Outline-history of Greek religion

by Lewis Richard Farnell

In view of the history of other temple institutions of like power among other peoples—the Mesopotamian, for instance—we may be surprised that the Delphic priesthood made no attempt to impose Apollo as the supreme God upon the Hellenic states. The author of the Homeric hymn, composed partly under Delphic influences, exalts Apollo as high as he dares; but neither in this nor in any Delphic utterance is Apollo presented as more than the minister of Zeus, the mouthpiece of the supreme Father-God, the tradition of whose supremacy among the Aryan Hellenes had been fixed fast by Homer and the Homeridai.

Nor did the Delphic Apollo succeed in achieving a monopoly of divination; for the spirit of local independence was opposed to any divine monopoly in any department of life. And other oracles, such as some of those on the Asia Minor shore, acquired considerable prestige, especially in the later period when the influence of Delphi had declined. But from the eighth till the beginning of the fifth century, the Pythian is the only one of the many mantic institutions that is to be regarded as a vital force of Pan-Hellenism.

The games of Greece.—As another important phenomenon belonging to the earlier part of this second period we note the emergence and development of the great Hellenic games. Some recent theorists have supposed that all the public athletic contests in Greece arose directly from some religious ritual belonging to the cult either of the gods or of the dead hero. The evidence is faulty and the ritualistic origin of these institutions is unproven. But a common temple-worship undoubtedly gave the opportunity and the occasion to the development of the four Great Games, and from the beginning they were placed beneath the ægis of religion. And these must be reckoned as among the strongest Pan-Hellenic influences, evoking and strengthening the consciousness of nationality. For in the sixth century the whole of Hellas, eastern and western, was represented at Olympia, Pytho, the Isthmus and Nemea; here was maintained the ‘truce of God’ between the jealous or hostile communities; and at Olympia once in every four years the Pan-Hellenes offered a common homage to their aboriginal Father-God.

We must then regard the great games and the Pythian establishment as momentous factors in the religious national life, as tending to evolve a religion of a broader compass than the narrow tribal type of the remote past. And they concern the higher mental history of the race because most of them, and notably the Pythian, included competitions of art and literature; and thus they assisted in establishing the specially Hellenic theory of the divine character of the artistic and intellectual life.

There were other festal and public meetings of a more exclusively religious purpose that also served to deepen in the various states the consciousness of spiritual unity, and often, where the great lyric poets composed hymns for the occasion, to exalt and illuminate the ideal conception of the divinity; the Pan-Ionic Delian festival of Apollo, for instance, of which the splendour developed in the early post-Homeric age and with the growing prosperity of the new Ionic colonies, must have contributed much to the building up of the peculiarly Hellenic ideal of Apollo; and the Homeric hymn, inspired by this occasion, is the earliest record of the national consciousness of the Ionic race.

Diffusion of Dionysos-worship.—Another religious phenomenon, pregnant of consequences for the spiritual history of Hellenism, is the diffusion of the worship of Dionysos. Faint, though indubitable traces of this can be discerned in the prehistoric period, but it only begins to be palpable and important in the early historic. Its significance has already been indicated in general outlines.^[80.1]

Having entered Attica from Bœotia and been adopted into the Attic state-religion some time before the Ionic migration to the Asia Minor coast, it gradually, in the eighth and seventh centuries captured most of the States of the Peloponnese, of the islands and the more distant colonies.

The Hellenic culture of Dionysos forms one of the most interesting chapters in the spiritual career of Hellenism; for the taming of the wild Thracian God, the transformation of him into a civic deity, the disciplining and the adaptation of the thiasoi of the Maenads to the uses of an orderly state-religion, were not the least among the achievements of the Hellenic genius. And as the state-religion of these centuries had no eschatologic theory, so it seems to have discarded everywhere whatever eschatologic promise the Dionysiac religion proclaimed on its entrance into Greece. Yet, in spite of the chastening influence of the civic spirit, the worship preserved much of its distinctive tone and religious power; evoking a special mood unknown in the other cults; while even the savage form of sacrament, in which the God was devoured in his human or animal-incarnation, survived with some modifications in Tenedos and Chios down to a late period. The history, then, of the Dionysiac religion concerns the account of the development of the sacramental idea in the Mediterranean. It concerns also the history of Hellenic culture; for one of its modes of expression was a peculiar type of emotional music, accompanying the Dionysiac hymn known as the dithyramb, which has been regarded, though probably erroneously, as the parent of Attic tragedy. Its main contribution to the polytheism of Greece was its stimulation of a warmer and stronger religious faith; and its special later service to popular religious theory was the refining and brightening of men’s thoughts and sentiments concerning the life after death and the powers of the lower world, with whom the mild and genial God was generally identified or associated.

Orphic thiasoi.—But its highest importance is found rather in the esoteric than in the external or popular domain of Hellenic religion. For, perhaps as early as the seventh century, the cult of Dionysos was raised to a higher power by the rise and diffusion of the Orphic brotherhoods or ‘thiasoi’ who worshipped this deity under various mystic names. The study of Orphism is of the highest interest and complexity; and it is only possible here to indicate its general features and significance. The preachers of the Orphic doctrines are the first propagandists or missionaries that we can discover in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. For they had a definite message, and ignoring the gentile and civic barriers of the old political religion, they preached it, if not to all mankind, at least to all the Hellenes. It was a message fraught with some new and momentous ideas, whose real import we have been able to gather in part from the now famous gold-tablets found in the graves of Crete and South Italy, and containing parts of a metric Orphic liturgy and creed that is a product at latest of the fifth, if not the sixth, century B.C. Combining these with some passages in Pindar’s Odes and Plato’s Dialogues, we can recover in outline the doctrine of early Orphism. It proclaimed a theory, unfamiliar to native Greek mythology and religion, that the soul of man is divine and of divine origin; that the body is its impure prison-house where it is in danger of contracting stain; that by elaborate purifications and abstinences the soul might retain its purity, and by sacramental and magic methods the pure soul might enjoy in this life and in the next full communion with God. Preoccupied with the problem of the life after death, the Orphic mystics evolved the concept of Purgatory, a mode of posthumous punishment temporary and purificatory; also, if we can trust certain indications in Pindar and Plato, the dogma of reincarnation or more specially of a triple cycle of lives both in this world and the next. Students of religious philosophy have noted here the striking resemblance to Buddhistic thought; and have considered whether Indian speculation could have cast its influence so far westward at so early a time.

It is of more immediate importance for the religious history of the Greek people to determine—if we could—the measure of success that these missions achieved, how far they succeeded in capturing the masses or the élite of the people. They certainly did not succeed in penetrating the inner circle of the Eleusinian mysteries; there is no evidence that they even tried, though it is likely that they did; but we may surmise that their influence was at one time strong at Athens, as Aristophanes proclaims as a generally accepted tradition that Orpheus was the apostolic founder of all mysteries. They were evidently powerful in Crete; but the chief arena of their activity and the chief scene of their secular and political influence was ‘Western Hellas’ or Magna Græcia, where Pythagoras was their greatest convert and the Pythagorean clubs their militant orders. The career of these forms a page of general Greek history. Their downfall relieved Hellas from the danger of the establishment of Orphism as a secular power, which threatened the Hellenic spirit with a bondage to sacerdotalism and the pharisaic formalism of the purist. Henceforth, the Orphic religion was a private influence only, and we have no evidence to determine precisely how great it was at any particular epoch. Pindar was deeply touched by it. Æschylus and Sophocles, so far as we can see, remained unmoved, while Euripides may have been at times attracted and at times repelled but was in no sense its champion. Plato in a well-known passage^[84.1] protests strongly against the Orphic mystery-mongers as spiritual quacks destitute of any real morality, who dealt in magic and traded in promises and threats concerning the other world. Whether this moral estimate of Orphism was just or not, there is no doubt that Plato’s theory of the soul as expressed in the Phædrus was indebted to the Orphic metaphysic. And the part played by these preachers of purity and salvation in the later spiritual history of Greece was certainly of high importance. They mark the beginning of a new era of individualism and of what is called ‘otherworldliness’ in religion; for their concern was with the personal soul and its destiny.