THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT GREEK

AND LATIN TRIBES.

BY THE REV. SIR GEORGE W. Cox, BART., M.A.

I.

If we limit the term religion to the direct relations of each individual man with God the Father of all men, it follows of necessity that that religion must be something altogether distinct from mythology. But whether the religion of Greeks, two or three thousand years ago, can be sharply and definitely severed from the mythology which they have bequeathed to us, is a question which calls urgently for an answer. No doubt it is quite possible that the swineherd Eumaios in the Odyssey may have had but a very imperfect acquaintance with the mythical stories of his age, and might have passed a poor examination in the intricacies of the Olympic theogony; but would this prove anything more than the fact that he was living in a world removed far away from what we might call the religious activity of his time? When, with his mind full of the iniquities of the suitors, he tells Odysseus that there are just gods who hate cruel deeds and honour justice and righteous works, he is making use of language which is free both from myth and from metaphor. The metaphor comes in when the Hesiodic poet speaks of the all-seeing and all-knowing eye of Zeus; but it is metaphor of a sort which it is impossible for us to avoid, and against which it is therefore useless for us to fight. We might bring together many utterances of a like spirit and form; but in what sense could we say that they represented the religion of the times to which the speakers belonged? To whatever extent we might carry our selections, we should still be dealing with the thoughts or the yearnings of individual minds; but we should be as far off as we were at starting from that which was supposed to be religion in any human society of the time.

The fact is, that in one sense we may, and in another we may not, draw distinctions between the religion of a people and their mythology. It is true, from one point of view, to say that the religion of Greeks of the age of Solon, or any other, did not consist simply in the fables told of Phœbus or Dionysos, or other deities; but it is equally true to say that the fables constituted the outer framework of all the Greek theological systems. In dealing with this question, we are always in danger of proving too much. We can always select expressions of faith uncoloured by the language of mythology, and these expressions may have come from persons very slenderly acquainted with the details of myths. We may say that by

religion we mean "our trust in one all-wise, all-powerful, eternal Being, the Ruler of the world, to whom we commit all our cares, and whose presence we feel not only in the outward world, but also in the warning voice within our hearts"; and we may maintain that of this religion alone was the Greek poet thinking when he expressed his longing for that perfect purity of word and deed, the law of which can never change or fail. We may speak of this as religion "ancient, primitive, and natural "; but we can reach the same religion through the complicated forms or schemes of any theology which the world has ever known. In so speaking, the majority will, in one sense, agree with us. In another they will not; and the differences between Christian majorities and those of the old Hellenic or Egyptian worlds are not wide. To the assertion of those universal thoughts or convictions they will listen approvingly, until they see, or fancy that they see, a disposition to attack through them, and by their aid, the body of technical propositions to which also they give the name religion. If any real ground should be furnished for this suspicion, the speakers will soon be informed that their primitive and natural religion is altogether insufficient ; that religion cannot exist apart from its historical framework; that of the events with which it is bound up, some are truths as well as facts; and that the reality of this framework is vouched for by a long series of marvellous incidents recorded in, or handed down by, ancient traditions.

In truth, we are making no advance so long as we continue in this path. There is no reason to doubt that a wary and careful examination would draw, even from the most bigoted of inquisitors, confessions of a fundamental faith, as simple as that of Eumaios or Nausikaa in the Odyssey; and so, if we choose to do so, we may say that in the acknowledgment of these truths all mankind, or, at the least, all civilized men, are agreed. No doubt the same admissions would have been made by the accusers of Socrates. Of this great thinker it may be said that he was fond of using language much in harmony with that of Eumaios; but his words were not accepted by his accusers as covering the whole field of religion, or as furnishing any adequate description of the thing. He might speak of the Divine goodness as that of which mankind were designed to be partakers; but this did not save him from the charges of rejecting the gods worshipped at Athens, and of introducing and setting up in their place new deities of his own.

This state of things can be paralleled in any age; it can be paralleled with singular exactness in our own, and it is important to note how closely the comparison holds good. At Athens, in the time of Socrates, we have, on the one side, a direct and immediate trust in an all-powerful and allholy God, who is bringing about the good of all His creatures; and, on the other, a system, more or less technical or organized, which challenges acceptance on the ground of an external authority. To both of these we give, or may give, the name of religion; but the adherents of the authoritative or traditional system will assuredly withhold the name from the simpler faith, so soon as they have reason for thinking that the authority

of the traditional system is likely to be impugned. We have before us the same contrasts still. Thinkers who may be disposed to follow the example of Socrates will be apt to say that Christianity and the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount are convertible terms, and that if this be not Christianity as a whole, it is useless to search for it elsewhere. But with such a judgment as this the adherents of traditional schools will have nothing to do. The simple truths, they will say, are undoubtedly truths, and it may be well to insist on them in their proper place; but their sphere is a very narrow one, and it is the technical system which challenges our obedience at the risk of irretrievable and endless run if we question it or reject it. But, briefly, this theory expresses itself in the proposition that what are called the cardinal dogmas or truths of Christianity are also historical events, and therefore that, if any doubt or deny these events, they have no right to the title of Christians, and are in fact traitors and aposThe statement assumes the form of a dilemma. Either the events on which Christianity is said to rest took place, or Christianity itself is mere falsehood. The reply that the terms used to designate these events are words denoting spiritual and eternal truths or entities, is dismissed with the retort that such fancies are purely visionary and unpractical, and that the average of mankind are wholly incapable of rising to such intellectual heights as these. That the traditional apologists have an immense advantage in their organization, in the completeness of their system, and in their numbers, there can be no question; and the same facts confront us in the trial and condemnation of Socrates.

tates.

For practical purposes it is, therefore, useless to define religion as a confession of certain primary truths, in reference to which all mankind, or all civilized mankind, are agreed. Whatever it may be in itself, we must make the term include all the acts, observances, and ceremonies by which any body, or bodies, of men choose to approach, or think that they approach, certain unseen beings with whom they suppose themselves to have a certain relation. These usages may, or may not, imply the reality of particular incidents in the history of the past. They most assuredly will do so when the system has acquired wide acceptance and authority; but we may, perhaps, be able to go back beyond them to a time when such historical beliefs were still things of the future. We can do so to a large extent with both the Greek and the Latin tribes of the ancient world. As we approach the time of contemporary historians, we find that these tribes have reached highly complicated social conditions which it is as necessary as it is difficult for us to understand; and these conditions are essentially religious.

In the Hellenic world we find everywhere the polis, or city, as the final unit of society; but the polis is merely the result of an aggregation of tribes (phylai), and the tribes again spring simply from a union of phratriai, or clans, which, in their turn, represent gatherings of houses or families, the Greek yévos, the Latin gens. We find that all these, in

cluding the polis, are religious societies, and that the subordinate fellowships are religious with an intensity scarcely to us conceivable. Into the polis other elements have entered, counteracting some of the principles which have full play in the tribes, the clans, and therefore, of course, still more in the house or family. It is, then, on the primeval Greek house that we have to fix our attention, if we wish to trace the forms and see the full significance of the religion, or, it may be, religions, which established themselves in the Hellenic world. We must take the facts as they come before us, not venturing to reduce them to a consistency for the proof of which we may lack adequate evidence, and not forgetting that the religion of one Greek polis, or city, might differ indefinitely from the religion of any other.

We are quite safe in saying that, the further we go back, the more we see before us a picture of savage and fierce exclusiveness, and that the various stages in the development of the polis show the check and curb put on the more brutal instincts which mark the life of the primitive Greek or Latin family. The growth of the polis, therefore, means the handling of materials which yielded for the most part a stubborn resistance. In other words, the materials out of which States have been formed are not those which the State would have desired as the most suitable instruments for doing its work. Thus the house carries us back to a time when we may fairly say that the influence or existence of any religion is scarcely discernible; and we have to ask how the family life of Greeks or Latins came to assume forms which seemed to place an impassable barrier in the way of the development of the State, and also of the elaborate and complicated systems of later religions. In examining the earlier conditions of human society, historians and political economists have been apt to put effects for causes; and this is just what we do when we say that in the ancient world community of place could no more convert aliens into citizens, than it could change domestic beasts into men; that in it property was derived from political rights, and not political rights from property. But why should it be so? and how are these difficulties explained by saying that particular races worshipped particular gods, and in a particular manner, when the very point which we have to determine is why these things should be so? We are told that in the ancient society the mixture of persons of different race in the same commonwealth tended to confuse all the relations of life, and all men's notions of right and wrong. But what we wish to know, and what we must know, is how or why notions of right and wrong, liable to be so disturbed, should have come into existence. What was the reason for that prohibition of inter-marriage, which we are told was a fatal hindrance to the development of national life? Why was an Athenian citizen an alien on reaching Corinth, although he was not a foreigner? Whence came the patria potestas of the old Roman law, which was unquestionably the power of life and death, residing in the master or lord, over all the members of the family? Why should exile

have been regarded as an adequate recompense for the crimes of the worst offenders?

The explanation is, after all, a simple one. The original Hellenic or Latin house was strictly what the den is to the wild beast which dwells in it, something, namely, to which he only has a right, and which his mate and offspring share by his sufferance, but which nothing else may enter except at the risk of life. This utter isolation of the earlier home is conclusively proved by social conditions, which we find existing in historical times. It could not have acquired its inviolable religious character had it not been held as a stronghold of the family long before the religious sanction came to be recognised and enforced. Among the Greek, as among the Latin tribes, every house was a fortress, carefully cut off by its precinct from every other. No party walls might join together the possessions of different families; no plough might break the neutral ground which left each abode in impenetrable seclusion. The curse attached to the removal of a neighbour's landmark was itself the growth of a later age which had begun to invest with the sanction of law the savage instinct which in earlier times had trusted to mere brute force; and in its turn the special boundary-god of each household gave place to a common deity which guarded the boundaries of the whole community. But the Latin myth is careful to tell us that the Roman Terminus was a power too mighty to be assailed even by the Capitoline Jupiter; and in this tale we have the evidence that the notion, of which Terminus was the embodiment, was far older than the religion of which Jupiter, Zeus-Pater, the All-father, was the necessary expression. The conception of Zeus Herkeios and Zeus Ephestios, who guard the fences and the hearth of a house, is, therefore, also older than that of Zeus the Father; and these two deities are, in fact, generalizations for a multitude of deities who presided each over his own scanty domain, the representatives of the isolated being who had once guarded his den against all invaders. From this condition of life there would have been no emerging had the impulse not been given by what we must call the growth of religion. The impulse came from the belief in the continuity of human life. It is useless to ask if this belief existed from the first. Of actual origins, it must be freely confessed that we know nothing. All that we can say is, that when we look on the pictures of ancient life, so far as we can trace them, the belief is there; and according to this belief the owner of the den had not ceased to live because he was dead. He felt the wants, the pleasures, and the pains of his former life. His rights of property were in no way changed, while his power to do harm (if he chose to do harm) was greater than it had been. He was not less the lord of his house, and he had the further title to reverence that he was now the object of its worship, its god. The result would be a development of the horrid rites which accompanied what we term Chthonian worship. As he would still need to hunt, to eat, and to sleep, his horse, his cook, and his wife must be despatched to bear him company in the