Chapter 7

The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles, again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic. It is expressed best perhaps, and that without mention of the name of a single god, in the great Funeral Speech of Pericles. It is higher than most modern patriotism because it is set upon higher ideals. It is more fervid because the men practising it lived habitually nearer to the danger-point, and, when they spoke of dying for the City, spoke of a thing they had faced last week and might face again to-morrow. It was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the world to be 'one great City of gods and men', the only Gods with which Greece could satisfactorily people that City were the idealized band of the old Olympians.

They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident--though perhaps an invariable accident--that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this, I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god;[77:1] so the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light.

FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Hdt. i. 60 ἐπεί γε ἀπεκρίθη ἐκ παλαιτέρου τοῦ βαρβάρου ἔθνεος τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν καὶ δεξιώτερον καὶ εὐηθίης ἠλιθίου ἀπηλλαγμένον μᾶλλον. As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' Εὐηθίη ἠλίθιος is almost '_Urdummheit_'.

[40:1] See in general Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i; Leaf, _Companion to Homer_, Introduction: _R. G. E._, chap. ii; Chadwick, _The Heroic Age_ (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_, chaps. viii and ix.

[40:2] Since writing the above I find in Vandal, _L'Avènement de Bonaparte_, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates . . . et ils créaient un type de haute vertu guerrière, quand ils croyaient seulement le reproduire.'

[41:1] Hdt. i. 56 f.; Th. i. 3 (Hellen son of Deucalion, in both).

[42:1] Hdt. i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed.

[42:2] The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. The word βάρβαροι is absent from both poems, an absence which must be intentional on the part of the later reciters, but may well come from the original sources. The compound βαρβαρόφωνοι occurs in B 867, but who knows the date of that particular line in that particular wording?

[42:3] Paper read to the Classical Association at Birmingham in 1908.

[43:1] For Korinna see Wilamowitz in _Berliner Klassikertexte_, V. xiv, especially p. 55. The Homeric epos drove out poetry like Corinna's. She had actually written: 'I sing the great deeds of heroes and heroines' (ἰώνει δ' εἱρώων ἀρετὰς χεὶρωιάδων ἀίδω, fr. 10, Bergk), so that presumably her style was sufficiently 'heroic' for an un-Homeric generation. For the change of dialect in elegy, &c., see Thumb, _Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_, pp. 327-30, 368 ff., and the literature there cited. Fick and Hoffmann overstated the change, but Hoffmann's new statement in _Die griechische Sprache_, 1911, sections on _Die Elegie_, seems just. The question of Tyrtaeus is complicated by other problems.

[45:1] The facts are well known: see Paus. i. 18. 7. The inference was pointed out to me by Miss Harrison.

[45:2] I do not here raise the question how far the Achaioi have special affinities with the north-west group of tribes or dialects. See Thumb, _Handbuch d. gr. Dialekte_ (1909), p. 166 f. The Achaioi must have passed through South Thessaly in any case.

[45:3] That Kronos was in possession of the Kronion and Olympia generally before Zeus came was recognized in antiquity; Paus. v. 7. 4 and 10. Also Mayer in Roscher's Lexicon, ii, p. 1508, 50 ff.; _Rise of Greek Epic_{3}, pp. 40-8; J. A. K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey (1914), chap. vii, viii; Chadwick, _Heroic Age_ (1911), pp. 282, 289.

[49:1] I do not touch here on the subject of the gradual expurgation of the Poems to suit the feelings of a more civilized audience; see _Rise of the Greek Epic_,{3} pp. 120-4. Many scholars believe that the Poems did not exist as a written book till the public copy was made by Pisistratus; see Cauer, _Grundfragen der Homerkritik_{2}, (1909), pp. 113-45; _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 304-16; Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i, p. xvi. This view is tempting, though the evidence seems to be insufficient to justify a pronouncement either way. If it is true, then various passages which show a verbal use of earlier documents (like the Bellerophon passage, _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 175 ff.) cannot have been put in before the Athenian period.

[49:2] In his _Zeus, the Indo-European Sky-God_ (1914, 1924). See _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 40 ff.

[50:1] A somewhat similar change occurred in Othin, though he always retains more of the crooked wizard.

[50:2] _Themis_, chap. i. On the Zeus of Aeschylus cf. _R. G. E._,{3} pp. 277 ff.; Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, ii. 6-8.

[50:3] Farnell, _Cults_, iv. 100-4. See, however, Gruppe, p. 107 f.

[51:1] _Hymn. Ap._ init. Cf. Wilamowitz's Oxford Lecture on 'Apollo' (Oxford, 1907).

[51:2] _Themis_, p. 439 f. Cf. ὁ Ἀγοραῖος. Other explanations of the name in Gruppe, p. 1224 f., notes.

[51:3] Hdt. i. 147; Plato, _Euthyd._ 302 c: _Socrates_. 'No Ionian recognizes a Zeus Patrôos; Apollo is our Patrôos, because he was father of Ion.'

[52:1] See Gruppe, p. 1206, on the development of his 'Philistine thunderstorm-goddess'.

[52:2] Hoffmann, _Gesch. d. griechischen Sprache_, Leipzig, 1911, p. 16. Cf. Pind. _Ol._ vii. 35; Ov. _Metam._ ix. 421; xv. 191, 700, &c.

[53:1] As to the name, Ἁθηναία is of course simply 'Athenian'; the shorter and apparently original form Ἀθάνα, Ἀθήνη is not so clear, but it seems most likely to mean 'Attic'. Cf. Meister, _Gr. Dial._ ii. 290. He classes under the head of Oertliche Bestimmungen: ἁ θεὸς ἁ Παφία (Collitz and Bechtel, _Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften_, 2, 3, 14{a}, {b}, 15, 16). 'In Paphos selbst hiess die Göttin nur ἁ θεός oder ἁ ϝάνασσα;--ἁ θιὸς ἁ Γολγία (61)--ἁ θιὸς ἁ Ἀθάνα ἁ πὲρ Ἠδάλιον (60, 27, 28), 'die Göttin, die Athenische, die über Edalion (waltet)'; 'Ἀθ-άνα ist, wie J. Baunack (_Studia Nicolaitana_, s. 27) gezeigt hat, das Adjectiv zu (*Ἀσσ-ίς 'Seeland'): Ἀττ-ίς; Ἀτθ-ίς; *Ἀθ-ίς; also Ἀθ-άνα = Ἀττ-ική, Ἀθ-ῆναι ursprünglich Ἀθ-ῆναι κῶμαι.' Other derivations in Gruppe, p. 1194. Or again αἱ Ἀθῆναι may be simply 'the place where the Athenas are', like οἱ ἰχθύες, the fish-market; 'the Athenas' would be statues, like οἱ Ἑρμαῖ--the famous 'Attic Maidens' on the Acropolis. This explanation would lead to some interesting results.

We need not here consider how, partly by identification with other Korae, like Pallas, Onka, &c., partly by a genuine spread of the cult, Athena became prominent in other cities. As to Homer, Athena is far more deeply imbedded in the _Odyssey_ than in the _Iliad_. I am inclined to agree with those who believe that our _Odyssey_ was very largely composed in Athens, so that in most of the poem Athena is original. (Cf. O. Seeck, _Die Quellen der Odyssee_ (1887), pp. 366-420; Mülder, _Die Ilias and ihre Quellen_ (1910), pp. 350-5.) In some parts of the _Iliad_ the name Athena may well have been substituted for some Northern goddess whose name is now lost.

[53:2] It is worth noting also that this Homeric triad seems also to be recognized as the chief Athenian triad. Plato, _Euthyd._ 302 c, quoted above, continues: _Socrates._ 'We have Zeus with the names Herkeios and Phratrios, but not Patrôos, and Athena Phratria.' _Dionysodorus._ 'Well that is enough. You have, apparently, Apollo and Zeus and Athena?' _Socrates._ 'Certainly.'--Apollo is put first because he has been accepted as Patrôos. But see _R. G. E._,{3} p. 49, n.

[54:1] Ridgeway, _Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse_, 1905, pp. 287-93; and _Early Age of Greece_, 1901, p. 223.

[54:2] Cf. Plut. _Q. Conv._ ix. 6; Paus. ii. 1. 6; 4. 6; 15. 5; 30. 6.

[54:3] So in the non-Homeric tradition, Eur. _Troades_ init. In the _Iliad_ he is made an enemy of Troy, like Athena, who is none the less the Guardian of the city.

[56:1] _Od._ θ 339 ff.

[56:2] See Paus. viii. 32. 4. _Themis_, pp. 295, 296.

[56:3] For the connexion of Ἥρα ἤρως Ἡρακλῆς (Ἡρύκαλος in Sophron, fr. 142 K) see especially A. B. Cook, _Class. Review_, 1906, pp. 365 and 416. The name Ἥρα seems probably to be an 'ablaut' form of ὥρα: cf. phrases like Ἥρα τελεία. Other literature in Gruppe, pp. 452, 1122.

[57:1] _Prolegomena_, p. 315, referring to H. D. Müller, _Mythologie d. gr. Stämme_, pp. 249-55. Another view is suggested by Mülder, _Die Ilias und ihre Quellen_, p. 136. The jealous Hera comes from the Heracles-saga, in which the wife hated the bastard.

[57:2] P. Gardner, in _Numismatic Chronicle_, N.S. xx, 'Ares as a Sun-God'.

[57:3] Chadwick, _Heroic Age_, especially pp. 414, 459-63.

[59:1] Chap. xviii.

[59:2] Introduction to his edition of the _Choëphoroe_, p. 9.

[61:1] The spirit appears very simply in Eur. _Iph. Taur._ 386 ff., where Iphigenia rejects the gods who demand human sacrifice:

These tales be false, false as those feastings wild Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child. This land of murderers to its gods hath given Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven.

Yet just before she has accepted the loves of Zeus and Leto without objection. 'Leto, whom Zeus loved, could never have given birth to such a monster!' Cf. Plutarch, _Vit. Pelop._ xxi, where Pelopidas, in rejecting the idea of a human sacrifice, says: 'No high and more than human beings could be pleased with so barbarous and unlawful a sacrifice. It was not the fabled Titans and Giants who ruled the world, but one who was a Father of all gods and men.' Of course, criticism and expurgation of the legends is too common to need illustration. See especially Kaibel, _Daktyloi Idaioi_, 1902, p. 512.

[62:1] Aristophanes did much to reduce this element in comedy; see _Clouds_, 537 ff.: also _Albany Review_, 1907, p. 201.

[62:2] _R. G. E._,{3} p. 139 f.

[64:1] Justin, _Cohort._ c. 15. But such pantheistic language is common in Orphic and other mystic literature. See the fragments of the Orphic Διαθῆκαι (pp. 144 ff. in Abel's _Hymni_).

[65:1] I have not attempted to consider the Cretan cults. They lie historically outside the range of these essays, and I am not competent to deal with evidence that is purely archaeological. But in general I imagine the Cretan religion to be a development from the religion described in my first essay, affected both by the change in social structure from village to sea-empire and by foreign, especially Egyptian, influences. No doubt the Achaean gods were influenced on their side by Cretan conceptions, though perhaps not so much as Ionia was. Cf. the Cretan influences in Ionian vase-painting, and e. g. A. B. Cook on 'Cretan Axe-cult outside Crete', _Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religion_, ii. 184. See also Sir A. Evans's striking address on 'The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in Hellenic Life', _J. H. S._ xxxii. 277-97.

[66:1] See _R. G. E._,{3} p. 58 f.

[68:1] 2 Sam. vi. 6. See S. Reinach, _Orpheus_, p. 5 (English Translation, p. 4).

[72:1] Cf. Sam Wide in Gercke and Norden's _Handbuch_, ii. 217-19.

[73:1] The Ξύνεσις in which the Chorus finds it hard to believe, _Hippolytus_, 1105. Cf. _Iph. Aul._ 394, 1189; _Herc._ 655; also the ideas in _Suppl._ 203, Eur. Fr. 52, 9, where Ξύνεσις is implanted in man by a special grace of God. The gods are ξυνετοί, but of course Euripides goes too far in actually praying to Ξύνεσις, Ar. _Frogs_, 893.

[77:1] Cf. the beautiful defence of idols by Maximus of Tyre, Or. viii (in Wilamowitz's _Lesebuch_, ii. 338 ff.). I quote the last paragraph:

'God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnameable 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, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature--just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved, but for remembrance' sake they will be happy in the sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pass judgement about Images? Let men know what is divine (τὸ θεῖον γένος), let them know: that is all. 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.'

III

THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, B. C.

There is a passage in Xenophon describing how, one summer night, in 405 B. C., people in Athens heard a cry of wailing, an _oimôgê_, making its way up between the long walls from the Piraeus, and coming nearer and nearer as they listened. It was the news of the final disaster of Kynoskephalai, brought at midnight to the Piraeus by the galley Paralos. 'And that night no one slept. They wept for the dead, but far more bitterly for themselves, when they reflected what things they had done to the people of Mêlos, when taken by siege, to the people of Histiaea, and Skîonê and Torônê and Aegîna, and many more of the Hellenes.'[79:1]

The echo of that lamentation seems to ring behind most of the literature of the fourth century, and not the Athenian literature alone. Defeat can on occasion leave men their self-respect or even their pride; as it did after Chaeronea in 338 and after the Chremonidean War in 262, not to speak of Thermopylae. But the defeat of 404 not only left Athens at the mercy of her enemies. It stripped her of those things of which she had been inwardly most proud; her 'wisdom', her high civilization, her leadership of all that was most Hellenic in Hellas. The 'Beloved City' of Pericles had become a tyrant, her nature poisoned by war, her government a by-word in Greece for brutality. And Greece as a whole felt the tragedy of it. It is curious how this defeat of Athens by Sparta seems to have been felt abroad as a defeat for Greece itself and for the hopes of the Greek city state. The fall of Athens mattered more than the victory of Lysander. Neither Sparta nor any other city ever attempted to take her place. And no writer after the year 400 speaks of any other city as Pericles used to speak of fifth-century Athens, not even Polybius 250 years later, when he stands amazed before the solidity and the 'fortune' of Rome.

The city state, the Polis, had concentrated upon itself almost all the loyalty and the aspirations of the Greek mind. It gave security to life. It gave meaning to religion. And in the fall of Athens it had failed. In the third century, when things begin to recover, we find on the one hand the great military monarchies of Alexander's successors, and on the other, a number of federations of tribes, which were generally strongest in the backward regions where the city state had been least developed. Τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Αἰτωλῶν or τῶν Ἀχαιῶν had become more important than Athens or Corinth, and Sparta was only strong by means of a League.[80:1] By that time the Polis was recognized as a comparatively weak social organism, capable of very high culture but not quite able, as the Covenant of the League of Nations expresses it, 'to hold its own under the strenuous conditions of modern life'. Besides, it was not now ruled by the best citizens. The best had turned away from politics.

This great discouragement did not take place at a blow. Among the practical statesmen probably most did not form any theory about the cause of the failure but went on, as practical statesmen must, doing as best they could from difficulty to difficulty. But many saw that the fatal danger to Greece was disunion, as many see it in Europe now. When Macedon proved indisputably stronger than Athens Isocrates urged Philip to accept the leadership of Greece against the barbarian and against barbarism. He might thus both unite the Greek cities and also evangelize the world. Lysias, the democratic and anti-Spartan orator, had been groping for a similar solution as early as 384 B. C., and was prepared to make an even sharper sacrifice for it. He appealed at Olympia for a crusade of all the free Greek cities against Dionysius of Syracuse, and begged Sparta herself to lead it. The Spartans are 'of right the leaders of Hellas by their natural nobleness and their skill in war. They alone live still in a city unsacked, unwalled, unconquered, uncorrupted by faction, and have followed always the same modes of life. They have been the saviours of Hellas in the past, and one may hope that their freedom will be everlasting.'[81:1] A great and generous change in one who had 'learned by suffering' in the Peloponnesian War. Others no doubt merely gave their submission to the stronger powers that were now rising. There were openings for counsellors, for mercenary soldiers, for court savants and philosophers and poets, and, of course, for agents in every free city who were prepared for one motive or another not to kick against the pricks. And there were always also those who had neither learned nor forgotten, the unrepentant idealists; too passionate or too heroic or, as some will say, too blind, to abandon their life-long devotion to 'Athens' or to 'Freedom' because the world considered such ideals out of date. They could look the ruined Athenians in the face, after the lost battle, and say with Demosthenes, ''Οὐκ ἔστιν, οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπως ἡμάρτετε. It cannot be that you did wrong, it cannot be!'[82:1]

But in practical politics the currents of thought are inevitably limited. It is in philosophy and speculation that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the time of disillusion.

Plato was disgusted with democracy and with Athens, but he retained his faith in the city, if only the city could be set on the right road. There can be little doubt that he attributes to the bad government of the Demos many evils which were really due to extraneous causes or to the mere fallibility of human nature. Still his analysis of democracy is one of the most brilliant things in the history of political theory. It is so acute, so humorous, so affectionate; and at many different ages of the world has seemed like a portrait of the actual contemporary society. Like a modern popular newspaper, Plato's democracy makes it its business to satisfy existing desires and give people a 'good time'. It does not distinguish between higher and lower. Any one man is as good as another, and so is any impulse or any idea. Consequently the commoner have the pull. Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he now sees, have been ministers to mob desires; they have 'filled the city with harbours and docks and walls and revenues and such-like trash, without Sophrosynê and righteousness'. The sage or saint has no place in practical politics. He would be like a man in a den of wild beasts. Let him and his like seek shelter as best they can, standing up behind some wall while the storm of dust and sleet rages past. The world does not want truth, which is all that he could give it. It goes by appearances and judges its great men with their clothes on and their rich relations round them. After death, the judges will judge them naked, and alone; and then we shall see![83:1]

Yet, in spite of all this, the child of the fifth century cannot keep his mind from politics. The speculations which would be scouted by the mass in the marketplace can still be discussed with intimate friends and disciples, or written in books for the wise to read. Plato's two longest works are attempts to construct an ideal society; first, what may be called a City of Righteousness, in the _Republic_; and afterwards in his old age, in the _Laws_, something more like a City of Refuge, uncontaminated by the world; a little city on a hill-top away in Crete, remote from commerce and riches and the 'bitter and corrupting sea' which carries them; a city where life shall move in music and discipline and reverence for the things that are greater than man, and the songs men sing shall be not common songs but the preambles of the city's laws, showing their purpose and their principle; where no wall will be needed to keep out the possible enemy, because the courage and temperance of the citizens will be wall enough, and if war comes the women equally with the men 'will fight for their young, as birds do'.