Again, in spite of one or two frivolous and licentious passages, the religious tone in the Homeric poems is serious and in many important respects accords with an advanced morality. The deity, though jealous and revengeful of wrongs or slights to himself, is on the whole on the side of righteousness and mercy; his displeasure is aroused by those who spurn the voice of prayer, who injure the suppliant, the guest, or even the beggar; and besides Zeus and the other ‘Olympians,’ who are general guardians of the right, there loom the dark powers of the lower world, who are specially concerned with the sanctity of the oath. Much also of the religious reflection in the poems strikes us as mature and advanced: notably that passage at the beginning of the Odyssey where Zeus declares that it is not the Gods who bring evil to men, but that it is the wickedness of their own hearts that is the cause of all their evils.
Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism. We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe; it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear.
This slight sketch of Homeric theology is presented here in the belief that the Homeric poems enable us to catch some glimmer of the religion of the centuries preceding the first millennium. This belief is based on the conviction that the poems represent a Greek society existing near the date of 1000 B.C. It is of course opposed to the view still maintained by some scholars that they are, in their finished form, a product of a much later period, and that the religion which they enshrine may be such as was in vogue in Attica about the epoch of Peisistratos. But certain arguments drawn from ethnology and sociology are fatal to this theory, and still more so are the arguments that may be drawn from the history of Greek religion; for at the period of Peisistratos certain religious forces were rife, and certain religious phenomena prominent, of which Homer is entirely silent.
Still less reasonable is it to imagine that Homer constructs a religious world out of his own brain. We must suppose that he reflects something real and contemporary. Only we must guard ourselves from the serious error of supposing that he reflects the whole. Much is doubtless missing in his account which we may be able to supply from Hesiod and other sources by means of reasonable hypotheses.
The assumption is, then, that the Homeric poems present us with a part-picture of the religion that prevailed among some of the leading Greek communities before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese and the Ionic colonisation of Asia Minor.
Pre-Homeric period of religion.—Now when we consider how slow of growth and enduring are the forms and the moral and metaphysical concepts of religion we have the right to believe that part of what Homer records on these matters is the inherited tradition of an age some centuries earlier than his own. It is probable that those earliest Aryan immigrants from the north, Achæans, Dryopes, Minyai and others—who by mingling with peoples of aboriginal Mediterranean stock and of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture constituted the happy blend that we call the Hellenic race—had already arrived at the stage of personal theism; and that Hellenic religion proper does not start with a ‘godless period’[21.1] when the unseen powers were only dimly outlined in the vaguer and more fleeting characters of what is called animism. We now know from the valuable discovery of a cuneiform inscription that the Iranian people had evolved such personal deities as Mitra and Varuna before 1400 B.C.[22.1] And we have the right to suppose that their western kinsfolk, who were forcing their way through the Balkans, probably only a century earlier, were at least at the same level of religious imagination. We can best understand the picture of the religious world of Homer and also the later cult-records, if we believe that the kindred tribes coming from the north brought in certain personal deities, some of whom were common to more than one stock, and one at least may have been common to them all. This would best explain the supremacy of Zeus, the Sky-God, the diffusion of his name Olympios, derived from the mountain that dominates the northern frontier, near to which the people that were to lead the history of Greece had at one time temporary settlements and which they regarded as the throne of their high God. The wide geographical area of his cult cannot be naturally explained on the assumption that at any period in Hellenic history he had been merely the special deity of one particular tribe. Also as regards two other high Gods at least, Apollo and Poseidon, we may be reasonably sure that already in the pre-Homeric period certain tribes other than the Achæans had these cult-figures. In the Hyperborean ritual, which reflects at points the earliest days of Hellenism, we can follow the track of Apollo’s invasion from the north; and the evidence is fairly clear that Poseidon was equally a northern immigrant, being the special tribal deity of the Minyai.
We must not then apply to the pre-Homeric period of Greek religion the formula, ‘one tribe one God,’ but must imagine that religion had already surmounted in some degree the tribal barriers; for though the spirit of tribal exclusiveness was strong throughout the earlier periods of this polytheism, certain families and certain tribes having the special prerogative of certain ἱερά and jealously excluding strangers, yet the fact of the common possession of certain worships by various tribes contained the germ of religious expansiveness.
Moreover, at some age indefinitely earlier than the Homeric, the conception of the high God had expanded both cosmically and ethically. Zeus had become more than a ‘departmental God’; the deity of the sky was also in the first period—so far as we can reconstruct it—Zeus ‘Chthonios,’ the Lord of the life of earth and of the world under the earth, and it is likely that Hades was only an emanation from him. Also, we may regard the Homeric appellation of Zeus, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε Θεῶν τε, as a conventional and crystallised phrase descending from an older poetic tradition. And we are justified in interpreting it as a phrase belonging to the higher plane of theism.[23.1]
We must also suppose that the anthropomorphic view of the personal deity, of which Homer is so attractive a spokesman, had asserted itself in the period before his. Unlike the early Roman, the early Hellenic divinities could be regarded as married, and ideas derived from the life of the family could be applied to them; although we can often discern that many of the myths concerning divine relationships—the sisterhood of Artemis to Apollo, for instance—do not belong to the earliest Hellenic epoch.
Minoan-Mycenæan religion.—But any account of the Hellenic polytheism of the second millennium demands a critical study of the Minoan-Mycenæan religion as well, and before we can decide what part of the Homeric and later systems belongs to the aboriginal Aryan-Hellenic tradition, we must know what the northerners found indigenous in the lands that they conquered or occupied. We know now that they found in many centres a culture superior to their own and a religion of an advanced theistic type with elaborate, though mainly aniconic, ritual, devoted pre-eminently to a Great Goddess, by whose side a God was only the subordinate partner. It has been pointed out[24.1] that where we find in historic Greece the Goddess-cult predominant, and especially the prevalence of a virgin-goddess, we should recognise the Minoan-Mycenæan tradition in antagonism to the ‘Aryan,’ the latter invariably maintaining the predominance of the God. We may therefore believe the cults of Artemis in Arcadia and Attica, of Athena in Attica, the cult—though not the name—of Hera in Argos[24.2] and Samos, to have been inherited from the former rather than to have been brought in by the latter. And sometimes linguistic science will be able to assign the different personalities of the polytheism to its different ethnic strains, by determining the group of languages to which the divine name in question belongs. Those that can be explained with certainty or probability as of ‘Aryan’ or Indo-Germanic and may therefore be presumed to have penetrated Greece from the north, are Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Hestia, Dionysos, probably Poseidon and Apollo. On the other hand, ‘Athena,’ ‘Artemis,’ ‘Aphrodite,’ ‘Hephaistos’ defy explanation on these lines, and probably belong to a primitive Ægean language. We may be doubtful about ‘Hermes,’ though elsewhere I have argued for his ‘non-Hellenic’ origin. That philology has not yet brought us nearer to the solution of many of these problems is due to the lacunæ in our knowledge of the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean languages, and especially to our ignorance of the Minoan script for which we have masses of material but as yet no interpreter. Finally, the evidence of the early geographical area of a certain cult may sometimes be decisive in itself; this is the case in regard to the cults of the ‘Mother of the Gods’ and of Aphrodite, who are aboriginally connected with Crete and Cyprus respectively, that is, with the centres of the Minoan culture.