CHAPTER II

GREEK AND ROMAN RELIGION

THE peoples of Christendom for a long time treated all the non-Christian religions as simply "heathen " and therefore unworthy of anything but disproof and contempt. Later, a few came to investigate with some curiosity and tolerance their queer customs and outlandish names. Only recently have they sought to look at them from the inside, to get at what they meant to those who believed and practised them, and see if there be not in them some inspiration for us too, some lesson which we can incorporate into our own faith and practice. It is in this friendlier and more sympathetic spirit that we would approach them.1

As our space is limited, we can only touch upon one or two of the many forms which religion assumed as the race became civilized; and then, in somewhat greater detail, we will recount the history of the Hebrew-Christian religion,

1 This spirit was well expressed by an old and little-known writer, Maximus of Tyre: "God himself . . . is unnamable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend his essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures .. yearning for the knowledge of Him... like earthly lovers, [who are] happy in the sight of anything that wakens the memory of the beloved. . . . If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire, I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.” (Quoted by Murray, p. 98, more fully.) To this we may add Emerson's "The religions we call false were once true. They also were affirmations of the conscience, correcting the evil customs of their times." ("Character," in Lectures and Biographies.)

Cf. also, on the study of ancient religions, American Journal of Philology, vol. 29, p. 156.

which has become, through a dramatic series of events, the dominant faith of the world. But we must not fail to speak of that beautiful Hellenic religion which, though utterly vanished from the earth in its literal acceptation, has fur nished and still furnishes such inspiration for art, for literature, and for life, that it is fitly called "the mother-tongue of the imagination.” 1

In what striking ways did religion develop in Greece?

(1) Prior to the conquest of Greece by the Aryan invaders of the second millennium B.C., there had been a civilization in some respects brilliant among the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of the peninsula; this age is now generally termed the Mycenæan or Ægean Age. Of its religion our knowledge is uncertain; but it included many elements that persisted, like the people themselves, and mingled with the religion of the conquering race. Through all the classic period we find traces of popular beliefs and rites, festivals and sacrifices, whose origin dates far back before the Hellenic (or Achæan) invasions. But it is not those survivals that most interest us, or such elements in the superimposed religion as were similar; it is rather the differentiating characteristics of the Olympian religion, those powerful gods that came down from the north with the invaders and made their home, according to common belief, upon Mount Olympus. These gods of the " buccaneer kings" of the age of the migrations the Heroic Age, as we have been accustomed to call it were themselves at that time little more than a gang of conquering chieftains," the reflection in the skies of their worshipers. But as the Achæans mingled with the indigenous peoples and became more civilized, these savage old Olympians" 2 turned gentler too; splendid, aristocratic

1 G. Santayana, Poetry and Religion, p. 56.

2 These phrases are from Murray.

66

figures as they remained, they dominated the dawning culture of Hellas, giving to it a common religion, far cleaner and more wholesome, freer from debasing superstitions, from obscene and bloody rites, than the native cults which it assimilated or superseded.

(2) The lordly Olympians were at the outset chiefly or wholly personifications of natural forces; Zeus, for example, was the same sky-god that we find in the Sanskrit Dyaus and the Roman Jove. But the popular imagination of this singularly imaginative race, and the bards in whom it abounded, delighted in weaving stories about them, refining out much of the cruelty of nature's ways that clings hard to nature-gods, until they created the glorious company of the Homeric pantheon, and, finally, the Zeus of Æschylus and Pheidias, the Hermes of Praxiteles, the Aphrodite of Melos-still, as she stands, armless and on alien soil, the highest human conception of queenly womanhood. Already, in the earliest extant literature of the Hellenes, their gods are half-detached from their natural sources and endowed with human emotions and purposes apart from those which might have been read into observed events. The needs of the people had seized upon myths once purely natural, found types of human fortunes in them, and developed in them new meanings. Poets and story-tellers, with their love of the dramatic and the picturesque, had projected their own impulses into these beings so vividly real to them, and had woven about them many adventures, plausible because human-like, but no longer a mere interpretation of phenomena. Thus, the gods, sharing human passions and sorrows, were brought nearer to men, and their enlarged powers and greater perfection became a more adequate picture of man's aspirations and ideals. And thus many of the tales of the gods, when collated and systematized in the latter days—as, notably, by Hesiod - had

little relevance left to the life of nature, the original nucleus of transparent myth having been engulfed by the new interest which had attached to them.

Mythology is the product of the poetic faculty working upon that primitive and instinctive animism or spiritism which is also, and earlier, the material for religion. The conduct-reaction upon it, together with the feelings of reverence, awe, worship, and the like, constitute religion; the playful, detached, imaginative attitude toward it produces mythology.1 In classic Greece the poetic and artistic results overshadow for us the more serious development. And it is, within limits, true that "the less seriously the gods are taken, the more luxuriantly does mythology flourish "; it was frowned upon by the pious, and must not be taken as an adequate expression of the religion that existed by its side. Yet the development and expurgation that were made, instinctively, perhaps, by the humanity and refinement of the Ionian bards, and consciously by the later philosopher-poets, influenced the religion itself profoundly, and helped to make it superior to the other religions of the ancient world in certain respects which we shall be ready, in a moment, to note.

(3) This Olympian religion, which left such a deep impress upon the literature and art of classic Greece, was never, however, the whole of Greek religion. The mysteryworship of Eleusis, and the Orphic brotherhoods, which came into prominence in the seventh century B.C., and were probably a revival or outgrowth of pre-Olympian cults, maintained a vigorous life long after the Olympians had vanished, yielding finally only to the Christian conquest, although their outward expressions — initiation ceremonies, lustrations, sacrifices, processions, pæans, and mystic

1 For the nature of mythology, see Encyclopædia Britannica, ad loc. Santayana, chap. IV.

plays - have vanished far more completely than the temples and statues and poetry of the Olympians.1 But they were never the normal and universal possession of the people. They were mystic brotherhoods, spreading by conscious propaganda, promising a deeper and more spiritual life, a penetration into the inner secrets of being, and salvation after death. They reveal to us a widespread hunger for a more personal religion, an individual communion with God, which was to receive its eventual satisfaction in Christianity. They present us with the earliest example of a religion set free from local and political limitations, and conceived, at least in germ, as a universal and voluntary brotherhood - with no dogma, indeed, but with a sense of deepened insight, a purified will, and a larger hope. These mystic brotherhoods did not antagonize the state religion, but supplemented it for the more spiritual-minded, and helped to pave the way for the Christian revolution.2

(4) Beginning about the sixth century B.C., and reaching its culmination in the fourth, a great wave of philosophic interest swept over the cultured classes of Hellas. As in the case of the earlier refining of the Olympian religion, the movement seems to have begun with the Ionians, the Greeks who had crossed the Ægean, and reached its climax in Athens. For the first time in recorded human history a truly scientific spirit arose, and men questioned every hitherto accepted belief. Xenophanes ridiculed the irrationality of the popular religious conceptions, and pointed out their immoral aspects. Other thinkers, divesting themselves of their preconceptions, began to construct original pictures of the cosmos. A general decline of naïve beliefs en1 It is true, however, that some of them survive in altered form in Christianity.

2 Encyclopædia Britannica, arts. Mystery, Orpheus, Mithras. F. Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. Harrison, chaps. IX-XII. Monist, vol. 11, p. 87.