.^[74.1]

Influence of Delphi and Crete.—In this post-Homeric development of a system of purification from bloodshed, the legends suggest that Crete and Delphi played a momentous part. In the great island, the cradle of European culture, the cult of Zeus had early attached to itself certain Cathartic ideas, probably of Dionysiac origin. And probably in the pre-Homeric period the influence of Crete had reached Delphi; while the legend of the migration of Apollo Delphinios from Crete to Delphi, and the story that the God himself must go to this island to be purified from the blood of Python, belong to the second period with which we are dealing.

We have reason to believe that the Delphic God—through the agency of his politic priesthood—was asserting his claim in the eighth and seventh centuries to be the dictator in the matter of purification from homicide, and thus to satisfy the cravings of an awakening conscience. This claim may have been suggested partly by the fear of competition with the spreading Dionysiac religion, which also brought with it a ‘Kathartic’ message, and with which the Delphic priesthood were wise enough to agree quickly; partly also by the aboriginal nature of Apollo, who was immemorially φοῖβος or ‘pure.’ Though the claim was not universally admitted and the Apolline jurisdiction could not obliterate the function of other divinities in this matter, yet it was powerful and effective of much that was vital both to law and religion. Of the early procedure at Delphi we know nothing. If the god exercised discretion in his grant of purification, if he refused, for instance, to purify the deliberate and cold-blooded murderer, here was the opportunity for the emergence of a civilised law of homicide. It may not have been until the seventh century that any Hellenic state could express in a legal establishment its consciousness of the difference between the act of murder and the act of justifiable or accidental homicide. The earliest that we know of was the law-court, ἐπί Δελφινίω, “near the image [or shrine] of the Dolphin-God”—established at Athens under the patronage of the Cretan-Delphic God to try cases where the homicide was admitted and justification was pleaded. In this, as in other Attic courts that dealt with the same offence, rites of purification were often an essential adjunct of the ceremony. The typical legend that enshrines the early ideas of ‘Katharsis’ and turns on the question of justifiable homicide is the legend of Orestes, which had spread around the Peloponnese and penetrated Attica as early as the eighth century, and later became Pan-Hellenic. Apollo, as a divine agent, appears in it first, as far as we have any literary record, in the lyric of Stesichoros, and at some indeterminate date in this period undertook the purification of the matricide.

Influence of Delphi on colonisation.—These Cathartic functions and the general demand for their exercise must have greatly enhanced the influence of Delphi in the earlier part of the post-Homeric period. It was doubtless strengthened even more by the great secular movement of Greek colonisation. With wise foresight the God had undertaken the guidance and encouragement of this already in the earliest days when the Hellenes were pushing across the sea; for it seems as if the first Greek settlements on the Asia Minor coast, the Lycian and the Æolic, were due to his leadership if not to his inspiration. The legends that associate him with the Dorian migration into the Peloponnese are too powerful to be rejected. And after this event, when light begins to shine on Greek history and the Hellenic race was rapidly establishing that chain of colonies across and around the Mediterranean which were to diffuse Greek culture through the world, the power of Delphi and the Delphic oracle reached its zenith. For it is clear that it was the prevailing fashion to consult the Pythian Apollo as to the choice of a site. Hence it came about that in so many Greek cities Apollo was worshipped as Ἀρχηγέτης, that is, as the divine founder, and that the flourishing communities of the West sent back tithe-offerings to his shrine.^[76.1] Was it by some accident or by something essential in his early cult and character that the God was able to play this momentous political part, such as no other deity has ever played in the secular history of his people? The cause may lie far back in the dim antiquity of the Apolline cult, when he was specially Ἀγυιεύς, a god ‘of the road,’ the leader of the migratory host. And in pre-Homeric times, if not aboriginally, he was already an oracular God; nor was any occasion so urgent for a consultation of the local oracle as when the people were setting forth on their perilous path to find a new home.^[77.1]

The Delphic oracle.—The spiritual history of the Hellenic race in the early history period, when we mark a growing consciousness of nationality and of kinship in the various stocks, is very much a record of the career and activity of the Delphic oracle; and this is too complex and lengthy a theme to be more than adumbrated here.^[77.2] Due partly to the local position and the immemorial sanctity of the oracle, partly to the devotion and the grateful remembrance of the powerful Dorian states in the Peloponnese, the Pythian worship came to overshadow the Delian, and provided the chief religious centre and the strongest bond of spiritual unity in the Hellenic world. For political unity it could do little, owing to the centrifugal bias of Greek politics; yet the Delphic Amphiktyony, the most powerful of these religious confederations that are recorded here and there in the early history of Greece, contained within it the germs of intertribal morality and concord. Its members were not indeed pledged to perpetual amity, but at least to a certain mutual forbearance even in their warlike dealings with one another. But the chief regulative functions of the oracle were concerned with questions of the institution and administration of cults, with the domains of legislation, colonisation, public and even private morality and conduct. In the sphere of religion it doubtless emphasised the necessity of purification from bloodshed; otherwise it had no high religious message to deliver; but it was enthusiastic for the propagation of the cult of Dionysos, and it authorised and sometimes encouraged the growing tendency towards the posthumous worship of distinguished men. In the sphere of morality its standard was generally high and its influence beneficent, especially—if we can trust the record—in the later period when it played the part of a State-Confessional and in its utterances reflected generally the progress of Greek ethics and the spirit of an enlightened humanitarianism.

But its chief religious achievements were to bring some principle of unity and authority into the complex and shifting aggregate of Greek polytheism, and to deepen the impression on the Hellenic mind of the divine ordering of the world; and the fruits of this teaching we gather in the works of Attic tragedy and in the history of Herodotus.