Outline-history of Greek religion E-Book

Lewis Richard Farnell

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion, as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of religion.
The history of Greek religion means, partly, the account and the interpretation of the various rites, cults and cult-ideas of the various Greek families, tribes and communities; partly the estimate of the religious temperament, both of the masses and of the individuals who emerged from among them and of whom some record has been preserved.
Now as the Greek world in the long period of its independence was never organised as a single State, the attempt to give a summary and general account of its religion is confronted with the perplexity arising from the often incalculable diversity of religious forms and ideas in the different centres of its social life, which was in the highest degree centrifugal. Nevertheless, as will be shown, we find in the midst of manifold local variation certain uniformity of religious psychology, making for uniformity of practice, which enables us to deliver certain general pronouncements about the whole.
Ancient Sources: Literary.—Our real knowledge of any ancient religion depends obviously on the copiousness and variety of our records. And it is likely to be more luminous, if the society in question expressed its religious life not only in surviving literature, but also in surviving art. Of both these kinds the student of Greek religion has an unusually rich material.

Leseprobe

OUTLINE-HISTORY OF GREEK RELIGION

BY LEWIS RICHARD FARNELL

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385744014

CONTENTS

I. The Sources and the Evidence

II. The Prehistoric Period

III. The Second Period, 900-500 B.C.

IV. The Third Period, 500-338 B.C.

V. The Period after Alexander

Literature

Endnotes

OUTLINE-HISTORY OF GREEK RELIGION

CHAPTER I.THE SOURCES AND THE EVIDENCE

The foundation of a serious and scientific study of Greek religion, as distinct from the mere mythology of Hellas, may almost be said to have been an achievement of the last generation of scholars. And it is only through recent research that the Hellenic spirit, so creative and imperial in the domains of literature, art and science, can be recognised as manifesting itself not unworthily in the sphere of religion.

The history of Greek religion means, partly, the account and the interpretation of the various rites, cults and cult-ideas of the various Greek families, tribes and communities; partly the estimate of the religious temperament, both of the masses and of the individuals who emerged from among them and of whom some record has been preserved.

Now as the Greek world in the long period of its independence was never organised as a single State, the attempt to give a summary and general account of its religion is confronted with the perplexity arising from the often incalculable diversity of religious forms and ideas in the different centres of its social life, which was in the highest degree centrifugal. Nevertheless, as will be shown, we find in the midst of manifold local variation certain uniformity of religious psychology, making for uniformity of practice, which enables us to deliver certain general pronouncements about the whole.

Ancient Sources: Literary.—Our real knowledge of any ancient religion depends obviously on the copiousness and variety of our records. And it is likely to be more luminous, if the society in question expressed its religious life not only in surviving literature, but also in surviving art. Of both these kinds the student of Greek religion has an unusually rich material.

For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement, Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental life. This is obviously true of the epic period, which produced the two types of the chivalrous and the theologic epic, and which has left us most valuable material for the religious history of the tenth and ninth centuries in the Homeric poems, and of the eighth and seventh centuries in the poems of Hesiod and in the ‘Homeric’ hymns. It is none the less true of the great lyric movement that followed upon that, when the greatest poets devoted themselves to the composition of songs for festal-religious occasions or of hymns for the service of temple or altar; and besides these whose great names and fragments of whose great works survive, there was another less distinguished group of special ‘hieratic’ poets, such as Pamphos and Mousaios, who composed hymns for the service of certain mystery-cults, and whose compositions were preserved as liturgical documents by the priestly families that administered them.

The sententious ethical-political poetry of the sixth century, the elegiacs of Theognis and Solon, is instinct with religious emotion and reflection. And the greatest product of the poetic genius of Hellas, the tragic drama, is of a religious character, both in respect of its origin and much of its subject-matter. Finally, the later learned poetry of the Ptolemaic period, the Kassandra of Lycophron, the hymns and other works of Kallimachos, the epic poem of Apollonios Rhodios, are full of antiquarian religious lore.

At the same time, our knowledge is much indebted to the great prose-writers of Greece, the philosophers, historians and orators; among the philosophers, especially to Plato, who more copiously than any of the others reveals to us, however much he idealises, the religious psychology and cult-phenomena of his period; among the historians, especially to Herodotus, who is the intellectual ancestor of the modern anthropologist and student of comparative religion and whose presentation of the facts is coloured with religious conviction. The works of the Attic orators are of special value for our purpose, first because the classical orator was far more apt than the modern to dilate on religious themes and appeal to religious sentiments, as religion was far more closely interfused with political and social life; secondly, because we are more sure of the orator than we can be of the poetic or philosophic writer that his words are attuned to the average pitch of popular belief and sentiment.

It is true then that all the great fields of Greek literature make their several contributions to the material of our subject. And besides the works of the great masters, the student has to reckon with the secondary and parasitic work of the later scholiasts, compilers and commentators, which is even more replete with the special information upon which the history of Greek religion can be built. The study of it is, in fact, almost coextensive with the whole study of Greek literature.

But amidst this profusion of material we must specially mark the works of those ancients who wrote direct treatises on the various religious phenomena, on the Gods, the cult-practices, the theologic and mythologic systems of the Hellenic societies. The earliest of such works that have come down to us are the poems of Hesiod and the Hesiodic school, the Works and Days and the Theogony, while of parts of the ‘Homeric’ hymns the special theme is the attributes and functions of the various divinities. But it was not till the period of scientific activity after Aristotle that definite treatises in prose on different departments of the national religion began to be rife. A chapter on sacrifice by Theophrastos is mainly preserved for us by Porphyry. The writers of ‘Atthides’ or Attic history and antiquities, who belonged mainly to the third century, were special workers in this field; Philochoros, the chief of them, wrote ‘on festivals,’ ‘on sacred days,’ ‘on divination,’ ‘on the Attic mysteries’; Istros, the slave and friend of Kallimachos, on the ‘manifestations of Apollo’ and on ‘the Cretan sacrifices’; while the ‘exegetic work’ of Kleidemos was, if we may judge from the fragments that remain, occupied with the problems of religion and mythology. Outside this circle we hear of other contributions to the history of Greek religion, such as the treatises of Herakleides, probably the pupil of Aristotle, usually called ‘Pontikos,’ on ‘the foundations of temples,’ and ‘on oracles’; and a work by an unknown Sokrates of Kos on the important subject of ‘Invocation-titles of the Gods.’ Lastly may be mentioned here a treatise of Apollodoros, ‘περι Θεῶν,’ which, if he is to be identified with the author of the ‘Bibliotheca,’ was probably a learned account of the popular religion rather than a metaphysical enquiry.

Of nearly all this scientific post-Aristotelian literature only isolated fragments survive in quotations by later writers, lexicographers, and scholiasts, who were no doubt more deeply indebted to it than they always acknowledged; but it is some compensation for our loss that the work last mentioned, the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros, has been preserved, a rich storehouse of myth and folklore with some infusion of actual cult-record. Among the later literature our subject is indebted to the geographer, Strabo, for many incidental observations of local cults and ritual; still more to the philosophic moralist and littérateur, Plutarch, a man of earnest religious interest and some power of original thought, who knew the religion of his country at first hand and at a time when it was yet alive, and who devoted to it much attention and literary industry; hence we must rank high among our ancient authorities his Quæstiones Græcæ and his treatises ‘on the Pythian Oracle’ and on ‘the cessation of oracles.’ Again, much desultory but varied information is afforded by the compilers Athenæus, in his Deipnosophistæ, and Stobæus, in his Florilegium. But of higher value than all these, or in fact than any work that has been bequeathed to us from antiquity, is the Descriptio Græciæ, by Pausanias, composed about 180 A.D.; for he travelled somewhat as a modern anthropologist, relying partly on earlier literature, yet using his own eyes and ears and his own notes; and his ruling passion was the study of the folk-religion and the religious monuments; so that it is due mainly to him that we know something of the village-religion of Hellas as distinct from that of the great cities, and can frame working theories of the evolution through immemorial ages of various growths of the polytheism.

The lexicographers Harpokration, Hesychios and Suidas contribute facts of value, especially in their citation of cult-appellatives, which owing to the magic value of the special name or title whereby the deity was invoked throw a revealing light on the significance and power of many a worship, and help to frame our conception of the complex character of many a divinity. Again, the various collections of ‘Scholia’ on the classical texts are a rich quarry for our reconstruction of the fabric of Hellenic religion; and of chief value among these are the Scholia on Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Theocritus, while Servius’ Commentary on Vergil tells us even more about Greek cult and mythology than about Roman; and high in this class of our authorities we must rank a work of late Byzantine learning, the Commentary of Tzetzes on Lykophron’s poem, ‘Kassandra,’ for his scholia are charged with remote antiquarian lore derived from good sources.

Finally, we gather much of our knowledge from the controversial treatises of the early Christian Fathers, written with propagandist zeal in the heat of their struggle against Paganism. They reveal to us much of the religion that they strove to overthrow by the exposure of its viciousness and its absurdities. But their statements must be used with cautious criticism. Their knowledge was by no means always at first hand, unless—which we rarely know to have been the case—they were, like Clemens of Alexandria, converted Pagans who had been bred up in the Græco-Roman polytheism. Their statements, for instance, about the Greek mysteries are often vague and unconvincing, while in their desire to include them all in one general condemnation they confuse Anatolian rites with Eleusinian. And they are pardonably blind to the often beautiful ritual, the nobler ideas and the higher moral elements in the older Mediterranean religions. Nevertheless, if we make due allowance for prejudice and exaggeration, works such as the Protreptica of Clemens, the treatise of Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, of Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Gentium, Eusebius’ Præparatio Evangelica, Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Athenagoras’ Legatio, must be ranked among the primary sources of our history.

A special but very important chapter in the later history of Greek religion is the account of the growth and diffusion of the religious brotherhoods, especially the Orphic Dionysiac societies. For these we have something of direct liturgical evidence in the collection of Orphic hymns, mainly the products of the later theosophic period, but throwing light on the theology and ritual of these sects. But our knowledge of this mystic religion which was engrafted upon Hellenism has been in recent times enriched by the priceless discovery of an ancient poetical Orphic liturgy engraved upon gold-leaf found in tombs of Crete and South Italy and probably a product of the fifth century B.C.

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.

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.