Outline-history of Greek religion

by Lewis Richard Farnell

We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena, Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already ‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to the Olympian family, are equally warm on the side of Troy and are treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he was therefore supposed to guard.

But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of the composite whole.

Proto-Hellenic period.—The very high development of this Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful analysis of the later cult-records.

Family religion.—Society in the latter half of the second millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had evolved the monogamic family. Demeter—whose Aryan descent is proved by her name—was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the religion of the family, which was the life-source of much of the private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.

Again, the wider kinship-groups of the φρατρίαι and γένη are obviously pre-Homeric, and doubtless these had been consecrated by aboriginal religion, though we cannot date precisely the emergence of such cult-forms as Zeus Φράτριος and Athena Φρατρία, the deities who were specially concerned with the constitution and rights of the kindred-group.

Political religion.—Further, it is fairly clear that already in this first stage the religion had become closely interfused with the higher political and social life. Although the greater part of the population lived still under the tribal system in scattered villages—κωμηδόν—yet the ‘polis’ had already arisen; and in certain cases we may surmise for it a religious origin, where its name is derived from the personal name or the shrine of some divinity. Examples are ‘Athenai,’ Alalkomenai, Potniai, perhaps Megara. In these cases the temple must have been the nucleus around which grew up the secular habitations; and the deity of the temple would become supreme in the political religion. Athena had won this position at Athens and probably elsewhere in the immemorial pre-Homeric past; and this explains her character in the Homeric poem as the divinity who more than all others inspires political wisdom and counsel. Various indications point in fact to the belief that the earliest development of the city life was closely bound up with the cults of Zeus and Athena; for no other divinity was ever styled Polieus or Polias by any Greek State; and this agrees mainly with the presentation of them in the Homeric poems. The unanimity of the tradition points back to the second millennium, as the period when this political characterisation of the two deities was determined. And this view is strikingly confirmed by the records concerning the ritual and the establishment of the cult of Zeus ‘Polieus’ on the Athenian Akropolis, an institution attributed to Kekrops and marking probably the Hellenisation of Attica; the singular features of the ritual and the association preserved in its legend of Attica with Crete indicate a high antiquity, when agriculture was the economic basis of the political as well as the religious life.

We may believe that other cults besides the two just mentioned played their part in the political growth of the pre-Homeric world. The marketplace, the cradle of political oratory, had become sacred ground, as Homer himself attests; and this consecration was probably marked by the presence of some ‘agalma,’ a sacred stone of Hermes, for instance. Apollo, also, had early divested himself of the aboriginal character of the god of the wood and of the homeless migratory host, had become a builder of cities, and had established himself in the city’s streets with a change in the meaning of his title, Αγυιεύς, once an appellative of the Way-God who guided the host through the wild, now of the deity who guarded the ways of the city. And already, before Homer, his shrine at Pytho was beginning to acquire wealth and political importance as an oracular centre of consultation.

Ethical religion.—The theistic system had been turned to good account in other directions than the political before it appeared on the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical religious spirit of Homer—unless we regard him as a man or as a group of men to whom a special revelation had been made—must reflect in some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him. We see then that current conceptions about the Gods had ceased to be inspired merely by fear; a milder sentiment had come to tinge religious thought; the Deity was regarded not only as a righteous God of vengeance, but as loving mercy and compassion and as a defender of the weak and destitute. Only once, and only in regard to the wild sea-god Poseidon, does a Homeric phrase suggest that the deity might have been regarded as in his own nature malevolent.^[29.1] The cult of Zeus Ξείνιος, the guardian of the stranger and the wanderer, had already arisen. And the sanctity of the oath taken in the name of the deities of the upper and the lower world was the basis of much private and communal morality.

Art an aspect of religion.—And other parts of the higher activity of man had been consecrated by the polytheism of which Homer inherits and develops the tradition. The earliest imagination of the Hellenes appears to have perceived a daimoniac potency—a ‘numen’ as we may say—in the arts of song and music; and this had sometimes crystallised into the personal forms of divinities, into such interesting embodiments as the Muses or the Charites, who must have belonged to the pre-Homeric popular theism. The latter group had grown up at the Bœotian Orchomenos, an old centre of the Minoan-Mycenæan culture. It may be that at one time they had no other than the purely physical significance of vegetation-powers; but we only understand their value for Homer if we suppose that before his time they had come to be associated with the arts and the delight of human life. We discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher and lower religions it was unique in this.

Proto-Hellenic ritual.—It seems, then, that even in the earliest period the polytheism was no longer on the most primitive plane. And we gather the same impression from what is revealed to us of the earliest forms of Greek ritual. The Homeric and Hesiodic poems are full of information concerning the liturgy or cult-service with which the poets were familiar; what they tell us avails first of all for the period of the eleventh to the eighth century. But ritual takes long to develop, and once fixed is the most abiding element in religion. It is not too bold, then, to take the Homeric account as vouching for a tradition that goes back at least to the later centuries of the second millennium.