Part 2

Let us now consider briefly the most important Homeric gods. At the head of the divine order stands Zeus, “father of gods and of men” (πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε), “most exalted of rulers” (ὔπατε κρειόντων), “most glorious and most mighty” (κύδιστε μέγιστε), as he is called.[20] To him the elements are subject and at his nod great Olympus trembles. He is the guardian of oaths, the protector of the stranger and the suppliant. Famed for his prowess and might he never in person enters battle, but indirectly he takes a hand in the strife between the Greeks and the Trojans. Although he surpasses all in wisdom and power, at times he is outwitted by other divinities. Like a mortal chieftain he presides at council on Olympus in his great hall, whither he may on occasion summon the divinities of every class to attend a general assembly.[21] Olympus indeed is conceived as loosely organized after the fashion of an aristocratic state with Zeus as chief (βασιλεύς), the Olympians as members of the council (βουλή), and the whole body of minor divinities as making up the assembly (ἀγορή).

Hera, the queen of Olympus, is at once both sister and wife of Zeus; they are the only wedded pair on Olympus. She belongs, however, distinctly to the second class of Olympians. She takes no part in the Odyssey; and in the Iliad, although she favors the Achaeans most vehemently, she is less active than Athena. In character she is a good deal of a scold, so that Zeus fears her jealous anger.[22] He knows that she is accustomed to block his plans, although on one occasion he had punished her by stringing her up by the wrists and tying anvils to her feet! Of this he indignantly reminds her: “Dost thou not remember when I strung thee up aloft and from thy feet I hung two anvils, and round thy wrists I bound a golden bond unbreakable? And thou wast hung in the upper air and the clouds. Wroth were the gods throughout high Olympus, but still they could not approach and free thee.”[23] Again he had beaten her, and when Hephaestus tried to intervene, Zeus seized the meddler by the foot and threw him out of Olympus. Hephaestus himself recalls the experience: “All the day long I fell and at setting of the sun I dropped in Lemnos, and there was little life left in me.”[24]

Athena is above all the goddess of war, and she plays a large part in both the Iliad and Odyssey. In the latter poem she is the special guardian of Odysseus, whose ready mind wins her admiration. She is also the most skilled of all divinities, the patroness of every handicraft.[25] She is perhaps the chief divinity of Troy; on the Trojan citadel stands her temple to which the noble matrons bring a gift of a beautiful robe with the promise of generous sacrifice if the goddess will give them her protection against Diomedes.[26] She also has a home on the acropolis at Athens.[27]

Apollo, the archer god, is a patron of war and of bowmen. In the Iliad he is a violent enemy of the Achaeans and gives most effective aid to the Trojans; but in the Odyssey he plays no active part. He also inspires seers and prophets; and he is the god of the lyre and the teacher of bards. In prayers he is named with Zeus and Athena when an object is most earnestly desired.[28]

These three are the greatest of the Homeric divinities, although there is no close connection among them. Apollo’s virgin sister, Artemis, plays a part much inferior to that of her brother, but in many ways she is similar to him. Her arrows bring a quick and peaceful end to women as Apollo’s do to men. In the chase she is preëminent: she is the fair goddess of wood and mountain.

Ares and Aphrodite also belong to a lower rank. In function they are limited to an appeal to a single passion each, Ares to rage for slaughter, Aphrodite to the passion of love. They are both treated with a certain contempt and are mocked by the other gods.

Hephaestus is the god of fire, the lame craftsman of Olympus. It was he who built the homes of the gods; but his skill was especially shown in the wondrous works he wrought in gold and silver. Such were the mixing-bowl which Phaedimus, the Sidonian king, gave to Menelaus;[29] wonderful automata, twenty golden tripods, which on occasion would go of their own accord to the assemblage of the gods and then return;[30] or the gold and silver dogs which guarded the palace of Alcinous.[31] Still more marvellous were the golden maidens endowed with reason, speech, and cunning knowledge, which supported their maker as he limped from his forge to his chair;[32] and above all the splendid armor wrought for Achilles.[33]

Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, has as his special province the sea; but he appears on Olympus at the councils of the gods. In the Iliad he supports the Achaeans vigorously; no doubt from anger at the Trojans whose king Laomedon had once cheated him of the pay which was his due for building the walls of Troy;[34] in the Odyssey, angry at the blinding of his son, Polyphemus, he holds Odysseus far from Ithaca, until at last the Phaeacians bring him home. Then in wrath he turns their vessel into stone.[35]

Such in brief are the eight great gods of the Homeric poems. Of these Zeus is easily the first, but in the first rank also are Athena and Apollo; Hera and Poseidon hold a second place; and Hephaestus, Ares, and Aphrodite belong to the third class. Many other divinities there are, but all of lesser rank, like Hermes whose duties are those of a higher servant or messenger. He is sent to escort King Priam to the tent of Achilles to ransom Hector’s body,[36] and he is despatched to Calypso’s isle to bid her let Odysseus go.[37] There are some indications that he is already the patron of thieves, as he is of servants. Dionysus and Demeter, so prominent in later Greece, have not yet won a place in the Olympic circle. There is no hint in the epics of the mysteries and the orgiastic cults which were afterwards of great significance. Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, holds as his realm the dark abode of the dead, where he reigns with Persephone as queen. His murky kingdom is now represented as beneath the earth, again as far out on the bounds of Oceanus. But Hades takes no active part in either poem.

Besides these there is a host of divinities, some named but most unnamed, who cause all the phenomena of the visible world. In fact, the Homeric man could not conceive of a natural world obeying laws whose operation was fixed; on the contrary, he could only think of animated beings as the causes of all events. For him every occurrence was the manifestation of the will of some divinity; the natural and the miraculous were one.

It is evident from this hasty review of the Homeric gods that we have in the epics no complete and fully organized pantheon. Zeus is regarded as supreme but he is thwarted and outwitted by lesser members of the Olympic circle, even as they block one another. In fact Homer’s view of the gods abounds in contradictions of which however only the scholar and the critic have ever been very conscious. From our modern standpoint we notice the moral inconsistencies above all. Although Zeus is the guardian of justice, he is deceitful and treacherous if occasion arises, as when at the request of Thetis he sends a delusive dream to Agamemnon to urge him to give battle, in spite of the fact that he cannot be successful.[38] It is Zeus also who is responsible for the faithless breaking of the truce between the Achaeans and Trojans[39]; and many other instances might be cited to illustrate his utter untrustworthiness. On his lack of domestic morality I need hardly dwell.

Yet we must remind ourselves that to the Homeric Age there was little connection, if any, between morals and religion. Religion is concerned with man’s relation to the gods, morality with his relation to his fellow men. Morality is therefore developed through the social relations first of all, and only later is brought into relation to religion. In Homer the sense of social obligations is much more keenly realized than is that of religious sanctions. The cardinal virtues are bravery, wisdom, love of home and family, and regard for hospitality. In a life of action, filled with war, bravery is of prime importance; by it wealth, power, and honor are won. Proper to such a life are practical wisdom and even cunning. The highest praise is to be called “first in council and first in battle.”[40] Agamemnon is lauded by Helen as “both a good king and a mighty warrior.”[41] The standing epithets of Odysseus, “very crafty” (πολύμητις) and “the man of many devices” (πολυμήχανος), show the qualities which were deemed praiseworthy. Yet Odysseus had won this distinction by his skill in lying and deceiving—practices still deemed highly laudable in our own world if employed against a foe, or sometimes even when used as acts of caution. Yet if our modern views do not wholly coincide with the ancient on these points, we can feel only admiration for the regard for home and family, the unselfish generosity, and the universal hospitality toward strangers which the epic heroes display.

The poems also set a high value on personal honor. The outrage done Menelaus by Paris, who violated the most sacred laws of hospitality by carrying away his host’s wife, was the whole cause of the Trojan War. To avenge this outrage all the princes of the Achaeans rallied as if the wrong suffered had been their own. Agamemnon’s high-handed act in taking the captive Briseis from Achilles roused that wrath which is the first word of the Iliad. The Odyssey is the epic of a personal will which, triumphing over all disasters, finally wreaked a terrible vengeance on the insolent suitors who had wooed Odysseus’ wife, devoured his substance, plotted against his son, and at the end shamefully insulted Odysseus himself. The punishment of the suitors is the victory of justice over lawlessness, and possesses a moral significance which was not lost on antiquity.

In what I have just been saying I have already implied that man’s relation to the gods was not ethical but ritualistic. We must remember that when we speak of “sin” or a “consciousness of guilt,” we are presupposing a self-conscious and self-searching individual. This the Homeric man was not; on the contrary he was in the highest degree natural, unreflective, and unconscious of self. In fact the Homeric concept of sin touches our moral ideas at hardly more than three points. Disregard for an oath, failure to honor one’s father and mother, and disrespect for the stranger and suppliant were high offenses against heaven and brought down divine wrath on the transgressor. But in general sin is failure to recognize man’s absolute dependence on the immortals, to give them due honor, to pay them proper sacrifice, and to walk humbly on the earth. Sacrifice is tribute whereby man acquires merit with divinity; of such meritorious credit the priest Chryses reminds Apollo in his prayer at the beginning of the Iliad:[42] “Hear me, Lord of the silver bow, ... if ever I have roofed over a temple pleasing to thee, or if ever I have burnt in thy honor fat thighs of bulls or of goats, then accomplish this my prayer.” Agamemnon in the stress of battle reproaches Zeus for bringing his present disaster upon him in spite of the fact that he made sacrifice on every altar as he hurried to Ilion;[43] and many other illustrations might be cited. Failure to make due offering might bring serious disaster. Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, omitted sacrifice before leaving Egypt; so he was forced to return from the island of Pharos and repair his failure, after which he accomplished his voyage easily.[44] When Oeneus neglected Artemis, she sent the Calydonian boar to afflict his land: “Artemis of the golden throne sent a plague upon them, angry that Oeneus did not offer her the first fruits of his rich land. All the other gods had their feast of hecatombs, and only to the daughter of mighty Zeus did he fail to make offering, whether he forgot or had no thought of the matter. But he showed great folly in his soul.”[45] Again the plague sent by Apollo on the Achaean host before Troy suggests to Achilles that the god may be angered at a failure to perform some vow or to offer a hecatomb.[46] It is little wonder that the enlightened Plato felt horror and disgust at such notions as these and that he condemned this kind of worship as an “art of trafficking” (ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη).[47] Still this Homeric idea of the relations between men and gods—an idea which has not wholly disappeared from the world today—rests on the notion that gods and men belong to one common society in which the obligations are binding on both sides.

Especially to be avoided was insolent pride; man must not boast himself overmuch; there were fixed bounds set for him which he might not transgress. So Ajax met his fate because of his insolent defiance: “Even so he had escaped his doom, hateful though he was to Athena, if he had not let fall an insolent speech and committed great folly. He said that in spite of the gods he had escaped the great gulf of the sea; but Poseidon heard his loud boasting. Straightway then he took his trident in his mighty hands and struck the Gyraean rock and cleft it in twain. Part remained in its place, but a portion fell in the deep, that part on which Ajax first sat and uttered his great folly; but it now bore him down beneath the vast billowy sea.”[48] But Achilles showed the approved attitude of mind when he thus addressed the dead Hector: “Lie now dead; but my doom I will accept whenever it please Zeus and the other immortal gods to send it.”[49] This fear of punishment from heaven, of that which Aeschylus and Herodotus call “the envy of the gods,” long operated to keep in check excess of speech and added no doubt to the comfort of Greek society. Of magic whereby man can compel the gods there is nothing in Homer; the inferiority of mortals to the immortals is complete.

We may now properly consider the Homeric view of life after death. The epic psychology made no sharp distinction between the soul and the body; on the whole the body was identified with the self rather than the soul (ψυχή), which goes to the realm of Hades when the man is dead. There in the world of shadows beneath the earth or far out by the stream of Oceanus the shades, pale images of the men who were, exist; they do not live. The pathetic plaints of the shades that come up to Odysseus in the eleventh book of the Odyssey show how hopeless is their lot. Though Orion pursue the wild beasts over the cheerless plains of asphodel and Minos hold his golden staff and sit in judgment over the dead, yet all is insubstantial and far less than life. The often quoted words of Achilles’ shade sum up the whole matter: “Speak not to me of death, glorious Odysseus. For so I might be on earth, I would rather be the servant of another, of a poor man who had little substance, than to be lord over all the dead.”[50]

There is no system of future punishment or rewards, although a few individuals have won supreme suffering like Tityus, Sisyphus, and Tantalus or gained high station like Minos, the judge. Therefore beyond the grave there was for the Homeric man no hope, no satisfaction. Only here under the light of the sun and in the glory of action could the epic hero find his joy. This is, in no small measure, the cause of that pathos which strikes us occasionally in the poems. Man is spoken of as the most pitiful of creatures, the feeblest of all beings which the earth nourishes. Evil and suffering sent by the gods are his lot, unrelieved by any prospect of the future.[51]

Let us now summarize briefly the matter we have thus far been considering together. As I said at the beginning of this lecture, religion in the Homeric poems shows the influence of the conditions under which the poems were composed. Intended for Ionian princes of Asia Minor, emigrants who had lost the support which local attachment always gives, the Iliad and Odyssey present those traits of religion which were everywhere understood and which made a universal appeal. Therefore the Homeric gods have a synthetic character; they are, as has been aptly said, “composite photographs” of local Zeus’s, Apollos, Athenas, and so on. Again since the epics were intended for entertainment, the gods are represented not as remote, but human and real; they have characters and personalities which local divinities did not possess. In picturing them as more human, in rehearsing their quarrels, intrigues, passions, and even physical peculiarities, the poet not only amused his carefree audience, but brought the gods closer to men; he made them more comfortable creatures to live with, even if they were moved by whims and fancies. Their worship was sacrifice associated with the banquet which men and gods shared in common fellowship; the gods were thought to wish man’s offerings and service just as man desired communion with them. Malevolent divinities, daemons of the earth, rites of riddance by which man seeks to avert the wrath of some spiteful or angry being, all the great mass of practices unquestionably common to the folk-religion of the age, were for the most part omitted by the poet as unsuited or uninteresting to his aristocratic audience. There is almost nothing bearing on the cult of the dead save possibly in connection with the funeral of Patroclus; incantation proper is mentioned only once; and Circe’s potent herbs by which she transformed Odysseus’s companions into beasts, like Circe herself, belong to fairyland. The Homeric religion, therefore, is largely a social religion of this world, of sunlight and of action.

Yet if Homer’s gods are human, they are still impressive; they have the dignity which comes from unchanging age and superhuman power; they are conceived in the grand way. So true was this that as the Homeric poems became popular literature, studied in school and known to all men, they created a universal religion. They also influenced the types under which the Greek artists represented their great gods. Tradition says that when Phidias was asked by his associate Panaenus what type he had selected for his Zeus at Olympia, he replied with Homer’s lines: “The son of Cronos spoke and nodded under his dark brows; and the ambrosial locks of the king fell down from his immortal head, and he shook great Olympus.”[52] Such was the effect of this statue after it had stood for five centuries and a half that the orator Dio Chrysostom said of it: “Whoever among mankind is wholly weary in soul, whoever has experienced many misfortunes and sorrows in life, and may not find sweet sleep, he, methinks, if he stood before this statue, would forget all the calamities and griefs that come in the life of man.”[53]

We must, however, recognize that the spiritual contribution of the Homeric poems to later Greece was inevitably less than the artistic. No inspired bard was needed to teach the lessons of man’s inferiority to the gods and of his dependence on them, although these are constantly emphasized; yet the epics also inculcate the necessity of moderation in act and speech; and they teach that Zeus is the guardian of oaths and of hospitality. Furthermore they express the half-realized belief that Zeus is the protector of all justice; and they bring home the fact that the individual must pay for his sin, however he may have been led into it. But the greatest contribution which the poems made to later religious thought was paradoxically due to the fact that they made their gods so thoroughly human, for it inevitably followed in due season that the gods were measured by the same standards of right and wrong that were applied to men. This eventually ennobled man’s concept of divinity, so that he required of the gods a perfection to match their immortal nature.

Herodotus names Homer and Hesiod together as the great theological teachers of Greece. But when we compare the later poet with the earlier we find a marked contrast between them. Homer looks backward to an earlier day; his poems reflect the glory of that splendid age when the Achaean princes, like Agamemnon in golden Mycenae, ruled at home in power, or on the plains of Troy contended with divine and human foes. Homer is aristocratic, universal, objective, with little self-consciousness, hardly concerned with the origins of gods and men or with the possible goals toward which the world was moving. Hesiod was the son of a farmer, who according to tradition had come from Cyme in Asia Minor to Boeotian Ascra which lay on a spur of the range of Helicon near a shrine of the Muses. When Hesiod wrote, the land had felt the exhaustion of war, the coming of ruder tribes from the north and west had swamped the earlier civilization, and both noble and peasant were finding life harder. These conditions are reflected in the Hesiodic poetry: it deals with fact rather than fancy; for the splendid dramatic deeds of men and gods it substitutes homely adage, reasoned reflection, and moral tale. Hesiod is self-conscious and reflective. He uses the first person, whereas Homer never names himself. A dour son of the soil, born in gloomy days, he is the first writer of Europe to speak for the common man.

The two chief poems which bear the name of Hesiod are the Theogony and the Works and Days. The former deals with the origin of the world and the generations of the gods. It is an attempt to bring order into current myths by sifting and arranging them into a system. The material Hesiod found ready to his hand; his task was to systematize and set it forth to his audience. The Theogony is the first extant work of European literature to present the idea that dynasties of the gods have succeeded each other in time, the rule of Uranus giving way to the sway of Cronos, who in his turn was displaced by Zeus. We have seen that Homer did not concern himself about such matters as these; that only vague references to such ideas are found in the Iliad and Odyssey. Hesiod, however, represents another age and another aspect of the Greek mind, a desire to bring harmony into the varied and inconsistent tales of current mythology and thus in a way to render the gods intelligible to men.

The gods of the Theogony are hardly moral beings; on the contrary much of the theology there presented is far ruder than that of the Iliad and Odyssey. Some of the tales are on the level of primitive mythology, such as the account of the way in which earth and heaven were separated and of the manner in which the earth was fertilized; others retain more offensive elements like that of Cronos devouring his children, or of Zeus swallowing his wife Metis when she was about to give birth to Athena, for it was fated that her child should be the equal of its father in wit and cunning. In general the poet gives no sign of being conscious that this work might have moral or religious significance. The word justice (δίκη), which is so frequent in the Works and Days, occurs but twice in the Theogony. The wives of Zeus are in succession Wisdom (Μῆτις) and Right (Θέμις), but his constant attendants are Violence (Κράτος) and Force (Βίη). In neither case, however, is any moral conclusion drawn therefrom. The only beings to whom moral functions are assigned are the Fates, “Goddesses who visit transgressions of men and gods and never cease from their fearful wrath until they have inflicted dire punishment on the sinner.”[54] Save for this passage and one in which the punishment of the gods for perjury is described, the Theogony is less ethical than even the Iliad and Odyssey, for they have regard for certain social sanctions. The work is nevertheless significant and requires notice here because it bears witness to the critical mind that set the myths in order, and because it shows that the age of Hesiod was a reflective one.