Fifth-century religion contrasted with the Homeric.—If we take Athens as the typical religious community of the fifth century and compare the structure and forms of her state-polytheism with those of the old Homeric world, we find the personalities of the prehistoric pantheon still worshipped and cherished; no prehistoric cult of that epic world has as yet fallen into desuetude; nor had the most civilised city of Hellas discarded the immemorial rites of the simple peasant religion, the worship of rivers and streams, nor some of the most naïve practices of animism. And it is clear that this conservatism was no hieratic convention, but a living faith, expressing a religious intuition of the people, who were as yet untouched by the cooling influences of science and philosophic scepticism. In fact, for the greater part of the fifth century, the life of the polytheism was probably stronger than it had been ever in the past. It was strengthened by the admission of a few new figures and by the development of some of the old.[93.1]

It is rather in respect to its spirit, tone and outlook that the religion of the fifth century presents some striking contrasts to the Homeric. Its anthropomorphism is even more pronounced, thanks to its great art-power, but it reveals a deeper conviction concerning the part played by moral agencies and powers in the affairs of men. The writings of Herodotus expound a religious view of history of which only faint indications were found in the earlier epic literature. The historian of the fifth century regards the momentous contest of Greece with Persia as a conflict of moral forces, the issue being worked out by unseen powers, such as Nemesis, Violence and Justice, with Zeus as the righteous Judge. And in weaving into his narrative the stories of Æacid heroes and the Eleusinian deities speeding to the help of the Hellenes at Salamis, he doubtless represents the faith of the average Greek. A similar view was also impressed on the religious imagination of the people by oracular utterances, such as that which was imputed to the prophet Bakis—Δῖα Δίκη σβέσσει κρατερὸν Κόρον, Ὑβριος υἱόν,[94.1] “Justice divine shall quench fell Koros, the child of Insolence,” Koros standing for Persia, the tyranny born of satiety. It is expressed pictorially on the famous vase at Naples, representing Hellas and Asia pleading their cause before the High God with Ἀπάτη, as a tempting demon, standing by Asia.[94.2] In this scene we trace also the influence of the famous tragedy of Æschylus, the ‘Persæ,’ which in more than one passage of deep religious conviction pronounces moral judgment on the great event.[94.3] The same view is expressed and the same tone heard in the striking poem of Pindar’s eighth Pythian ode, where he exults over the triumph of ‘Hesychia,’ the armed Peace of Hellas, who has cast Insolence into the sea, even as Zeus quelled the monster Typhœus.

Pan-Hellenism.—The Hellenic confederate effort against Persia was the nearest approach ever made by the Hellenic race to Pan-Hellenic action; and in a striking chapter of Herodotus, eulogising the loyalty of the Athenians to the cause of Greece, emphasis is laid on the name of Zeus Hellenios.[94.4] This is the highest political title of the High God; and its history is interesting. Originally the narrow tribal name of the God of the Hellenes, a small Thessalian group under the leadership of the Aiakidai, it was transported to Aigina by a migration of the same tribe, whose ancestor Aiakos was the high-priest of Zeus Hellanios; already in the sixth century, when the denotation of Hellas was enlarged, the title may have taken on a wider meaning. But it was the danger of the Persian wars, and the part played in them—we may believe—by the men and the old heroes of Aigina that brought the cult into prominence, investing the cult-name with a wider significance and a more potent appeal. Here, then, was Hellenic religion giving voice to an ideal that might be realised by the poet, the artist, and the thinker, but never by any statesman or state.

Another cult belonging to the same range as this was that of Zeus Eleutherios, the God of Hellenic freedom. “Having driven out the Persian they raised an altar to Zeus, the God of the free, a fair monument of freedom for Hellas.”[95.1] These lines of Simonides commemorate the dedication of the Greeks after the victory at Platæa, when they had purified the land and its shrines from the polluting presence of the barbarian by means of sacred fire brought from Delphi. The significance of this has been pointed out elsewhere[95.2] by the present writer; the fight for liberty was prompted by more than a mere secular passion, but by an idea inherent in the civic religion. The title Ελευθέριος is only known before the Persian wars in the Zeus-worship of Laconia; henceforth it was widely diffused, commemorating not only the deliverance of Greece from the barbarian, but, in Sicily for instance, emancipation from the domestic tyrant.

In contrast with the deterioration of the old Roman religion, caused by the Hannibalic wars, the successful struggle of Greece against barbarism in the east and the west undoubtedly quickened for a time the fervour and devotion inspired by the national cults. The sufferings of Hellas were easily repaired; the Gods in whom they had trusted had not failed them, and much of the spoils won from the barbarian were gratefully dedicated to the embellishment of the shrines. The vacillating and time-serving policy of Delphi at the hour of the greatest peril was condoned or unnoted by the victors, and Apollo received an ample share of the fruits of victory. The champions of Hellenism in the West, Gelo and Hiero, commemorated their victories over the Carthaginian and Etruscan powers at Himera and Kyme by thankofferings sent to Apollo at Delphi and Zeus at Olympia. The bronze helmet found at Olympia, and now in the British Museum, inscribed with the simple dedication, “Hieron the son of Deinomenes and the Syracusans send Tuscan spoils to Zeus from Kyme,” is an epoch-marking monument of Pan-Hellenic history and religion. The gratitude of Hellas was paid in the first instance to the High God Zeus; to him was consecrated the ‘feast of freedom’ at Platæa, which was still commemorated with pathetic fervour even in the last days of Hellenic decay;[96.1] to him, under the national title of Olympios, was dedicated the mighty temple at Akragas, from the spoils won by Gelo at Himera. But the outflow of national thankfulness was directed to other divinities as well; notably and naturally to the War-Goddess of the Athenians, and the spoils of Persia at Athens and Platæa were partly devoted to the erection of two striking statues of Athena. Nor were the lesser powers of the elements forgotten; the winds that assisted the Greek fleet at Artemision and the nymphs of the soil on which the battle of Platæa was fought; the grateful Athenians instituted a cult of Boreas, their kinsman, in their restored city and assisted in the worship of the Nymphs at Kithairon. The Arcadian goatherd-God, the rustic Pan, was admitted into Athens shortly before the battle of Marathon, and the story to which the Athenians gave currency of the help he rendered them at the great battle contributed something no doubt to the subsequent diffusion of his cult.

A further religious consequence of these great events was the stimulus given to hero-worship; Gelo, the victor at Himera, and some of the Hellenes who fell at Thermopylæ, Marathon and Platæa received heroic honours. This ‘heroising’ of the recently defunct had its moral value as a strong stimulus to patriotism, when they had died in the service of their country; and though it was degraded in the fifth century to the exaltation of the useless athlete, yet it must be reckoned among the life-forces of later polytheism and as a momentous factor of higher religious history.

Finally, we may with probability ascribe to the triumph of Hellas and to the expanding glory and greatness of Athens a marked increase in the Hellenic popularity of the Eleusinian mysteries. For this the Athenians might thank Herodotus and his thrilling narrative of the vision of a heavenly host seen moving from Eleusis towards Salamis, for the salvation of Hellas; they might also thank their own far-sighted policy of encouraging the whole Hellenic world to take part in the worship at Eleusis, aspiring thus to make the Hall of the Mysteries, a recent architectural work of the Periclean administration, the centre of a Pan-Hellenic faith.[98.1] And their attempt in great measure succeeded.

Influence of religious art.—The study of the polytheism of this century is essentially also a study of the great religious art which culminated in the handiwork of Pheidias, but which continued forceful and prolific till the age of Alexander. The general effect of the iconic art upon Greek religion has been briefly indicated above; and long before this century the religious bias of the race was committed to idolatry;[98.2] the people craved an image that they could love and cherish, though here and there they might retain the uncouth fetich, the block of wood or rudely hewn stone, because of the immemorial magic which it had acquired through ages of shy half-savage veneration. The achievement of Pheidias and his contemporaries was only the culmination in a process of ideal anthropomorphism that began with Homer and was helped forward by the lyric poetry and music of the post-Homeric age and by the art of the sixth century. Strictly estimated and studied in all its fullness, in the marvellous products of vase-painting, glyptic and sculpture that even the shattered fabric of antiquity presents to us, the art of the fifth and early fourth century must be called the most perfect religious art of the world. A more spiritual or more mystic religion could not have produced or could not have borne with such an art. But it was the best and most satisfying expression of the best that the religious spirit of Hellenism admitted; for this polytheism had been built up by the teachers of the people, poets and artists obeying the race-instinct, not on vague conceptions of infinite Godhead ineffable for art and inexpressible in clear speech, but on vivid perceptions of concrete divine personages, distinct in form, attributes and character robust and very real. The Greek artist, with his miraculous cunning of hand, could deal with such types as he could not have dealt with ‘the Word’ or with the ‘Buddha.’ Nor was he merely the exponent of the highest popular imagination, but, unconsciously perhaps and in obedience to a true art-tradition, at times a reformer and in any case a creator. For us his works have this value among others that, even more than the poetic literature, they reveal to us how the people at their best imagined their deities. But they also helped the people to imagine them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone. It was not till the time of Skopas in the fourth century that Greek sculpture could so deal with this orgiastic theme. The plastic work of the fifth century dealing with divine forms is mainly tranquil, majestic, ethical, intellectual; the physical perfection of the divinities sculptured on the Parthenon impresses us not merely and not so much with the sense of physical beauty and strength, but rather with the sense of a higher and nobler vital power; so instinct is the beauty with that quality that the Greeks called σεμνότης, a quality partly ethical, partly spiritual, but palpable in material forms that hint at a tranquil reserve of strength. The expressive power of such an art can show benignity and mildness of mood without sentimentality, because without voluptuousness, intellectual thought without morbidness, majesty without self-display.

The gentle and tranquillising spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries speaks in the famous Eleusinian relief showing the mother and the maid giving his mission to Triptolemos. The Pheidian Athena Parthenos was a more deeply conceived ideal than the Athena of the poets, for it showed her as the Madonna of the Athenian people, with a softer touch of maternal gentleness in the face. The Zeus Olympios of Pheidias transcended the portrait of the High God as given by Homer or even by Æschylus; for the chryselephantine statue impressed the later Greeks as the ideal of the benign and friendly deity, the divine patron of a Hellas united and at peace with itself; an image that appeared “to add something to the traditional religion,”[100.1] embodying, as Dio Chrysostom says, a conception of the God so convincing and complete that “having once seen it one could not imagine him otherwise.”[101.1]

Nor had any of the poets presented Hera in forms so winning and gracious as those in which the best art of this age embodied her, as the Argive Goddess ‘of good works’ “in whose face and person brightness appeared by the side of majesty.”[101.2] The poetic presentation of Apollo is blurred and incomplete compared with such plastic types as the Apollo of the Parthenon frieze and the Pheidian statue in the Museo delle Terme. The older poetic ideal of Aphrodite was shallow and trite compared to the Aphrodite of the Pheidian type, such as we see presented by the Laborde head in the Louvre; here is something of the majesty of the great cosmic goddess imagined by Æschylus in his Danaides, but combined with an emotion of human love in the countenance and a winning appeal that the verses of the great poet do not clearly convey. And we may surmise that the ‘Ourania’ Aphrodite of Pheidias had some influence on the theory of Plato and his distinction between the heavenly and the sensual love. The full imagination of the personality of Kore would combine the radiance and the grace of the young cornfield with the awe and mystery of the lower world; the former is masterfully presented by a coin[101.3] of Lampsakos that shows her rising from among the cornstalks with uplifted yearning face; the unknown artist of the great Syracusan medallion struck towards the close of the fifth century combines this aspect of her, in a type of surpassing loveliness, with a touch of melancholy that hints at the character of the Goddess of death.[102.1]