Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  13. Ian Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 202, 203, 206-207.

  14. Oscillations between hierarchy and egalitarianism in the ancient Near East have been documented from the earliest times. On the Natufians in the Levant, see Ofer Bar-Yoseph, “From Sedentary Foragers to Village Hierarchies: The Emergence of Social Institutions,” in The Origins of Human Social Institutions, ed. W. G. Runciman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1-38.

  15. Walter Donlan, “Chief and Followers in Pre-State Greece,” in The Aristocratic Ideal and Selected Papers (Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazi-Carducci, 1999), 355. The books of the Odyssey in question are those that recount the adventures of “Odysseus and his followers (hetairoi = `companions,’ `comrades’) on their return from the Trojan War” (348).

  16. Donlan, The Aristocratic Ideal, 19, citing, for aristoi, Iliad 2.577-578, 5.780, 12.89, 12.197, 13.128; and for heroes, Iliad 2.110, 12.165, 15.230, 19.34.

  17. Iliad 12.310-321, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Though Sarpedon and Glaukos were Lykian allies of Troy and so technically nonGreek, they expressed Greek sentiments in the passage above.

  18. Odyssey 19.108-114, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

  19. Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 225-247. M. L. West, in The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 321-323, gives a number of Near Eastern, especially Assyrian, analogous passages (136), but he especially stresses analogies with the Hebrew scriptures, e.g., Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28, Amos 9, and a number of Psalms.

  20. Hesiod, Theogony, in Hesiod, trans. Athanassakis, 81-92.

  21. We might note the relation of the two archetypal Israelite kings, David and Solomon, to poetry and wisdom. David is a “singer and lyre player,” to whom the Psalms are attributed, and Solomon is famous for his wisdom, with several books of wisdom attributed to him (though in the narrative, he is not so wise, sowing the seeds of the division of the kingdom). In early Greece the relation of poetry, wisdom, and politics is, if anything, even clearer.

  22. W. G. Runciman, “Origin of States: The Case of Archaic Greece,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982): 354.

  23. Robin Hagg, ed., The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B.c.: Tradition and Innovation-Proceedings of the Second International Symposium at the Swedish Institute in Athens, 15June, 1981 (Stockholm: Svenska Instituter iAthen, 1983).

  24. Jonathan Hall in Hellenicity, 53ff., doubts that the “Akhaioi” in Homer, though the commonest word for those we call the Greeks, were really identical with the Hellenes. He sees Hellenic identity as emerging quite late, “in the elite environment of the Olympic Games during the course of the sixth century” (227), and as being consolidated in opposition to the early fifth-century Persian invasion.

  25. One could think of the autonomous polis as an element in the Panhellenic culture much as the nation-state is an element in contemporary international culture. John Meyer and his associates have argued persuasively for this latter relationship. See John W. Meyer and Michael T. Hannon, eds., National Development and the World System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Connie L. McNeely and D. A. Chekki, eds., Constructing the Nation-State (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 1995); and Frank Lechner and John Boli, World Culture: Origins and Consequences (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).

  26. See particularly the work of Ian Morris, such as Archaeology as Cultural History.

  27. The most succinct treatment of the Greek nobility is Louis Gernet, “The Nobility in Ancient Greece,” in Gernet, Anthropology ofAncient Greece, 279-288.

  28. Panhellenic culture would seem to count as what is commonly called a “civilization,” that is, a multistate culture area, where all the constituent entities share with one another beliefs and practices that differentiate them all from neighboring “civilizations.” Norman Yoffee, referring to early Mesopotamian civilization in Sumeria (discussed in Chapter 5 of this book), emphasizes that the “civilizational” ideology includes notions about what each constituent “state” should be like. See his Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, State, and Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17. In the case of Greece, the polis as a political form, including a strong belief in its autonomy and the lack of even a lingering notion that, as was believed in Sumeria, centralization was desirable, was part of Panhellenic civilization. Yoffee also notes that civilizations are often constituted in significant part by the long-distance trading and gift exchange of elites, as would seem to have been the case in Greece.

  29. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

  30. Robert Parker, in his Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), speaks of Greek women enjoying “cultic citizenship” (80). He also says that “though lacking most political rights, [Athenian] women are citizens” when it comes to religion (4). Several important festivals were restricted to women participants.

  31. M. R. Popham and L. H. Sackett, Lefkandi I, the Iron Age: The Settlement and the Cemeteries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), supp. vol. 11 (British School of Archaeology at Athens).

  32. Quoted by Nicholas Purcell in “Mobility and the Polis,” in The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, ed. Oswyn Murry and Simon Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.

  33. One effort (which has not gone uncontested) to characterize the economic basis of the eighth-century transformation is David W. Tandy’s Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997). The paucity of evidence from the eighth century leaves open a variety of interpretations.

  34. Herodotus, admittedly at a much later period and in the context of the Athenian resistance to the Persian invasion, defines Greek cultural identity as follows: “and then there is our common Greekness: we are one in blood and one in language; those shrines of the gods belong to us all in common, and the sacrifices in common, and there are our habits, bred of a common upbringing.” Herodotus, The History 8.144, David Grene translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Notably absent is a common polity.

  35. See Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). Of course, the common cultural world did not disappear after the archaic period: Greece continued to learn from societies to its east, as they, in turn, did from Greece.

  36. Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

  37. Peter W. Rose, Sons of the Gods, Children of the Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  38. For a person like me who has spent much of his life studying Japan, the absence of an emphasis on loyalty between leader and follower in a warrior culture is quite shocking.

  39. An extensive treatment of the mesoi and their importance in early Greek society is given by Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and theAgrarian Roots of Western Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Hanson has a principled objection to the term “peasant,” which he sees as indicating a degree of dependence and subservience missing among those he prefers to call “farmers.” See also: Ian Morris, “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy,” in Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19-48. Morr
is has discussed the ongoing conflict between “middling ideology” and “elitist ideology” in Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), chap. 5, “Antithetical Cultures,” 155-191. He believes that by about 500 BCE, elitist ideology had pretty much evaporated and middling ideology became hegemonic. The emergence of a “conservative” criticism of Greek democracy in the fourth century was based in large part on principles that had originally been part of middling ideology.

  40. Josiah Ober uses the term “dignity” to characterize the citizens of Athenian democracy; see Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 87. He borrows his sense of the term from Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73.

  41. Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2-3. Italics in original.

  42. W. G. Runciman, “Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead-End,” in Murray and Price, The Greek City, 347.

  43. Paul Cartledge, “Comparatively Equal,” in Ober and Hedrick, Demokratia, 182.

  44. Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990 [1980]), 21; see also 144: “The city was grounded in its citizens, not in an autonomous state apparatus. The citizens constituted the state.”

  45. Warrior assemblies and city assemblies are known from many parts of the world: see, for example, Yoffee, Myths, under assemblies in the index. There is a question whether the polis assemblies had been originally warrior assemblies and only later assemblies of all (adult male) citizens. Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued for the priority of warrior assemblies that were then transformed into citizen assemblies. His chapter “City-State Warfare” in his Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988 [1974]), ends with the statement, “On the one hand the army is nothing if not the city itself; on the other, the city is nothing but a troop of warriors” (53). Homeric evidence is mixed: there are warrior assemblies in the Iliad and a citizen assembly in Ithaca in the Odyssey. Morris in the several works cited above seems to think that the eighth century saw and responded to a greater demand for inclusion by non-noble citizens, without reference to warrior status. Although assemblies, particularly in chiefdoms and early states, are not rare in history, there is no case known, other than Greece, where they actually replaced monarchy as a primary form of governance.

  46. Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History, esp. chap. 4.

  47. Rosalind Thomas in her Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), writes of Homer “singing his poetry aloud to an audience” (4). Later she writes that the performance of the Homeric rhapsode, though without musical accompaniment, “is better described as `chanting’ than simply reciting,” and goes on to cite Plato’s Ion 535b-e as indicating that the rhapsode not only uses costume and gesture but is so overcome with emotion at critical moments in the narrative that he is as one possessed, and moves the audience to similar emotion (118). This suggests a powerfully mimetic aspect in Homeric performance.

  48. Walter Burkett, History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 23. Italics in the original.

  49. For the argument that “history” and “myth” inevitably overlap, see William McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

  50. Lines 26-28, trans. Athanassakis.[0]

  51. Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1996 [1967]), 52, where he speaks of “performative truth,” and 89-106.

  52. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 61-86. See also, Eric A. Havelock, The Greek Concept ofJustice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 106-122.

  53. Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 244. Her quote is from Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Acbaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 18. Clay’s work has been instructive for my purposes. Although she is not interested in the social context and confines herself to close readings, her concern for early Greek theology in each text she studies has been helpful. In addition to her work on Homer, cited above, she has written on the Homeric Hymns in The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Homeric Hymns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and on Hesiod in Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  54. Havelock, Preface, 62. It is worth remembering that the title of Plato’s last great work in political philosophy, Laws, is, in Greek, Nomoi.

  55. Although the verb from the same root, nemein, is present and will, as we shall see below, turn out to be significant.

  56. Whether these texts are any more “critical” than some texts to be found in many preaxial societies is an open question. Kurt A. Raaflaub has gone so far as to argue that in Homer the axial transition had already occurred in Greece: see his “Polis, `the Political,’ and Political Thought: New Departures in Ancient Greece, c. 800-500 BCE,” in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Johann P. Arnason et. al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 253-283. But Raaflaub has confused political thought with political theory, which emerges only in the late fifth / early fourth centuries, the time of the axial transition in Greece, as we will see. Raaflaub develops his views of early Greek political thought further in his “Poets, Lawgivers, and the Beginnings of Political Reflection in Archaic Greece,” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23-59.

  57. Richard Seaford in his Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52, points out, however, that the Greek sacrifice, though always dedicated to a god, was a communal event, with the meat shared among the participants and with only the bones and the fat burned for the god, as against the more normal Mesopotamian case where the sacrifice was dedicated primarily to the god and only the king or priests could partake.

  58. Ibid., 53.

  59. Ibid., 49, italics added. Because this was still true in Greek cities under Rome, it is clear why Christian refusal to participate in civic sacrifices or eat sacrificial meat (Christians had their own sacrifice) placed them outside the bounds of the civic community.

  60. Ibid., 49-50. Italics in original. Seaford’s discussion in Money and the Early Greek Mind sums up and expands the rich treatment of these issues in his Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  61. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 95. Burkert writes “almost without priests” because there were a few vestigial hereditary priesthoods, perhaps the most significant of which was the priesthood at Eleusis.

  62. Zaidman and Pantel, Religion in theAncient Greek City, 49.

  63. On the procession, see Burkert, Greek Religion, 99-10 1.

  64. See article “Festivals” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd rev. ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 593.

  65. Meier, Greek Discovery of Politics, 44-45.

  66. I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Timothy Doran, `Ate, Antisocial Behavior, and Polis Building in Solon’s Political and Poetical Efforts” (2005), for my understanding of this aspect of Solon’s teaching.

  67. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 74-114.

  68. See Parker, Athenian Religion, 43-55.

  69. Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age (New York: Holt, 1998 [1993]), 71; Meier goes on to say, “Although he demanded more from him
self than from others, he expected nothing more for himself in return, and he did not seek to be superior to the common man.” Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis, vol. 2 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 199; Voegelin goes on to say, “[Solon] created the type of the lawgiver, the nomothetes, in the classical sense, not for Hellas only, but as a model for mankind … The Eunomia he created in the polis was the Eunomia of his soul. In his person came to life the prototype of the spiritual statesman.”

  70. Rebecca H. Sinos, “Divine Selection: Epiphany and Politics in Archaic Greece,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73-91. Parker, in Athenian Religion, 83-84, finds this a plausible account.

  71. W. Robert Connor, “Civil Society, Dionysiac Festival, and the Athenian Democracy,” in Ober and Hedrick, Demokratia, 217-226. For a fuller discussion of Cleisthenes’s reforms, see Meier, Greek Discovery of Politics, 49-81.

  72. It is worth remembering that in Plato’s Laws Dionysus shares honors with Apollo as the bringer of festivals for the relief of human suffering (2.653d) and that in the choral singing and dancing that are central in the education of children, but which continue in the ideal city throughout the life cycle, it is to Apollo and Dionysus that the hymns are sung (2.665b). Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy not only saw Apollo and Dionysus as complementary, but also described Dionysiac rituals as leading to a sense of communion and community. For Nietzsche, music was essential to the effects produced by Dionysiac ritual. It was to the power of music that he ascribes the following consequences: “Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him-as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Frances Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), 23.