In the first place why are they called "Olympian"? Are they the G.o.ds of Mount Olympus, the old sacred mountain of Homer"s Achaioi, or do they belong to the great sanctuary of Olympia in which Zeus, the lord of the Olympians, had his greatest festival? The two are at opposite ends of Greece, Olympus in North Thessaly in the north-east, Olympia in Elis in the south-west. From which do the Olympians come? On the one hand it is clear in Homer that they dwell on Mount Olympus; they have "Olympian houses" beyond human sight, on the top of the sacred mountain, which in the _Odyssey_ is identified with heaven. On the other hand, when Pisistratus introduced the worship of Olympian Zeus on a great scale into Athens and built the Olympieum, he seems to have brought him straight from Olympia in Elis. For he introduced the special Elean complex of G.o.ds, Zeus, Rhea, Kronos, and Ge Olympia.[45:1]
Fortunately this puzzle can be solved. The Olympians belong to both places. It is merely a case of tribal migration. History, confirmed by the study of the Greek dialects, seems to show that these northern Achaioi came down across central Greece and the Gulf of Corinth and settled in Elis.[45:2] They brought with them their Zeus, who was already called "Olympian", and established him as superior to the existing G.o.d, Kronos. The Games became Olympian and the sanctuary by which they were performed "Olympia".[45:3]
As soon as this point is clear, we understand also why there is more than one Mount Olympus. We can all think of two, one in Thessaly and one across the Aegean in Mysia. But there are many more; some twenty-odd, if I mistake not, in the whole Greek region. It is a pre-Greek word applied to mountains; and it seems clear that the "Olympian" G.o.ds, wherever their worshippers moved, tended to dwell in the highest mountain in the neighbourhood, and the mountain thereby became Olympus.
The name, then, explains itself. The Olympians are the mountain G.o.ds of the old invading Northmen, the chieftains and princes, each with his _comitatus_ or loose following of retainers and minor chieftains, who broke in upon the ordered splendours of the Aegean palaces and, still more important, on the ordered simplicity of tribal life in the pre-h.e.l.lenic villages of the mainland. Now, it is a canon of religious study that all G.o.ds reflect the social state, past or present, of their worshippers. From this point of view what appearance do the Olympians of Homer make? What are they there for? What do they do, and what are their relations one to another?
The G.o.ds of most nations claim to have created the world. The Olympians make no such claim. The most they ever did was to conquer it. Zeus and his _comitatus_ conquered Cronos and his; conquered and expelled them--sent them migrating beyond the horizon, Heaven knows where. Zeus took the chief dominion and remained a permanent overlord, but he apportioned large kingdoms to his brothers Hades and Poseidon, and confirmed various of his children and followers in lesser fiefs. Apollo went off on his own adventure and conquered Delphi. Athena conquered the Giants. She gained Athens by a conquest over Poseidon, a point of which we will speak later.
And when they have conquered their kingdoms, what do they do? Do they attend to the government? Do they promote agriculture? Do they practise trades and industries? Not a bit of it. Why should they do any honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them.
They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war.
A few deductions may be from this statement, but they do not affect its main significance. One G.o.d, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. Yes: a smith, a maker of weapons. The one craftsman that a gang of warriors needed to have by them; and they preferred him lame, so that he should not run away. Again, Apollo herded for hire the cattle of Admetus; Apollo and Poseidon built the walls of Troy for Laomedon.
Certainly in such stories we have an intrusion of other elements; but in any case the work done is not habitual work, it is a special punishment.
Again, it is not denied that the Olympians have some effect on agriculture and on justice: they destroy the harvests of those who offend them, they punish oath-breakers and the like. Even in the Heroic Age itself--if we may adopt Mr. Chadwick"s convenient t.i.tle for the Age of the Migrations--chieftains and G.o.ds probably retained some vestiges of the functions they had exercised in more normal and settled times; and besides we must always realize that, in these inquiries, we never meet a simple and uniform figure. We must further remember that these G.o.ds are not real people with a real character. They never existed. They are only concepts, exceedingly confused cloudy and changing concepts, in the minds of thousands of diverse worshippers and non-worshippers. They change every time they are thought of, as a word changes every time it is p.r.o.nounced. Even in the height of the Achaean wars the concept of any one G.o.d would be mixed up with traditions and a.s.sociations drawn from the surrounding populations and their G.o.ds; and by the time they come down to us in Homer and our other early literature, they have pa.s.sed through the minds of many different ages and places, especially Ionia and Athens.
The Olympians as described in our text of Homer, or as described in the Athenian recitations of the sixth century, are _mutatis mutandis_ related to the Olympians of the Heroic Age much as the h.e.l.lenes of the sixth century are to the h.e.l.lenes of the Heroic Age. I say "_mutatis mutandis_", because the historical development of a group of imaginary concepts shrined in tradition and romance can never be quite the same as that of the people who conceive them. The realm of fiction is apt both to leap in front and to lag in the rear of the march of real life.
Romance will hug picturesque darknesses as well as invent perfections.
But the G.o.ds of Homer, as we have them, certainly seem to show traces of the process through which they have pa.s.sed: of an origin among the old conquering Achaioi, a development in the Ionian epic schools, and a final home in Athens.[49:1]
For example, what G.o.ds are chiefly prominent in Homer? In the _Iliad_ certainly three, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, and much the same would hold for the _Odyssey_. Next to them in importance will be Poseidon, Hera, and Hermes.
Zeus stands somewhat apart. He is one of the very few G.o.ds with recognizable and undoubted Indo-germanic names, Djeus, the well-attested sky- and rain-G.o.d of the Aryan race. He is Achaian; he is "h.e.l.lanios", the G.o.d worshipped by all h.e.l.lenes. He is also, curiously enough, Pelasgian, and Mr. A. B. Cook[49:2] can explain to us the seeming contradiction. But the Northern elements in the conception of Zeus have on the whole triumphed over any Pelasgian or Aegean sky-G.o.d with which they may have mingled, and Zeus, in spite of his dark hair, may be mainly treated as the patriarchal G.o.d of the invading Northmen, pa.s.sing from the Upper Danube down by his three great sanctuaries, Dodona, Olympus, and Olympia. He had an extraordinary power of ousting or absorbing the various objects of aboriginal worship which he found in his path. The story of Meilichios above (p. 14) is a common one. Of course, we must not suppose that the Zeus of the actual Achaioi was a figure quite like the Zeus of Pheidias or of Homer. There has been a good deal of expurgation in the Homeric Zeus,[50:1] as Mr. Cook clearly shows. The Counsellor and Cloud-compeller of cla.s.sical Athens was the wizard and rainmaker of earlier times; and the All-Father surprises us in Thera and Crete by appearing both as a babe and as a Kouros in spring dances and initiation rituals.[50:2] It is a long way from these conceptions to the Zeus of Aeschylus, a figure as sublime as the Jehovah of Job; but the lineage seems clear.
Zeus is the Achaean Sky-G.o.d. His son Phoebus Apollo is of more complex make. On one side he is clearly a Northman. He has connexions with the Hyperboreans.[50:3] He has a "sacred road" leading far into the North, along which offerings are sent back from shrine to shrine beyond the bounds of Greek knowledge. Such "sacred roads" are normally the roads by which the G.o.d himself has travelled; the offerings are sent back from the new sanctuary to the old. On the other side Apollo reaches back to an Aegean matriarchal Kouros. His home is Delos, where he has a mother, Leto, but no very visible father. He leads the ships of his islanders, sometimes in the form of a dolphin. He is no "h.e.l.lene". In the fighting at Troy he is against the Achaioi: he destroys the Greek host, he champions Hector, he even slays Achilles. In the Homeric hymn to Apollo we read that when the great archer draws near to Olympus all the G.o.ds tremble and start from their seats; Leto alone, and of course Zeus, hold their ground.[51:1] What this G.o.d"s original name was at Delos we cannot be sure: he has very many names and "epithets". But he early became identified with a similar G.o.d at Delphi and adopted his name, "Apollon", or, in the Delphic and Dorian form, "Apellon"--presumably the Kouros projected from the Dorian gatherings called "_apellae_".[51:2] As Phoibos he is a sun-G.o.d, and from cla.s.sical times onward we often find him definitely identified with the Sun, a distinction which came easily to a Kouros.
In any case, and this is the important point, he is at Delos the chief G.o.d of the Ionians. The Ionians are defined by Herodotus as those tribes and cities who were sprung from Athens and kept the Apaturia. They recognized Delos as their holy place and worshipped Apollo Patroos as their ancestor.[51:3] The Ionian Homer has naturally brought us the Ionian G.o.d; and, significantly enough, though the tradition makes him an enemy of the Greeks, and the poets have to accept the tradition, there is no tendency to crab or belittle him. He is the most splendid and awful of Homer"s Olympians.
The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it leads to a somewhat surprising result. What Apollo is to Ionia that, and more, Athena is to Athens. There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan and Ionian, some Northern.[52:1] But her whole appearance in history and literature tells the same story as her name. Athens is her city and she is the G.o.ddess of Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Kore. In Athens she can be simply "Parthenos", the Maiden; elsewhere she is the "Attic" or "Athenian Maiden". As Glaucopis she is identified or a.s.sociated with the Owl that was the sacred bird of Athens. As Pallas she seems to be a Thunder-maiden, a sort of Keraunia or bride of Keraunos. A Palladion consists of two thunder-shields, set one above the other like a figure 8, and we can trace in art-types the development of this 8 into a human figure. It seems clear that the old Achaioi cannot have called their warrior-maiden, daughter of Zeus, by the name Athena or Athenaia. The Athenian G.o.ddess must have come in from Athenian influence, and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the poems that influence must have reached. If we try to conjecture whose place it is that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her regular epithet, "daughter of Zeus", belongs in Sanskrit to the Dawn-G.o.ddess, Eos.[52:2] The transition might be helped by some touches of the Dawn-G.o.ddess that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The rising Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from the head of Zeus. Also she was born amid a snowstorm of gold. And Eos, on the other hand, is, like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant Pallas.[53:1]
Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves very easily. A body of poetry and tradition, in its origin dating from the Achaioi of the Migrations, growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, and reaching its culminating form at Athens, has prominent in it the Achaian Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, the Athenian Kore--the same Kore who descended in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his throne.[53:2]
We need only throw a glance in pa.s.sing at a few of the other Olympians.
Why, for instance, should Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a puzzling figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother of Zeus in Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian or Aegean G.o.d present in him.
He is closely connected with Libya; he brings the horse from there.[54:1] At times he exists in order to be defeated; defeated in Athens by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, in Argos by Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though he continues to hold the Isthmus.
In Trozen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with Athena.[54:2] Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls his own hands had built.[54:3] These problems we need not for the present face. By the time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a sea-G.o.d, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens and Ionia. He is the father of Neleus, the ancestor of the Ionian kings. His temple at Cape Mykale is the scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as a religious centre of the Ionian tribes. He has intimate relations with Attica too. Besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession of the land, he appears as the father of Theseus, the chief Athenian hero. He is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erechtheus. He is the special patron of the Athenian knights. Thus his prominence in Homer is very natural.
What of Hermes? His history deserves a long monograph to itself; it is so exceptionally instructive. Originally, outside Homer, Hermes was simply an old upright stone, a pillar furnished with the regular Pelasgian s.e.x-symbol of procreation. Set up over a tomb he is the power that generates new lives, or, in the ancient conception, brings the souls back to be born again. He is the Guide of the Dead, the Psychopompos, the divine Herald between the two worlds. If you have a message for the dead, you speak it to the Herm at the grave. This notion of Hermes as herald may have been helped by his use as a boundary-stone--the Latin _Terminus_. Your boundary-stone is your representative, the deliverer of your message, to the hostile neighbour or alien. If you wish to parley with him, you advance up to your boundary-stone. If you go, as a Herald, peacefully, into his territory, you place yourself under the protection of the same sacred stone, the last sign that remains of your own safe country. If you are killed or wronged, it is he, the immovable Watcher, who will avenge you.
Now this phallic stone post was quite unsuitable to Homer. It was not decent; it was not quite human; and every personage in Homer has to be both. In the _Iliad_ Hermes is simply removed, and a beautiful creation or tradition, Iris, the rainbow-G.o.ddess, takes his place as the messenger from heaven to earth. In the _Odyssey_ he is admitted, but so changed and castigated that no one would recognize the old Herm in the beautiful and gracious youth who performs the G.o.ds" messages. I can only detect in his language one possible trace of his old Pelasgian character.[56:1]
Pausanias knew who worked the transformation. In speaking of Hermes among the other "Workers", who were "pillars in square form", he says, "As to Hermes, the poems of Homer have given currency to the report that he is a servant of Zeus and leads down the spirits of the departed to Hades".[56:2] In the magic papyri Hermes returns to something of his old functions; he is scarcely to be distinguished from the Agathos Daimon.
But thanks to Homer he is purified of his old phallicism.
Hera, too, the wife of Zeus, seems to have a curious past behind her.
She has certainly ousted the original wife, Dione, whose worship continued unchallenged in far Dodona, from times before Zeus descended upon Greek lands. When he invaded Thessaly he seems to have left Dione behind and wedded the Queen of the conquered territory. Hera"s permanent epithet is "Argeia", "Argive". She is the Argive Kore or Year-Maiden, as Athena is the Attic, Cypris the Cyprian. But Argos in Homer denotes two different places, a watered plain in the Peloponnese and a watered plain in Thessaly. Hera was certainly the chief G.o.ddess of Peloponnesian Argos in historic times, and had brought her consort Herakles[56:3] along with her, but at one time she seems to have belonged to the Thessalian Argos.
She helped Thessalian Jason to launch the ship _Argo_, and they launched it from Thessalian Pagasae. In the Argonautica she is a beautiful figure, gracious and strong, the lovely patroness of the young hero. No element of strife is haunting her. But in the _Iliad_ for some reason she is unpopular. She is a shrew, a scold, and a jealous wife.
Why? Miss Harrison suggests that the quarrel with Zeus dates from the time of the invasion, when he was the conquering alien and she the native queen of the land.[57:1] It may be, too, that the Ionian poets who respected their own Apollo and Athena and Poseidon, regarded Hera as representing some race or tribe that they disliked. A G.o.ddess of Dorian Argos might be as disagreeable as a Dorian. It seems to be for some reason like this that Aphrodite, identified with Cyprus or some centre among Oriental barbarians, is handled with so much disrespect; that Ares, the Thracian Kouros, a Sun-G.o.d and War-G.o.d, is treated as a mere bully and coward and general pest.[57:2]
There is not much faith in these G.o.ds, as they appear to us in the Homeric Poems, and not much respect, except perhaps for Apollo and Athena and Poseidon. The buccaneer kings of the Heroic Age, cut loose from all local and tribal pieties, intent only on personal gain and glory, were not the people to build up a powerful religious faith. They left that, as they left agriculture and handiwork, to the nameless common folk.[57:3] And it was not likely that the bards of cultivated and scientific Ionia should waste much religious emotion on a system which was clearly meant more for romance than for the guiding of life.
Yet the power of romance is great. In the memory of Greece the kings and G.o.ds of the Heroic Age were transfigured. What had been really an age of buccaneering violence became in memory an age of chivalry and splendid adventure. The traits that were at all tolerable were idealized; those that were intolerable were either expurgated, or, if that was impossible, were mysticized and explained away. And the savage old Olympians became to Athens and the mainland of Greece from the sixth century onward emblems of high humanity and religious reform.
II. _The Religious Value of the Olympians_
Now to some people this statement may seem a wilful paradox, yet I believe it to be true. The Olympian religion, radiating from Homer at the Panathenaea, produced what I will venture to call exactly a religious reformation. Let us consider how, with all its flaws and falsehoods, it was fitted to attempt such a work.
In the first place the Poems represent an Achaian tradition, the tradition of a Northern conquering race, organized on a patriarchal monogamous system vehemently distinct from the matrilinear customs of the Aegean or Hitt.i.te races, with their polygamy and polyandry, their agricultural rites, their s.e.x-emblems and fertility G.o.ddesses. Contrast for a moment the sort of s.e.xless Valkyrie who appears in the _Iliad_ under the name of Athena with the Kore of Ephesus, strangely called Artemis, a shapeless fertility figure, covered with innumerable b.r.e.a.s.t.s. That suggests the contrast that I mean.
Secondly, the poems are by tradition aristocratic; they are the literature of chieftains, alien to low popular superst.i.tion. True, the poems as we have them are not Court poems. That error ought not to be so often repeated. As we have them they are poems recited at a Panegyris, or public festival. But they go back in ultimate origin to something like lays sung in a royal hall. And the contrast between the Homeric G.o.ds and the G.o.ds found outside Homer is well compared by Mr.
Chadwick[59:1] to the difference between the G.o.ds of the Edda and the historical traces of religion outside the Edda. The G.o.ds who feast with Odin in Asgard, forming an organized community or _comitatus_, seem to be the G.o.ds of the kings, distinct from the G.o.ds of the peasants, cleaner and more warlike and lordlier, though in actual religious quality much less vital.
Thirdly, the poems in their main stages are Ionian, and Ionia was for many reasons calculated to lead the forward movement against the "Urdummheit". For one thing, Ionia reinforced the old Heroic tradition, in having much the same inward freedom. The Ionians are the descendants of those who fled from the invaders across the sea, leaving their homes, tribes, and tribal traditions. Wilamowitz has well remarked how the imagination of the Greek mainland is dominated by the gigantic sepulchres of unknown kings, which the fugitives to Asia had left behind them and half forgotten.[59:2]
Again, when the Ionians settled on the Asiatic coasts they were no doubt to some extent influenced, but they were far more repelled by the barbaric tribes of the interior. They became conscious, as we have said, of something that was h.e.l.lenic, as distinct from something else that was barbaric, and the h.e.l.lenic part of them vehemently rejected what struck them as superst.i.tious, cruel, or unclean. And lastly, we must remember that Ionia was, before the rise of Athens, not only the most imaginative and intellectual part of Greece, but by far the most advanced in knowledge and culture. The Homeric religion is a step in the self-realization of Greece, and such self-realization naturally took its rise in Ionia.
Granted, then, that Homer was calculated to produce a kind of religious reformation in Greece, what kind of reformation was it? We are again reminded of St. Paul. It was a move away from the "beggarly elements"
towards some imagined person behind them. The world was conceived as neither quite without external governance, nor as merely subject to the incursions of _mana_ snakes and bulls and thunder-stones and monsters, but as governed by an organized body of personal and reasoning rulers, wise and bountiful fathers, like man in mind and shape, only unspeakably higher.
For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of G.o.ds against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first the overwhelming power of pa.s.sion and unguided strength. It is h.e.l.las against the brute world.[61:1]
The victory of h.e.l.lenism over barbarism, of man over beast: that was the aim, but was it ever accomplished? The Olympian G.o.ds as we see them in art appear so calm, so perfect, so far removed from the atmosphere of acknowledged imperfection and spiritual striving, that what I am now about to say may again seem a deliberate paradox. It is nevertheless true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a _telos_ or completion but a movement and effort of life.
We may a.n.a.lyse the movement into three main elements: a moral expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs. We will take the three in order.
In the first place, it gradually swept out of religion, or at least covered with a decent veil, that great ma.s.s of rites which was concerned with the Food-supply and the Tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation of generative processes.[62:1] It left only a few reverent and mystic rituals, a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy and the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superst.i.tion. To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often b.l.o.o.d.y. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta.
The Olympian movement swept away also, at least for two splendid centuries, the worship of the man-G.o.d, with its diseased atmosphere of megalomania and blood-l.u.s.t.[62:2] These things return with the fall of h.e.l.lenism; but the great period, as it urges man to use all his powers of thought, of daring and endurance, of social organization, so it bids him remember that he is a man like other men, subject to the same laws and bound to reckon with the same death.
So much for the moral expurgation: next for the bringing of intellectual order. To parody the words of Anaxagoras, "In the early religion all things were together, till the Homeric system came and arranged them".
We constantly find in the Greek pantheon beings who can be described as p????? ????t?? ??f? ?a, "one form of many names". Each tribe, each little community, sometimes one may almost say each caste--the Children of the Bards, the Children of the Potters--had its own special G.o.ds. Now as soon as there was any general "Sunoikismos" or "Settling-together", any effective surmounting of the narrowest local barriers, these innumerable G.o.ds tended to melt into one another. Under different historical circ.u.mstances this process might have been carried resolutely through and produced an intelligible pantheon in which each G.o.d had his proper function and there was no overlapping--one Kore, one Kouros, one Sun-G.o.d, and so on. But in Greece that was impossible. Imaginations had been too vivid, and local types had too often become clearly personified and differentiated. The Maiden of Athens, Athena, did no doubt absorb some other Korai, but she could not possibly combine with her of Cythera or Cyprus, or Ephesus, nor with the Argive Kore or the Delian or the Brauronian. What happened was that the infinite cloud of Maidens was greatly reduced and fell into four or five main types. The Korai of Cyprus, Cythera, Corinth, Eryx, and some other places were felt to be one, and became absorbed in the great figure of Aphrodite. Artemis absorbed a quant.i.ty more, including those of Delos and Brauron, of various parts of Arcadia and Sparta, and even, as we saw, the fertility Kore of Ephesus. Doubtless she and the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, Hermes, Dionysus, and the like.
As so often in Greek development, we are brought up against the immense formative power of fiction or romance. The simple Kore or Kouros was a figure of indistinct outline with no history or personality. Like the Roman functional G.o.ds, such beings were hardly persons; they melted easily one into another. But when the Greek imagination had once done its work upon them, a figure like Athena or Aphrodite had become, for all practical purposes, a definite person, almost as definite as Achilles or Odysseus, as Macbeth or Falstaff. They crystallize hard.
They will no longer melt or blend, at least not at an ordinary temperature. In the fourth and third centuries we hear a great deal about the G.o.ds all being one, "Zeus the same as Hades, Hades as Helios, Helios the same as Dionysus",[64:1] but the amalgamation only takes place in the white heat of ecstatic philosophy or the rites of religious mysticism.
The best doc.u.ment preserved to us of this attempt to bring order into Chaos is the poetry of Hesiod. There are three poems, all devoted to this object, composed perhaps under the influence of Delphi and certainly under that of Homer, and trying in a quasi-Homeric dialect and under a quasi-Olympian system to bring together vast ma.s.ses of ancient theology and folk-lore and scattered tradition. The _Theogony_ attempts to make a pedigree and hierarchy of the G.o.ds; _The Catalogue of Women_ and the _Eoiai_, preserved only in scanty fragments, attempt to fix in canonical form the cloudy mixture of dreams and boasts and legends and hypotheses by which most royal families in central Greece recorded their descent from a traditional ancestress and a conjectural G.o.d. The _Works and Days_ form an attempt to collect and arrange the rules and tabus relating to agriculture. The work of Hesiod as a whole is one of the most valiant failures in literature. The confusion and absurdity of it are only equalled by its strange helpless beauty and its extraordinary historical interest. The Hesiodic system when compared with that of Homer is much more explicit, much less expurgated, infinitely less accomplished and tactful. At the back of Homer lay the lordly warrior-G.o.ds of the Heroic Age, at the back of Hesiod the crude and tangled superst.i.tions of the peasantry of the mainland. Also the Hesiodic poets worked in a comparatively backward and unenlightened atmosphere, the Homeric were exposed to the full light of Athens.
The third element in this Homeric reformation is an attempt to make religion satisfy the needs of a new social order. The earliest Greek religion was clearly based on the tribe, a band of people, all in some sense kindred and normally living together, people with the same customs, ancestors, initiations, flocks and herds and fields. This tribal and agricultural religion can hardly have maintained itself unchanged at the great Aegean centres, like Cnossus and Mycenae.[65:1]
It certainly did not maintain itself among the marauding chiefs of the heroic age. It bowed its head beneath the sceptre of its own divine kings and the armed heel of its northern invaders, only to appear again almost undamaged and unimproved when the kings were fallen and the invaders sunk into the soil like storms of destructive rain.
But it no longer suited its environment. In the age of the migrations the tribes had been broken, scattered, re-mixed. They had almost ceased to exist as important social ent.i.ties. The social unit which had taken their place was the political community of men, of whatever tribe or tribes, who were held together in times of danger and constant war by means of a common circuit-wall, a Polis.[66:1] The idea of the tribe remained. In the earliest cla.s.sical period we find every Greek city still nominally composed of tribes, but the tribes are fict.i.tious. The early city-makers could still only conceive of society on a tribal basis. Every local or accidental congregation of people who wish to act together have to invent an imaginary common ancestor. The clash between the old tribal traditions that have lost their meaning, though not their sanct.i.ty, and the new duties imposed by the actual needs of the Polis, leads to many strange and interesting compromises. The famous const.i.tution of Cleisthenes shows several. An old proverb expresses well the ordinary feeling on the subject:
?? ?e p???? ???e?e, ???? d" ???a??? ???st??.
"Whatever the City may do; but the old custom is the best."
Now in the contest between city and tribe, the Olympian G.o.ds had one great negative advantage. They were not tribal or local, and all other G.o.ds were. They were by this time international, with no strong roots anywhere except where one of them could be identified with some native G.o.d; they were full of fame and beauty and prestige. They were ready to be made "Poliouchoi", "City-holders", of any particular city, still more ready to be "h.e.l.lanioi", patrons of all h.e.l.las.