The mysteries of Mithras embodied much the same eschatologic ideas and hopes; but these came to the Græco-Roman world only in the latest period before the establishment of Christianity, and had little hold on Hellenic society proper. Doubtless the most attractive mystery for the Hellenes was the Orphic, and we have many proofs of its activity and life in the two centuries before and after the beginning of our era; and we can well understand the causes of its popularity. Its deity had become Hellenised long ago; the Orphic formulæ were free from barbarous jargon and admitted the familiar divine names; the insistence on purification was congenial to many Hellenic temperaments; there was probably nothing surviving in the ritual that was objectionable to the cultivated Hellene; and finally its picture of Paradise seems to have accorded with the trend of the Hellenic imagination. The numerous grave-inscriptions of these centuries rarely express any definite Orphic sentiment or allude to any specially mystic faith; but we know that the sacred hymn of the votaries was buried with them from the fourth century down to the Roman Imperial period; and we have the evidence of Plutarch attesting the prevalence of these societies and their power of appeal, for, when he is consoling his wife for the death of their child, he reminds her of the promises of future happiness held out by the Dionysiac mysteries, into which they have both been initiated.[152.1]
Hero-worship and apotheosis.—The idea that was common to many of these mystic brotherhoods, that the mortal might achieve divinity, is illustrated by another religious phenomenon which stands out in this latest period, namely, the worship of individual men and women either in their lifetime or immediately after death. To appreciate the full significance of this, one must be familiar with the usages of the earlier Hellenes as also of the Oriental peoples who became subjects of the Diadochi. We have observed that the Greek of the sixth and fifth centuries was willing to concede heroic honours to certain distinguished individuals after death; in this there was nothing inconsistent with the principles of higher polytheism; and in the earlier cases the grounds of canonisation were usually good and reasonable. It becomes a more serious question about the religious and moral character of a people when divine worship is proffered to a living person. Of this the first example is the cult of Lysander as a God, which, as Plutarch seems to imply, arose even in his lifetime.[152.2] The same writer records the story of the apotheosis offered by the people of Thasos to Agesilaos and his sarcastic refusal.[153.1] The same kind of adulation was lavished by the degenerate Athenians on Alexander and Demetrios Poliorketes. The most salient examples are derived from the records of the Seleukidai and the Ptolemies, the kings of these dynasties usually enjoying divine honours after death, and sometimes bearing divine titles, such as Σωτηρ, Saviour, Θεός, or God, in their lifetime. Is this merely the gross servility of a decadent age that had lost all real sense of religion? This is no doubt the true account of it in some degree; Dio Chrysostom exclaims against the quackery and vanity of it;[153.2] and the sharp-witted Athenians and the educated Greek generally would be under no illusion when they prostrated themselves before these human-Gods. It is natural to suppose that the effect upon the life of the old religion was corrosive when a queen or a courtesan could be publicly recognised as Aphrodite, and that the general belief in Apollo and Dionysos would tend to collapse when the one was identified with the Seleukidai, the other with Attalos. Yet the faith in Dionysos at least was able to survive the strain. And what seems to us mere hypocrisy and blasphemy would appear to many of the Hellenistic communities in another light. It seems that the uncultured Greek in the time of Herodotus was capable of believing in all seriousness that Xerxes might be a real incarnation of Zeus upon earth;[153.3] and such an idea would be familiar, as an old tradition in the popular estimate of kingship, to the natives of Syria and still more to the Egyptians. When the Rosetta stone proclaims the Ptolemy as ‘the living image of God,’ the average Greek might smile in secret, but the native Egyptian would instinctively assent to this assumption of divinity by the heir of the ancient Pharaohs.
This apotheosis of the mortal, so rife in this later period, may be regarded as a moral and religious evil. Yet it must not be taken too hastily as a proof of the unreality of the prevailing polytheism. And, for better or worse, it was a momentous fact belonging to the higher history of European religion; for it familiarised the Græco-Roman world with the idea of the incarnation of the Man-God.
Signs of decay and of new life in later Paganism.—The Hellenistic period cannot be severed by any sharp dividing line from the Græco-Roman; but it belongs rather to the student of Roman religion and the Roman Empire to pursue the history of Hellenic polytheism through the first centuries of our era down to the establishment of Christianity. The religious phenomena of the period that has just been sketched present, on the one hand, the signs of decay, the decay of the old civic and political religion which fostered the growth of the Greek Polis, the intrusion from the East of demonology and magic, and on the other hand the working of new religious forces which prepare the way for Christianity. The cults of Apollo, Zeus and Athene were among the first to wither; yet a living and personal religious sense was in all probability more diffused through the Greek world under the Epigoni and the Roman Empire than it had been in the earlier centuries. Contact with the Oriental spirit brought to many a stronger intensity of religious life; religion is no longer preoccupied with the physical and political world, but its horizon lies beyond the grave and its force is ‘other-worldliness.’ Men flock to the mysteries, seeking communion with the divinity by sacrament, and sustaining their faith by mystic dogmas. The religious virtue most emphasised is purity, of which the influence is often anti-social; this was no longer always understood in a pharisaic sense, but its spiritual significance was proclaimed to the people and penetrated the sphere of temple-ritual. An inscription from a temple in Rhodes of the time of Hadrian contains a list of rules concerning righteous entrance into the shrine, “the first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil conscience.”[155.1] Something similar was inscribed on the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros.[155.2] The objective of the earlier Hellenic polytheism was the city, the tribe, the family; that of the later was the individual soul; the earlier religious morality looked rather to works and practice, the later rather to purity and personal intimacy with God, which gave the cue to the later ‘gnosis’ and theosophy. The gradual divorce of religion from political life was a loss which was not repaired for many centuries; but it was compensated by the rise of a humanitarian spirit which was to be infused into a new cosmopolitan religion.[155.3]
The above is only a panoramic sketch indicating the various elements of a singularly manifold religious system. It has been impossible to touch on all the special points of interest, such as divination and the minutiæ of ritual and of the festivals; for these the student must consult special treatises. The object of this monograph has been to present the main essential features in a chronologic survey and to assign to each its significance and relative importance. The history has been adumbrated of a religion that maintained itself for nearly two thousand years on the higher plane of polytheism; a religion which, while lacking the sublimity and moral fervour of some of the Oriental creeds, made certain unique contributions to the evolution of society and the higher intellectual life of man.
By the side of the higher growths many of the products of lower and savage culture were maintained which were mainly obliterated by Christianity. It is necessary to note and appreciate these lower facts; but there is a risk of overestimating their importance and vitality. Many of these are found in all higher religions, usually in a moribund state. It is its higher achievement that makes any particular religion of importance in the history of civilisation; and we are now aware that Greek religion can claim this importance. Nor can the lower elements as a whole be shown to be the germs of the higher within the Hellenic period proper. We cannot show the evolution of the personal anthropomorphic deities of Greece from magic ritual or totemism or theriomorphism without transcending the chronologic limits of the period within which it is allowable to speak of a Hellenic people at all. The emergence of personal Gods, from whatever region or by whatever influence they emerged, is an event of very primitive history. At least we know that of the two populations whose blending made Hellenism, the indigenous Mediterranean and the Northern or Central European invader, the former possessed a personal theism of dateless antiquity; while all the evidence points to the conviction that the Aryan tribes entered Greece with certain personal deities already evolved or acquired.
We find that anthropomorphism was the strongest bias of the Hellenic religious imagination; and with this we associate his passion for idolatry and hero-worship. It is interesting for the student of Hellenic Christianity to note the influence of these tendencies on the later history of the Greek Church; and generally it has been the result of much modern research to reveal the truth that the indebtedness of Christian dogma and ritual to the later Hellenic paganism was far greater than used to be supposed.
LITERATURE
Older works, such as Welcker’s Griechische Götterlehre (3 vols., 1857-1863), and Preller’s Griechische Mythologie (2 vols., 4th ed., by C. Robert, 1887), are only useful now for their collection of facts.
Recent literature: O. Gruppe, Griechische Culte und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den orientalischen Religionen, 1887; Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, 1906; L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, 5 vols. (1896-1910); Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religiongeschichte (Greek section, 1906); Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis, a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912) (both works dealing mainly with special questions and the more primitive aspects of the religion).