Growth of the Thiasoi.—Another interesting phenomenon that begins to arrest our attention in the latter part of the fifth century is the growth of private θίασοι or voluntary religious associations independent of the public religion and devoted to a special divinity who might be an alien. The most interesting testimony is the title of a comedy by Eupolis called the ‘Baptai,’ which we may interpret as ‘the Baptisers,’ satirising a society devoted to the Thracian goddess, Kotytto, whose initiation-rites must have included a ceremony of baptism, of which this is the earliest example within the Hellenic area. It will be more convenient to estimate the importance of religious significance of these θίασοι in the survey of the next period of our history. Meanwhile, it is well to mark certain evidence that the most powerful and appealing of these, the Orphic mystery, having failed in the sixth century to capture the States of Magna Græcia, was increasing its private influence in Eastern Greece in the century before the rise of Alexander. Plato’s attack is itself a witness of this. And when Aristophanes[130.1] and an Attic orator contemporary with Demosthenes[130.2] openly acknowledge Orpheus as the apostle to the Hellenes of the most holy mysteries, and the teacher of a higher way of life, we must conclude that the spirit of the Orphic brotherhoods had touched the imagination of the general public outside the circle of the initiated.

Religion in first half of fourth century B.C.—Yet it is hazardous and probably false to say that the public religion of Greece was decaying visibly throughout the first half of the fourth century. Athens is as usual our chief witness. The restored democracy was all the more strenuous in matters of religion as scepticism was considered a mark of the new culture of the oligarchically-minded. The trial of Socrates is an indication of this temper. We have also evidence from this period of the occasional severity of the Athenian people against those who tried to introduce unauthorised and un-Hellenic cults. The Hellenic tradition is still strong against the contagion of the orgiastic spirit of the Anatolian religion, and it was with difficulty that the Athenian public could tolerate the wild ritual of Sabazios and the Phrygian Mother, nor even in the time of Demosthenes were the participants in it secure from danger. The early fourth-century art still exhales the religious spirit and serious ethos of the Pheidian school; and it created the type, and almost succeeded in establishing the cult, of the new Goddess of Peace, Eirene, for whose presence among them the wearied Athenians might well yearn; it also perfected the ideal of Demeter, the Madre Dolorosa of Greek myth, whose Eleusinian rites with their benign promise of salvation added power and significance to the later polytheism. The literature of this period attests the enduring vitality of the popular religion. The Attic oratory of the fourth century was more religious in its appeal than any modern has been, as might be expected of a time when there was yet no divorce conceivable between Church and State. It is not a question of the religious faith of the individual orator, but of the religious temper of the audience which is attested by many striking passages in the speeches. According to Antiphon, the punishment of sinners and the avenging of the wronged is specially the concern of the deities of the nether world[131.1]; Andokides avers that foul misconduct was a more heinous sin in a man who had been in the service of the Mother and the Maid of Eleusis[132.1]; the speech against Aristogeiton is almost as much a religious as a juridical utterance. Demosthenes may have been a sceptic at heart, believing in chance—as he once says—as the governing force of our life; but otherwise he is glowingly orthodox in respect of Attic religion and mythology, and the greatest of his speeches closes with a fervent and pious prayer.[132.2] And again it is well to remind ourselves that the political or forensic orator is a truer witness to the average popular belief than the poet or the philosopher.

Plato’s attitude towards the popular religion.—A consecutive history of Greek religious thought as embodied in the surviving writings or records of the philosophic schools of Hellas is far too large a subject even to be adumbrated here. And a general survey of the religion can only notice shortly the leading thinkers whose works there is reason to suppose had popular vogue and lasting influence upon the religious world.

Among these the primacy belongs to Plato; and the full account of Greek religion, both in the period that precedes the downfall of Greek independence and in the periods that follow, must include a critical estimate of his religious speculation. This is no place for an elaborate consideration of the metaphysic of his ideal theory, or the relation of his ideas to a theistic system; but only the most general observations may be allowed for the purpose of this sketch. To understand his main attitude towards the popular cults, and his influence upon the later educated world of Greece, we must recognise at once that, idealist and reformer as he was, he was no revolutionary or iconoclast in matters of religion; he would reform Greek mythology, purging it of stories of divine conflicts, divine vengeance, divine amours; and, as these fortunately were enshrined in no sacred books, he feels that this might be done gently and easily without disturbance to the established forms of worship. He does not desire to abolish sacrifice or idolatry, but inculcates simplicity in the offerings.[133.1] In one passage he even maintains that the legislator will not change a single detail of the ritual, if only for the reason that he does not know anything of the inner truth that may lie behind such outward forms.[133.2] Even in his most advanced physical and metaphysical speculations he finds a place for the popular pantheon;[133.3] in the hierarchic scale of things the Olympians are ranged somewhere below the supreme transcendental God of the Universe. The ‘Timæus’ dialogue presents some interesting theologic dogma; here[133.4] in the scale of Divine creation the Olympian Pantheon, which seems to be accepted rather for the sake of ancient tradition, is given the third place after the planets and the Sun which are the second works of the Supreme Creator, the first being the cosmic Heaven. These deities of the polytheism, then, are not immortal in their own nature, but are held together for all eternity by the will of the highest God. And it was to them that he committed the formation of man, and lent for this purpose a portion of his own immortality; the mortality of man is thus accounted for; which would have been inexplicable had he sprung directly from the immortal Supreme Being.

It is interesting for our present purpose to note that this esoteric and transcendental system, devised by the great master and parent of Greek theosophy, would leave the established religion more or less unimpaired; it even accepts its data at certain points, namely, the nativity of its Gods, and draws the logical conclusion that Gods, who were born could not be by essence immortal; therefore Zeus could not be accepted as the Absolute and Supreme Being of the Cosmos. Also it proclaims the idea of an immortal element in man, which, again, is in accord not only with Orphic teaching, but also with the contemporary popular faith in the survival of some part of our being after death. But the work which reflects most vividly the popular religion and betrays the strongest sympathy with it is the Laws, a work of his old age in which the conservative spirit of the religious reformer is no less striking than the intellectual decay of the philosopher. He accepts the greater part of the civic political religion, merely purifying the mythology and some of the ideas concerning divinity; and it is striking how easily he finds in it materials ready to his hand on which he can build an exalted ethical-religious system of rights and duties, especially those which concern the life of the family and the groups of kinship.[134.1] In fact, the background of the thought in this lengthy treatise is almost always the Greek Polis, though glimpses may here and there break through of a wider vista. He expresses the prejudices of the Greek citizen against new forms of private or foreign orgiastic cult which were dangerously enticing to women;[135.1] any doubtful question that might arise concerning rite or cult he would leave to the decision of the oracles of Delphi or Dodona or of Zeus Ammon.[135.2] We feel generally that Plato did not assume the part of an apostle of a new order of religion, but that both in his philosophy and religious theory he found a sufficient point d’appui in the old, of which he tried to strengthen the moral potentialities.

The later sects which attached themselves to his name or to his school were deeply interested in religious speculation, which degenerates at last into the mystic superstition of Neoplatonism. Therefore, as the work of Aristotle belongs to the history of European science, so the philosophy of Plato concerns the later history, both of pre-Christian and Christian religious thought. To estimate exactly how his influence worked on the better popular mind in the centuries before Christ is impossible. But we may naturally and with probability surmise that he contributed much to the diffusion of the belief in the spiritual nature and perfection of God, to the extirpation of the crude notions of divine vindictiveness and jealousy, to the interpretation of the external world in terms of mind and spirit as against any materialistic expression, to the acceptance of the belief in the divinity of the human soul and its affinity with God and in the importance of its posthumous life, which was partly conditioned by the attainment of purity. These latter ideas constitute the faith of the Orphic sects, from whom Plato may have silently borrowed them. But whether through Plato or the thiasoi many of them came to appeal strongly to the popular mind of later Hellas.

Religious art in the fourth century.—Our general survey is now approaching that period of world-change brought about by the rise of Macedon. But before leaving the scene of the free City-State, we should remember to estimate the religious work done by the great fourth-century masters of sculpture before the power of Alexander reached its zenith. The fiery imagination of Skopas found plastic types for the forms of Dionysos and his thiasos, and his work rivalled at least, if it did not surpass, in inspiration of tumultuous life the masterpieces of the older Attic vase-painters noticed above. Praxiteles, the master of the gentler moods of the soul, in the religious sphere consummated the types of Aphrodite and Demeter; the almost perfect embodiment of the latter goddess, the Cnidian Demeter of the British Museum, a work of his school, combines something of the tearful expression of the Madre Dolorosa with the blitheness of the Corn-Goddess. We are conscious indeed of a change in the representation of divinity. The works of this later generation have lost the majesty and awe, the σεμνότης, as the Greeks called it, of the fifth-century art; nor can the Greek states command any longer the creation of the chryselephantine colossal statues of temple-worship. In these later types, though still divine, there is more infusion of human passion, of the personal experience, the struggles and yearning of the individual soul. Anthropomorphism is pursuing its path, and though still fertile in works of high spiritual value, may come to weary and weaken the religious sense.

CHAPTER V.
THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

The establishment of the Macedonian Empire wrought momentous changes in the civic-political religion of Hellas; and some of these were in the direction of loss and decay, while others worked for the birth of new religious life. The political significance of Apollo of Delphi, of Zeus and Athena, the divine leaders of the Polis in its counsels and ambitions, was doomed to pass away. Athena, as the warder and counsellor, was of less avail for Athens than were the Samothracian sea-deities for the victorious Demetrios.

Certainly in the first centuries of the Hellenistic age there were few external signs of decay; we do not yet hear of ruined shrines or the decline of great festivals such as the Delia; Athena, though no longer the goddess of a civic Empire, was still and for ages yet remained the benign Madonna for the Athenian, to whose care the boy-athlete and the marriageable girl were dedicated; we have record from the island of Tenos[137.1] of the abiding hold that even such a deity as Poseidon still exercised on the affections of his people, as late as the second and first centuries B.C.; and if we had continuous chronicles of each cult-centre we should probably find similar evidence showing that the dominant figures of the old polytheism were still able to fulfil in some degree the religious wants of the individual worshipper. And scholars who have been tempted to ante-date the decay of Hellenic polytheism have ignored, among other evidence, this important historic fact that in the fourth century it was still vital enough to make foreign conquests, to penetrate and take possession of Carthage, for instance, and that in the third century it began to secure for itself a new lease of life within the city and the growing Empire of Rome; in fact, the last chapter of Greek religion falls within the Roman imperial period.