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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{gods
religion
zeus
earth
age
epic
like
greek
myths
worship}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Greece
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter II

     Hera was, probably even in prehellenic times, the great goddess of Argos;
in Homer she names Argos, Mycenae, and Sparta as the cities dearest to her.
After Argos, Samos was in historical times the most important seat of her
worship, and the local myth made it the scene of her birth. As the chief deity
of these places, she was not only "defender of the city," but presided over
husbandry and industry.  The cow was sacred to her, and in religious
processions her car was drawn by oxen; a standing epithet in Homer is
literally, "cow-faced", poetically understood as having large and beautiful
eyes like a cow.  In other places agricultural rites are not a prominent part
of her cult - an argument against the theory of some scholars that she was
primitively an earth goddess.

     Hera was worshipped throughout the Hellenic world as the spouse of Zeus,
having, perhaps as a result of migration, superseded his older consort, Dione.
In consequence, Hera was worshipped by the side of Zeus in many temples.  The
sacred marriage, which was acted out in varying forms in different places,
annually celebrated their nuptials.  Since Zeus was a sky god, this is
interpreted as the marriage of heaven and earth, the fertilisation of the
earth by the sky, but neither the rites with which we are acquainted nor the
myths that grew about them sustain this theory; they seem rather to reflect
the customs of human marriage, over which, as has been said, Hera presided.
As the married goddess - the only one in whom this character is emphasised -
Hera was the goddess of matrimony and of wedded women.  Sacrifices to Zeus and
Hera, as the divinities who bless the consummation of marriage (Teleios,
Teleia), were part of the wedding service.  Women in childbed were also under
Hera's protection; she took over the occupation and even the title of the
functional deity of childbirth, Eileithyia, and her kindly interest is
extended to all the interests of woman's life.

     Hephaistos is the skilled artificer among the gods and the patron deity
of craftsmen, especially of smiths, armourers, and cunning workers in gold and
silver.  The most important local seat of his worship was the island of
Lemnos, where he alighted, according to Homer, when Zeus threw him out of
heaven for intervening on his mother's behalf in a domestic jar between his
parents.  In Lemnos, Aphrodite also was especially worshipped, and through
this local conjunction Aphrodite became the wife of Hephaistos, ^1 while in
other places she was the wife of Ares.  Hephaistos is, further, the god of
fire; not the fire of the hearth or the altar, but of the fire in the forge,
the fire used in the arts.  In Lemnos, and later in Sicily and other volcanic
regions, he had his smithy under the mountain, and when columns of smoke rose
from the crater men knew that he was at work.  At Athens, which was early a
manufacturing city, Hephaistos was the patron of the lower town, and was
closely associated in worship with the city goddess, Athena.

[Footnote 1: So in the Odyssey.]

     Ares is a warrior god, whose home was among the fierce Thracian
barbarians, and his barbarian origin clings to him.  He loves the fight for
fighting's sake; strong and brave and skilled in arms, he rushes into the fray
in a frenzy, with a troop of kindred spirits at his heels whose significant
names are Battle and Strife, Fear and Terror.  He represents the brute side of
war, and it is brute strength and courage, the rage of battle, with which he
fills the warriors who invoke him.  But he is a fickle god, in whose constancy
it is folly to trust, and his somewhat scanty wit is no match for the mind of
Athene.  Victory in war is bestowed by the gods of the city, or by Zeus the
sovereign, not by Ares.  In his quality of god of the fray, he was, however,
universally worshipped.  In Thebes he was married to Aphrodite, and in the
later system of the twelve gods Ares and Aphrodite are regularly joined.

     Demeter, whose name was even in antiquity explained by Ge meter, "Mother
Earth," ^2 was a goddess of the fertile soil and of tillage.  Like other earth
deities she was connected with the nether world, the abode of the buried dead;
she is the mother of Persephone, the queen of Hades, or of the maiden (Kore)
whom Pluto carries off to his gloomy realm.  On the other hand, as the deity
of settled communities of husbandmen, she is Thesmophoros, the goddess to whom
the ordinances of family life and society are attributed.  Many local deities
of similar functions were identified with Demeter or absorbed by her, the more
easily that they seem often to have had no proper names but to have been
addressed only as "mistresses, ladies, august holy ones," and the like -
titles which Demeter and her daughter assumed.  In the epic, which deals with
the aristocracy of the gods, Demeter is seldom mentioned; but one of the
longest of the Homeric Hymns belongs to her and recites the myth of Kore. The
great importance of the worship of Demeter in the religion of Greece in
historical times will engage our attention later, as will also the religion of
Dionysos, which in Homer is still a wild foreign cult.

[Footnote 2: Cicero, Natura Deorum, II, 67.  The Etymologicum Magnum gives,
among others, the etymology, "Barley Mother," from a Cretan dialect.]

     Besides these gods, who were worshipped throughout the whole Hellenic
world, there were many other deities, some of them conspicuous and universal,
such as the Sun (Helios) and the Earth (Ge, Gaia), some localised in mountains
and rocks, in lakes and streams and springs of water, in forests and glades,
or in single trees; and innumerable powers which were recognised in particular
operations of nature or functions of life.  We have had occasion repeatedly to
observe in the foregoing pages how the favoured gods grew great by
appropriating the functions and the local cults of the older numina, whose
names then became specific titles by which the gods were invoked in worship, a
process which was greatly facilitated by the fact that the names of gods such
as Artemis, Apollo, Aphrodite, suggested no meaning - they were true proper
names - while the names of the local and functional deities were generally
intelligible and in the form of adjectives.  Yet in spite of the absorption of
the smaller gods by the greater, many of the former remained distinct figures
in religion.  The preservation of their individuality was helped by the myths
which the poetical imagination of the Greeks wove about them, often drawing
them into the train of one of the greater gods as attendants or companions -
Artemis and her nymphs, for example - but thus most effectively keeping them
separate personalities.

     The Greeks shared the belief of all mankind that the dead exist after
death, and though notions about the mode of this existence were not always the
same, they never ceased to cherish them.  The tombs at Mycenae and elsewhere
were furnished with treasures and weapons, and give abundant evidence that
offerings were made both at the entombment and afterward. The description of
the burial of Patroklos in Homer is a vivid picture of the funeral rites of a
fallen chieftain: twelve Trojan youths were slain at the pyre, besides horses
and dogs, to accompany their master, and many cattle and sheep.

     The furnishing of the tomb with articles of use and luxury was
discontinued in later times; Attic tombs of the sixth and fifth centuries
scarcely contain anything but vases (lekythoi).  Offerings to the dead were
made at the tomb on the thirtieth of each month and on the birthday of the
deceased; probably also on the anniversary of his death.  The blood of the
victims was conducted into the ground by shafts or pipes, the carcass was
burned.  In a still later period animal sacrifices were disused; libations of
milk and honey or of wine (generally unmixed) sufficed.  The form of the
offerings was similar to that to the chthonic deities, and the same terms are
used.

     An intermediate place between the tendance of the dead and the worship of
the gods was occupied by the veneration of heroes.  A hero, in this sense, is
a man who after his death has been promoted to a higher rank of existence than
the common dead.  Legendary founders of cities, and eventually the eponymous
ancestors of families, were honoured in this way, as were also many more
historical persons who had deserved well of their country.  The canonisation
sometimes took place immediately after death. Frequently, however, a hero was
not recognised as such till long after his time; in such cases confirmation of
the discovery was usually sought from an oracle.  The cult attached to the
tomb; the bones of heroes who had died in foreign lands were brought home like
sacred relics.  If they could not be recovered, a cenotaph was erected.  The
hero was a local saint; the benefits he bestowed were confined to his
neighbourhood or at least to his native land, though of course strangers might
seek his aid there.  The rites were generally conformed to those of the
underworld powers, but some heroes attained still higher honours and were
worshipped like gods.

     The centuries which lie between the Mycenaean period and the dawn of
Greek history are the epic age.  In them the memorable exploits of the later
Mycenaean times, especially the expedition to Troy and the wars against
Thebes, were celebrated by many poets.  Doubtless the earliest efforts were of
modest compass, but the volume grew with the art of the singers; new figures,
incidents, episodes were introduced, till there came to be a considerable body
of epic story, more or less loosely strung on a traditional narrative thread.
Of such materials the poets of the Iliad and Odyssey constructed their great
works, not as mere compilers and arrangers, but as creators, whose genius is
not less admirable that they did not create out of nothing.  The oldest parts
of the Iliad carry us back into the neighbourhood of 1000 B. C., and in them
the epic art appears in its full perfection; it can hardly be questioned that
generations of singers had wrought in this field before Homer; and it is not
improbable that if we could trace them to their origin, we should find that
the legends in part grew up on the borders of the Mycenaean age itself.  The
culmination of epic poetry falls between the tenth century and the middle of
the eighth; after that it declined, though there are passages in the Odyssey
which were probably introduced in the seventh or even in the sixth century.

     In many countries the oldest literature that has survived is religious in
character; the Rig-Veda, for example, is a collection of hymns to the gods for
use in religious worship, the Gathas of the Avesta are the utterances of the
Iranian prophet.  The Greek epic, on the contrary, is purely secular poetry.
The gods play a large part in it, but it is not at all the part which religion
assigns them.  The epic is, moreover, aristocratic poetry, composed and sung
for the delectation of princes and nobles by the recital of the heroic deeds
and adventures of their kind in olden time, or of their own forefathers.  It
was created and transmitted by professional bards, skilled in poetry as a fine
art, with well-established, if not explicitly formulated, rules not merely of
diction and metre but of structure.  The fact that the Homeric poems were
meant for the ears of the cultivated upper classes, together with the
detachment from the soil which is to be spoken of further on, explains the
small place which ghosts and spectres, bogeys and demons, occupy in the poems,
compared with that which they had in the popular religion and superstition of
classical times.  The allusions suffice, however, to show that these uncanny
beliefs existed, though they are for the most part ignored.  It is necessary
to emphasise this point: the impression of the religion of the epic age gained
from the Homeric poems alone is in this respect as one-sided as that which is
got from the Rig-Veda if the Atharvan is left out of consideration.

     There are other things that must be kept in mind in using Homer as a
source for the religion of the times.  One of these is that the gods as well
as the human heroes of the epic are drawn from widely separated regions and
branches of the race; whatever may be true of the literary unity of the Iliad,
its material is highly composite.  The gods are not the religious pantheon of
the Greeks, but a collection of the principal Greek deities, brought together,
not by religion, but by the war against Troy, exactly like the chiefs of the
people.  The gods, too, are away from their homes and the seats of their
worship: Apollo's shrine, at which the Greeks make expiation in the first book
of the Iliad, is not a Greek but a Trojan sanctuary.  Consequently worship is
reduced to prayers and occasional sacrifices, chiefly for divination or
expiation; the ordinary cultus, with its offerings and festivals, and the
innumerable observances by which religion is inwoven with the whole life of
man, are necessarily absent; it was impossible to imagine them detached from
the localities where they belonged and the occasions in the lives of the
people - the seasons and operations of agriculture, for example - with which
they were associated.

     For the same reason, the properly religious myths of the gods come into
the poems only incidentally, and only, so to speak, the least religious of
them.  To the myths that were closely connected with places and forms of
worship there are in general only allusions; and for those which dealt with
the part of the gods in making the earth yield her increase and multiplying
the flocks, or as guardians and patrons of the occupations of peace, there is
no place at all.  The gods, in fact, are not about their proper business; they
are playing a part in an heroic action right manfully, and the story of their
doings, whatever mythical elements may be disguised in it, is mainly poetical
fiction embellishing heroic legend.  It is plain, therefore, that we may learn
a vast deal about Greek religion in the epic age from the Homeric poems, but
they do not give a picture of religion as it really was in any age or place.

     The influence of the epics on the subsequent development of Greek
religion was very great.  Originally composed as an entertainment of nobles,
they became, with the upcoming of the people, popular literature, and were
recited at festivals and holidays to assembled multitudes.  Later still they
were taught and explained to youth, and became the foundation of education.
And since the inspiration of the poets was a serious belief, what they told
about the gods possessed an authority that was not to be lightly challenged.
The epics created a universal Hellenic religion.  The Olympian gods may
originally have been deities associated in local religion with the Thessalian
Mount Olympus, but when this group, with Zeus at its head, was made the
highest circle of gods, other divinities were raised to the same rank.  Hera,
for example, whose chief seats were at Argos and Samos, as the spouse of Zeus,
follows him to Olympus - all the more easily that Olympus itself was now not
the earthly mountain but the celestial city of the gods.  In the relation of
the gods to one another - a subject about which at different centres there
were widely diverse notions, depending on their importance in local worship
and myth, or upon historical circumstances - the epics introduced a certain
tendency to uniformity, though they did not establish a standard of orthodoxy.
The provinces and functions of the gods, in like manner, were more distinctly
defined by the poets - Poseidon, the sea-king, Hermes, the messenger of the
gods, Apollo, the inspirer of prophecy and poetry, and the like.  Such
familiar characterisations of the Greek gods are in fact derived from the
poets; the gods of religion were much more complex figures.

     More than this, the epics gave to the gods a salient individuality, not
such as attaches to the powers of a primitive mythology through connection
with particular phenomena of nature, nor that of departmental and functional
deities who are defined by their specific operations, but an individuality of
character.  Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, for example, are as sharply and
consistently discriminated as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus.  They are
also distinctly imagined: we learn not only how they feel and act, but how
they look; the classical types of the gods in art were created, as the Greeks
themselves recognised, by the poets.

     The epics also enabled men to conceive how the many gods, with their
different characters and functions, their conflicting wishes and purposes,
could consist with the unity of the divine government of the world.  The
Olympian state, like the Mycenaean kingdoms which doubtless served as models
for it, is a monarchy, with a factious aristocracy who often try to circumvent
the sovereign and carry through their designs without his consent, but, when
he chooses to assert himself, are powerless to escape his knowledge or resist
his will.  The poets know the old myth of Zeus' birth, and how he supplanted
his father.  A like fate may one day overtake him; but in the age that now is,
he alone is supreme over gods and men and nature; his will is law and destiny.
Sometimes, however, there rises, behind and above Zeus, the vague and but
faintly personified power of fate or of the moral and social order, something
like the Vedic Rita and the Avestan Asha.

     The most important influence of the epics on religion was that they made
the gods completely human.  They are, indeed, superior to men in beauty and
strength, in knowledge and in magical arts; they have a different fluid in
their veins and subsist on other food, but they are, after all, beings of the
same kind and of like character.  The necessities of the epic action carry the
anthropomorphic tendency of religion to its farthest limit.  In becoming
entirely human the gods become morally responsible; if they behave altogether
like men their actions will be judged by the same standards; and as the moral
ideals of the community advance the gods will be expected to be models of
uprightness and goodness.  This consequence was only slowly realised;
doubtless the lordlings to whom the lay of Demodokos was sung laughed with as
little scruple as the gods themselves at the embarrassment of Ares and
Aphrodite entangled, flagrante delicto, in Hephaistos' net.  When it was
realised, however, it tended to purify and ennoble the conception of the gods;
while, on the other hand, the immoral and irrational myths and tales to which
a certain religious authority attached, gave ground, as will appear in the
sequel, for a trenchant attack on religion in the name of reason and virtue.

     Great as the influence of the epic was, it must not be overlooked that on
the most important side of Greek religion the poetic theology had little
effect.  In worship, the deities to whom men offered prayer and sacrifice were
those whom their forefathers had worshipped on that spot from time immemorial.
Even when one of the Olympians superseded, in name, the divinity of the place,
the old conception often remained essentially unchanged, and the ritual was
even more conservative.  What the worshippers were concerned with was not the
feats of prowess displayed by the gods on the Trojan plain, but what they did
for the community or the individual who invoked them at their altars.  The
local myths, inseparably bound to festal rites or secular expiations, had far
more significance for religion than the common poetical mythology.  Many gods
who in religion were of the first consequence, especially the whole circle of
chthonic deities - gods of the soil and of the subterranean abodes of the dead
- are hardly named in the epics.  The gods of the peasantry, rustic as their
worshippers, would be as little at home among the Olympian aristocrats as the
latter in the simple shrines of their country cousins.  In the great social
revolutions of the subsequent centuries these gods and cults came into
prominence; they give a distinctive character to the later religion of Greece.

     In a well-known passage Herodotus couples Homer and Hesiod as the authors
of Greek theology: it was they who composed the genealogies of the gods, and
gave them their standing epithets, and assigned to them their offices and
vocations, and described their appearance.  The Theogony of Hesiod is,
however, a work of wholly different character from the Homeric epics, and the
product of another age.  Hesiod is fully aware of this difference.  The Muses
who called him as he pastured his flocks at the foot of Mount Helicon and sent
him to reveal to men the truth concerning the gods say:

     "We know many a fable to tell, with semblance of true words;
     We know also the truth to relate, when that is our purpose."

The poet takes his mission seriously; he aims not to entertain but to
instruct.  He undertakes not merely to set in order the genealogies of the
gods of the present age of the world - this occupies, in fact, less than a
hundred lines toward the end of the poem, and is chiefly a catalogue of the
multitudinous consorts and progeny of Zeus.  It is rather to the history of
the gods before the dynasty of Zeus, and to the conflicts by which his empire
was established, that Hesiod devotes himself, and, farther back, to the
earliest divine generations and the origin of the gods.  The theogony here
becomes cosmogony, and presents the oldest extant Greek speculations on the
beginning of things, speculations not only closely akin to the Orphic
cosmogonies but anticipating the problems of the Ionian natural philosophy.

     First Chaos (the yawning void) came into being; next the broad-bosomed
Earth, the firm foundation of all things, and murky Tartarus (the cavernous
interior of the earth); then Love.  From Chaos sprung Erebos and Night; from
Night were born Aither (the circumambient light) and Day.  Earth produced the
starry Heaven, which covers it completely, the mountains, haunts of the
nymphs, and the barren sea.  Thus far the cosmogony.  With the marriage of
Heaven and Earth (Ouranos and Ge) the theogony begins.  From this union spring
the Titans, the youngest and greatest of whom was Kronos, father of the
Cyclopes and the hundred-armed monsters whom Ouranos imprisons in the deep
recesses of Earth to her great discomfort.  At her instance, Kronos
emasculates his father; from the blood that drips upon the earth spring later
the Erinyes and the giants, from the froth of the abscinded member cast into
the sea, the "foam-born" goddess, Aphrodite.  Then follow the offspring of the
Titans, a motley brood.  Of Kronos and Rhea are born Hestia, Demeter, Hera,
Hades, Poseidon, and, last of all, Zeus.  Fearing that his children may deal
with him as unfilially as he had dealt by his father, Kronos devours his
progeny, new born; from this fate Zeus is saved by the ruse of Rhea, who
substitutes for the infant a stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes; the young god
is brought up in concealment in Crete.  When he is grown, the struggle for the
empire of the world begins.  Zeus is aided by his brothers, whom Kronos has
been constrained to disgorge, and by the Cyclopes and the Hekatoncheires, whom
Zeus has released from their prison-house within the earth.  The Titans are
vanquished, and imprisoned in Hades under guard of the hundred-armed monsters.
Zeus is acknowledged by the gods as sovereign.

     The Hesiodic Theogony is an attempt to reduce to order a body of
traditional material of diverse origin.  Allusions in the epics show that much
of this material was in circulation long before Hesiod's time, and in other
things he seems to have followed the authority of Homer.  There are traces
also of different myths of the origin of the world of perhaps equal antiquity,
in one of which the cosmic egg figured as it does in India and in Egypt.

     Hesiod's story of the birth of Zeus is derived from Cretan myths: his
mother Rhea is the Cretan goddess; the cave where she brought into the world
her greatest son was shown on Mount Dicte, or, if you preferred, on Mount Ida;
the Kouretes, whose clanging arms drowned his cries, were Cretan sword-dancers
- in short, the infancy of Zeus belonged to Crete.

     To scholars whose notions of early Greek religion were drawn solely from
the epic, the savage features of the Cretan myths seemed singularly un-Greek,
and they easily convinced themselves that the Kronos who devoured his own
offspring was a Phoenician god and that the non-Hellenic element in Cretan
religion was of Semitic origin.  According to Philo of Byblos, the sacrifice
of children, which was so striking a characteristic of the Phoenician
religion, was inaugurated by a god whom he calls Kronos, who sacrificed his
only son.  There is, however, no real parallel between the two myths: one is a
cultus myth, giving divine precedent and authority for a peculiar type of
human sacrifice, the other is an example of a common folk-lore motive, the
putting out of the way of an infant which is destined, if it grows up, to
supplant the ruler (commonly a kinsman).  To connect these myths is a very
naive procedure even for comparative mythology.  It is unnecessary to dwell on
this, however, for in the light of our present knowledge of Cretan
civilisation the theory of the early Phoenician influence must be abandoned
altogether.

     The scene of the Titanomachy is Thessaly; the Titans descend to the
encounter from Mount Othrys, the gods from Mount Olympus.  The war between the
gods of the present order and the monstrous powers who ruled the world before
them was clearly, in its original conception, a cosmic conflict, though in the
Hesiodic version Kronos and Iapetos, the protagonists of the Titans, are
completely anthropomorphic deities.  A Babylonian poem has for its principal
subject a like conflict between Bel, as the champion of the gods, and the
dragon Tiamat with her allies, the monstrous brood of chaos. ^1 The motives of
the two myths are obviously the same, and many scholars are inclined to
assume, more or less confidently, that the Greek myth is an echo of the
Babylonian.

[Footnote 1: See above, pp. 209 ff.]

     In the Works, Hesiod paints a sombre picture of the degeneracy of his
times.  Age by age, from the beginning, the world has grown worse.  On the
golden age, with which human history began, followed one of silver, and on
that the age of bronze; the present is the iron age, and the decadence is
still in progress.  The heroic age represented in the epic stands in this
series between bronze and iron, that is, immediately preceding the author's
own day.  The present is an evil day: judges take bribes and pervert justice;
those who have the might scoff at the protests of their victims as the hawk in
the fable does at the cries of the nightingale. The shadows of the actual are
deepened by contrast with the picture of the ideal city wherein dwelleth
righteousness.

     That man has so hard a lot on earth, Hesiod ascribes to the anger of Zeus
for the theft of fire by Prometheus.  For this fault the gods contrived the
maiden Pandora, with her fatal charm and her fatal guile, and sent her to
Prometheus' slow-witted brother, Epimetheus, who took her in; whereupon, with
feminine curiosity, she lifted the lid off the jar in which all evils were
confined and let them loose beyond reclaim.