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Greek Religious Thought from Homer to the Age of Alexander

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Greek Religious Thought from Homer to the Age of Alexander 'The Library of Greek Thought GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT FROM HOMER TO THE AGE OF ALEXANDER Edited by ERNEST BARKER, M.A., D.Litt., LL.D. Principal of King's College, University of London tl<s } prop Lt=. GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT FROM HOMER TO THE AGE OF ALEXANDER BY F. M. CORNFORD, M.A. Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge MCMXXIII LONDON AND TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON tf CO. HOTTO (E f- k> ) loUr\ P. DOTTO/U TALKS ) f^op Lt=. 7 yt All rights reserved f PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN TO WALTER DE LA MARE INTRODUCTION The purpose of this book is to let the English reader see for himself what the Greeks, from Homer to Aristotle, thought about the world, the gods and their relations to man, the nature and destiny of the soul, and the significance of human life. The form of presentation is prescribed by the plan of the series. The book is to be a compilation of extracts from the Greek authors, selected, so far as possible, without prejudice and translated with such honesty as a translation may have. This plan has the merit of isolating the actual thought of the Greeks in this period from all the constructions put upon it by later ages, except in so far as the choice of extracts must be governed by some scheme in the compiler's mind, which is itself determined by the limits of his knowledge and by other personal factors. In the book itself it is clearly his business to reduce the influence of these factors to the lowest point; but in the introduction it is no less his business to forewarn the reader against some of the consequences. In the first place, it is probable that the development of in better understood Greek religion is, some ways, by us than by the Greeks themselves. It is true that much of the labour of modern scholarship is spent in divining by painful inference truths that do not happen to stand in the literary or monumental record, either because so in much has been lost, or because the truths question were only dimly apprehended, or again because they vii viii GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT were so familiar that there was no occasion to mention them. On the other hand, it is also certain that our immensely wider knowledge of other societies, civilised or barbarous, gives us an advantage over the most learned of men antiquity. Within living memory the work of Robertson Smith, Tylor, Lang, Sir James Frazer, and many others has permanently shifted the perspective. The discovery by Sir Arthur Evans of a civilisation in Crete stretching back thousands of years before Homer has finally destroyed the illusion that Homer's world is primitive, and has laid down at least a framework of historical fact in times from which little more than the rumour of a Minoan thalassocracy had reached Thucy- dides. In so far as this new knowledge goes beyond any- thing known to the Greeks, it has no place in this volume. In so far as it reveals what the Greeks knew, but do not happen to have mentioned in the surviving literature, the picture here presented is incomplete. Further, man's attitude towards the divine is most directly expressed in liturgy, in ritual observance, in prayers and hymns of the temple service. If our aim were to understand the religious thought of England in the sixteenth century, we should turn to the Book of Common Prayer before consulting what is commonly called the literature of the time. About the corresponding side of Greek religion we possess a considerable mass of evidence, but it cannot be represented by extracts from contemporary writers. Even if room were found for descriptions of ritual, there would remain the very delicate question how far the liturgy in use at any moment reflected the real beliefs of any part of the population. r e know from late sources that, at an ancient festival l11 Souls calledfhe Anthesteria, the Athenian house- INTRODUCTION ix " holder entertained the ghosts of the dead, who went " that till dismissed about the city at season, they were with the words: "Out of the doors, ghosts! The Anthesteria is over." When the details of the ritual have been pieced together from indirect allusions and from scraps of lost antiquarian works preserved by late annotators of Greek texts, we seem to make out that the Anthesteria belonged to an order of primitive festivals embodying beliefs about the dead and the gods of the lower world such as scarcely find utterance in the extant literature. They had been overlaid by the Olympian religion of Homer, from which the cult of the dead had almost entirely disappeared. What are we to infer from the perpetuation of the festival custom ? What was in the mind of the Athenian who feasted his ghosts and then sped their departure with the curt formula which became " a proverb addressed (we are told) to those who are always demanding a repetition of favours received"? Evidently, there is no simple answer to this question. The belief originally implied in a ceremonial custom may fade in extreme an as time goes on, till, cases, no one but antiquary knows what the custom means. And besides the effects of time, we have to remember that a civilised is stratified in the fifth society many layers. In century there may have been some Athenians who still believed that the ghosts went about the city at the Anthesteria; some who thought that the dead were at a safe distance underground or in the west; others who found no offence in the suggestion that they were permanently consigned to dreamless sleep, or that the spirit, breathed out from the dying frame, was scattered and lost in the impersonal air. So much for the limitations imposed by the plan of this series. Even within these limits, the translator is x GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT of faithful faced by the formidable difficulty finding and theion renderings for the words theos (" god ") whether he (" divine "). The modern Englishman, in reads the Bible or not, is nourished on a tradition which Judaic monotheism, reformed by Christ and St. derived Paul, is combined with a metaphysical theology from Plato and Aristotle. Moses enjoins, and Plato countenances, the belief in a God who is one, a person, the good and benevolent, the designer and maker of is and a universe. Christianity adds that God love, In Father who cares for every one of his children. " " English the serious use of the word God suggests " " all these attributes. But the Greek word theos does issue between not necessarily implv any one of them. The the seemed monotheism and polytheism, so vital to Jew, to the Greek a matter of small importance. Even Plato, in a context where the very nature of deity is in question, " " " " will speak of God or of the gods indifferently, and it is still debated whether, and in what sense, he In believed in a plurality of personal divinities. general, the essential attribute of the divine is immortality Whatever exemption from old age, decay, and death. is immortal is divine; whatever is divine, immortal. " Even this definition, however, is too narrow. Im- " some kind mortal would naturally be taken to imply of life and consciousness. But the word theos can be applied to abstractions such as the most concrete imagina- or with conscious- tion could not really personify endow the ness of any sort. A character in Euripides says that " a recognition of friends after long absence is god." The sudden onset of unlooked-for joy in meeting is a " as some- divine thing. It seems to come from without, even the thing not ourselves." In cases such as this, INTRODUCTION xi " " " expressions deity," divinity," heaven," which I have sometimes employed as renderings of theos, are too definite and concrete. " " The phrase something not ourselves may serve to remind us that, after all, a searching inquiry would disclose a high degree of vagueness in the notion of divinity even among professed Christians in our own age. Two thousand years hence, a student who knew nineteenth century literature only from anthologies and fragmentary quotations, might be seriously misled. He might set down Wordsworth as a pantheist believing " only in something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," and might have no inkling that the poet sincerely recited the Athanasian creed in Grasmere Church. In a recent article on Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, I find these sentences: " Men do not know of what thev are the instruments. Their ambitions, their desires, their fixed objects, have no relation to the things which they are used by higher powers to do. It was a God, it was a God, which drove the Capetians and compelled them to remake " Gaul." The expression a God," and the neuter " " which would not lead one to suppose that the writer (Mr. Belloc) was one who usually made no secret of his adherence to the Roman faith. The author has lapsed into traditional really pagan language, formally irre- concilable with his professed religion. So hard is it to discover what men believe, or what they think they believe, from fragments of what they say. " " If something not ourselves may be taken as the lowest common measure of the usages of theos, we can arrange its other applications along a scale ascending from the barest abstractions, such as the sudden xii GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT recognition of a lost kinsman, to the completely anthro- pomorphic gods of Homer.
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