Monumental.—The above is a sketch of our more important literary sources. The knowledge to be derived from them would, on the whole and in many important details, remain vague and uncertain, were it not supplemented and secured by the evidence coming from another source which we may term semi-literary, the evidence from inscriptions. These have been accumulated in vast profusion during the last thirty years, and have been, and are still being, reduced to order for our special purpose. The public inscriptions, being dry state-documents, do not reveal to us the heart of any mystery or the religious soul of the people, but rather the State-organisation and the exact minutiæ of ritual and sacrifice from which we can sometimes reconstruct an image of the inward religious thought. And many a local cult of value for our total impression that was unrecorded by any writer is revealed to us by these monuments. But the needs and aspirations of the private man are better attested by the private inscriptions attached to ex-voto dedications or commemorating divine benefits received.
Yet amidst all this wealth of evidence there seems one thing lacking. Of actual temple-liturgies, of formal prayers proffered round the altars, of the hymns chanted in the public service, of all that might constitute a text of Greek church-service there is comparatively little preserved. One or two hymns and a few fragments of the religious lyric of the seventh century—to which we may now add the important recent find of the pæans of Pindar—a strophe of an ancient hymn to Dionysos sung by the Elean women, a fourth-century pæan to Dionysos composed for the Delphic service, the newly discovered hymn of the Kouretes in Crete, a few formulæ of prayers quoted or paraphrased by later writers—all this appears meagre material when we compare it with the profusion of documents of the public and private religion that are streaming in from Babylon.
But in respect of another source of the history of religion, our Greek material is unique, namely, the monuments of art. For the greatest art of Hellas was mainly religious, the greatest artists working for the religious service of the State. And the surviving works of sculpture, painting and glyptic, wrought either for public or private purposes, present us often not only with facts of religion and ritual unrecorded in literature, but also with an impression hard to gain otherwise of the religious consciousness of the people and serve also as witnesses to the strength of the religious feeling. For instance, the knowledge and appreciation of Athena’s personality that we derive from Attic monuments is deeper and more vivid than any that we gain from the literature. Therefore the study of Greek religion is concerned as much with the art and archæology as with the literature.
CHAPTER II.
THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD
A summary sketch of so manifold a theme as that with which this short handbook deals will be of more value if it can present the facts in some kind of chronologic sequence.
We may conveniently distinguish four periods: the first, the prehistoric, falling mainly in the second millennium B.C. and closing with the epoch marked by the Homeric poems; the second, extending from 900 to 500 B.C., beginning with the colonial expansion of Hellas and ending before the Persian invasion; the third, from 500 to 338 B.C., including the greatest century of Greek history and closing with the battle of Chæronea and the establishment of Macedonian supremacy; the fourth and last, the Hellenistic and Græco-Roman period.
The chronologic statement is embarrassed by the absence of any record of date for the institution and diffusion of most of the cults and for the growth of certain religious ideas; nor can we safely date a religious fact by the date of the author who first mentions it; a detail of ritual, a myth, a religious concept, only attested by Pausanias or a late scholiast, may descend from an age centuries before the Homeric. And our earliest inscriptions do not as yet reach back to a period earlier than the beginning of the seventh century.
For determining our view of Greek religion in the second millennium B.C., when Hellenism was in the making, the poems of Homer and Hesiod are of priceless value if they are used with cautious and trained criticism. We depend greatly also on the general inductions of comparative religion and anthropology, which may sometimes guide us rightly in this matter, especially if the anthropological comparison is drawn from more or less adjacent communities rather than from the Antipodes. We depend also on the evidence of the monuments of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, revealing glimpses of the practices and faith of a people of high culture, whom no one would dare now to call, at least in the earlier stage of their life, Hellenic, but from whom the earliest Hellenes doubtless adopted much into their own religion.
Sketch of Homeric religion.—The poems of Homer present us with an advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. The anthropomorphic bias is dominant in the poems, plastically shaping the figures of all the divinities, except occasionally some of the lower grade, such as the river-god Skamandros. Even the vague group of nymphs, female ‘daimones’ of the rill and the mountain, while lacking individual characterisation, bear the anthropomorphic name, ‘Brides,’ or ‘young women,’ which is the root-meaning of Νύμφη. Though the gods and goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves in the form of any animal—birds by choice—yet their abiding type is human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera, still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’—the term is a complimentary epithet of women—and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions and ethical as well as artistic emotions. The highest among them are not imagined as Nature-powers, bound up with or immanent in the forces and departments of the natural world, for such a description applies only to his wind-Gods and nymphs and gods of river and sea; also, though more loosely, to his Helios, the God of the Sun; to beings in fact that count little in his religious world. It scarcely applies to Poseidon, for though his province is the sea, and some of his functions and appellatives ‘the girdler of the earth,’ ‘the earth-shaker,’ ‘he of the dark blue locks’ are derived from it, he is also the builder of the walls of Troy, the family deity of the house of Nestor, and the God of horses. It does not describe at all his mode of imagining and presenting Apollo, Hera, Athena, Hermes and others. There is no hint that these divinities were conceived by him as nature-powers or as evolved from any part of the natural world. The High God, Zeus, though specially responsible for the atmospheric and celestial phenomena, is not identified with the thunder or even with the sky, though a few phrases may reveal the influence of an earlier animistic conception of the divine sky. His religious world, in short, is morphologically neither a system of polydaimonism nor one of pantheism in which a divine force is regarded as universally immanent in the world of things; but is constructed on the lines of personal theism.
We may observe also that the polytheism of the age of Perikles in regard to some of its leading divinities has not markedly advanced beyond the Homeric. Athena, in the Homeric poems, is already the Goddess of war, arts, and counsel; and there are already hints in the Homeric presentation of her of the tender Madonna-like character that is beautifully developed in the later Attic monuments. The Homeric Apollo is already the oracular God who delights in the music of the Pæan, though his artistic and intellectual character is not yet fully developed. Of Hermes and Hephaistos the later Attic conception is not notably different from the Homeric.