by Will Durant
Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them of making atonement for their sins or those of their fathers by sacrifices or charms. . . . And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus . . . according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals but whole cities that expiations and atonements may be made by sacrifices and amusements [ceremonies?] which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead. The latter [ceremonies] they call mysteries, and these redeem us from the Pains of Hell; but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.51
Nevertheless there were in Orphism idealistic trends that culminated in the morals and monasticism of Christianity. The reckless looseness of the Olympians was replaced by a strict code of conduct, and the mighty Zeus was slowly dethroned by the gentle figure of Orpheus, even as Yahweh was to be dethroned by Christ. A conception of sin and conscience, a dualistic view of the body as evil and of the soul as divine, entered into Greek thought; the subjugation of the flesh became a main purpose of religion, as a condition of the release for the soul. The brotherhood of Orphic initiates had no ecclesiastical organization and no separate life; but they were distinguished by the wearing of white garments, the avoidance of flesh food, and a degree of asceticism not usually associated with Hellenic ways. They represented, in several aspects, a Puritan Reformation in the history of Greece. Their rites encroached more and more upon the public worship of the Olympian gods.
The influence of the sect was extensive and enduring. Perhaps it was here that the Pythagoreans took their diet, their dress, and their theory of transmigration; it is worthy of note that the oldest Orphic documents now extant were found in southern Italy.52 Plato, though he rejected much in Orphism, accepted its opposition of body and soul, its puritan tendency, its hope of immortality. Part of the pantheism and asceticism of Stoicism may be traced to an Orphic origin. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria possessed a large collection of Orphic writings, and based upon them much of their theology and their mysticism. The doctrines of hell, purgatory, and heaven, of the body versus the soul, of the divine son slain and reborn, as well as the sacramental eating of the body and blood and divinity of the god, directly or deviously influenced Christianity, which was itself a mystery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release. The basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cult are alive and flourishing amongst us today.
IV. WORSHIP
Greek ritual was as varied as the kinds of deities that it honored. The chthonian gods received a gloomy ritual of appeasement and riddance, the Olympians a joyful ritual of welcome and praise. Neither form of ceremony required a clergyman: the father acted as priest for the family, the chief magistrate for the state. Life in Greece was not as secular as it has been described; religion played a major part in it everywhere, and each government protected the official cult as vital to social order and political stability. But whereas in Egypt and the Near East the priesthood dominated the state, in Greece the state dominated the priesthood, took the leadership of religion, and reduced the clergy to minor functionaries in the temples. The property of the temples, in real estate, money, and slaves, was audited and administered by officials of the state.53 There were no seminaries for the training of priests; anyone could be quietly chosen or appointed priest if he knew the rites of the god; and in many places the office was let out to the highest bidder.54 There was no hierarchy of priestly caste; the priests of one temple or state had usually no association with those of another.55 There was no church, no orthodoxy, no rigid creed; religion consisted not in professing certain beliefs, but in joining in the official ritual;56 any man might have his own creed provided that he did not openly deny or blaspheme the city’s gods. In Greece church and state were one.
The place of worship could be the domestic hearth, the municipal hearth in the city hall, some cleft in the earth for a chthonian deity, some temple for an Olympian god. The precincts of the temple were sacred and inviolable; here the worshipers met, and here all pursued persons, even if tainted with serious crime, could find sanctuary. The temple was not for the congregation but for the god; there, in his home, his statue was erected, and a light burned before it which was not allowed to die. Often the people identified the god with the statue; they washed, dressed, and tended the image carefully, and sometimes scolded it for negligence; they told how, at various times, the statue had sweated, or wept, or closed its eyes.57 In the temple records a history was kept of the festivals of the god, and of the major events in the life of the city or group that worshiped him; this was the source and first form of Greek historiography.
The ceremony consisted of procession, chants, sacrifice, prayer, and sometimes a sacred meal. Magic and masquerade, tableaux and dramatic representations might be part of the procession. In most cases the basic ritual was prescribed by custom, and every movement of it, every word of the hymns and prayers, was preserved in a book kept sacred by the family or the state; rarely was any syllable or action altered, or any rhythm; the god might not like or comprehend the novelty. The living speech changed, the ritual speech remained as before; in time the worshipers ceased to understand the words they used,58 but the thrill of antiquity supplied the place of understanding. Often the ceremony outlasted even the memory of the cause that had prompted it; then new myths were invented to explain its establishment: the myth or creed might change, but not the ritual. Music was essential to the whole process, for without music religion would be difficult; music generates religion as much as religion generates music. Out of the temple and processional chants came poetry, and the meters that later adorned the robust profanity of Archilochus, the reckless passion of Sappho, and the scandalous delicacies of Anacreon.
Having reached the altar—usually in front of the temple—the worshipers sought with sacrifice and prayer to avert the wrath or win the aid of their god. As individuals they might offer almost anything of value—statues, reliefs, furniture, weapons, caldrons, tripods, garments, pottery; when the gods could make no use of such articles the priests could. Armies might offer part of their spoils, as Xenophon’s Ten Thousand did in their retreat.59 Groups would offer the fruits of the field, the vines or the trees; more often an animal appetizing to the god; sometimes, on occasions of great need, a human being. Agamemnon offered Iphigenia for a wind; Achilles slaughtered twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus;60 human victims were hurled from the cliffs of Cyprus and Leucas to satiate Apollo; others were presented to Dionysus in Chios and Tenedos; Themistocles is said to have sacrificed Persian captives to Dionysus at the battle of Salamis;61 the Spartans celebrated the festival of Artemis Orthia by flogging youths, sometimes to death, at her altar;62 in Arcadia Zeus received human sacrifice till the second century A.D.;63 at Massalia, in time of pestilence, one of the poorer citizens was fed at public expense, clad in holy garments, decorated with sacred boughs, and cast over a cliff to death with prayers that he might bear punishment for all the sins of his people.64 In Athens it was the custom, in famine, plague, or other crisis, to offer to the gods, in ritual mimicry or in actual fact, one or more scapegoats for the purification of the city; and a similar rite, mimic or literal, was annually performed at the festival of the Thargelia.*65 In the course of time human sacrifice was mitigated by restricting its victims to condemned criminals, and dulling their senses with wine; finally it was replaced by the sacrifice of an animal. When, on the night before the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.), the Boeotian leader Pelopidas had a dream that seemed to demand a human sacrifice at the altar as the price of victory, some of his councilors advised it, but others protested against it, saying “that such a barbarous and impious obligation could not be pleasing to any Supreme Beings; that typhons and giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of gods and mortals; that it was absurd to imagine any divinities and powers delighting in slaughter and sacrifice of men.”68
Animal sacrifice, then, was a major step in the develop
ment of civilization. The beasts who bore the brunt of this advance in Greece were the bull, the sheep, and the pig. Before any battle the rival armies sent up sacrifices in proportion to their desired victory; before any assembly in Athens the meeting place was purified by the sacrifice of a pig. The piety of the people, however, broke down at the crucial point: only the bones and a little flesh, wrapped in fat, went to the god; the rest was kept for the priests and the worshipers. To excuse themselves the Greeks told how, in the days of the giants, Prometheus had wrapped the edible portions of the sacrificial animal in skin, and the bones in fat, and had asked Zeus to choose which he preferred. Zeus had “with both hands” chosen the fat. It was true that Zeus was enraged upon finding that he had been deceived; but he had made his choice, and must abide by it forever.69 Only in sacrifice to the chthonian gods was everything surrendered to the deity, and the entire animal burnt to ashes in a holocaust; the divinities of the lower world were more feared than those of Olympus. No common meal followed a chthonic sacrifice, for that might tempt the god to come and join the feast. But after sacrifice to the Olympians the worshipers, not in awed atonement to the god but in joyous communion with him, consumed the consecrated victim; the magic formulas pronounced over it had, they hoped, imbued it with the life and power of the god, which would now pass mystically into his communicants. In like manner wine was poured upon the sacrifice, and then into the cups of the worshipers, who drank, so to speak, with the gods.70 In the thiasoi, or fraternities, into which so many trade and social groups in Athens were organized, this idea of divine communion in a common religious meal formed the binding tie.71
Animal sacrifice continued throughout Greece until ended by Christianity,72 which wisely substituted for it the spiritual and symbolical sacrifice of the Mass. In some measure prayer too became a substitute for sacrifice; it was a clever amendment that commuted offerings of blood into litanies of praise. In this gentler way man, subject to chance and tragedy at every step, consoled and strengthened himself by calling to his aid the mysterious powers of the world.
V. SUPERSTITIONS
Between these upper and nether poles of Greek religion, the Olympian and the subterranean, surged an ocean of magic, superstition, and sorcery; behind and below the geniuses whom we shall celebrate were masses of people poor and simple, to whom religion was a mesh of fears rather than a ladder of hope. It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle stories—of Theseus rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into wine:73 such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable poetry with which imagination brightens the common life. One could even pass over the anxiety of Athens to secure the bones of Theseus, and of Sparta to bring back from Tegea the bones of Orestes;74 the miraculous power officially attributed to these relics may well have been part of the technique of rule. What oppressed the pious Greek was the cloud of spirits that surrounded him, ready and able, he believed, to spy upon him, interfere with him, and do him evil. These demons were always seeking to enter into him; he had to be on his guard against them at all times, and to perform magical ceremonies to disperse them.
This superstition verged on science, and in some measure forecast our germ theory of disease. All sickness, to the Greek, meant possession by an alien spirit; to touch a sick person was to contract his uncleanliness or “possession”; our bacilli and bacteria are the currently fashionable forms of what the Greeks called keres or little demons.75 So a dead person was “unclean”; the keres had gotten him once for all. When the Greek left a house where a corpse lay, he sprinkled himself with water, from a vessel placed for such purposes at the door, to drive away from himself the spirit that had conquered the dead man.76 This conception was extended to many realms where even our bacteriophobia would hardly apply it. Sexual intercourse rendered a person unclean; so did birth, childbirth, and homicide (even if unintentional). Madness was possession by an alien spirit; the madman was “beside himself.” In all these cases a ceremony of purification was considered necessary. Periodically homes, temples, camps, even whole cities were purified, and very much as we disinfect them—by water, smoke, or fire.77 A bowl of clean water stood at the entrance to every temple, so that those who came to worship might cleanse themselves,78 perhaps by a suggestive symbolism. The priest was an expert in purification; he could exorcise spirits by striking bronze vessels, by incantations, magic, and prayer; even the intentional homicide might, by adequate ritual, be purified.79 Repentance was not indispensable in such cases; all that was needed was to get rid of the evil possessive demons; religion was not so much a matter of morals as a technique of manipulating spirits. Nevertheless the multiplication of taboos and purificatory rites produced in the religious Greek a state of mind surprisingly akin to the Puritan sense of sin. The notion that the Greeks were immune to the ideas of conscience and sin will hardly survive a reading of Pindar and Aeschylus.
Out of this belief in an enveloping atmosphere of spirits came a thousand superstitions, which Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, summarized in one of his Characters:
Superstitiousness would seem to be a sort of cowardice with respect to the divine. . . . Your Superstitious Man will not sally forth for the day till he have washed his hands and sprinkled himself at the Nine Springs, and put a bit of bay-leaf from a temple in his mouth. And if a cat cross his path he will not proceed on his way till some one else be gone by, or he have cast three stones across the street. Should he espy a snake in his house, if it be one of the red sort he will call upon Dionysus; if it be a sacred snake he will build a shrine then and there. When he passes one of the smooth stones set up at crossroads he anoints it with oil from his flask, and will not go his ways till he have knelt down and worshiped it. If a mouse gnaw a bag of his meal, he will off to the wizard and ask what he must do; and if the advice be, “Send the bag to the cobblers to be patched,” he neglects the advice and frees himself of the ill by rites of aversion. . . . If he catches sight of a madman or an epileptic, he shudders and spits into his bosom.80
The simpler Greeks believed, or taught their children to believe, in a great variety of bogies. Whole cities were disturbed, at short intervals, by “portents” or strange occurrences, like deformed births of animals or men.81 The belief in unlucky days was so widespread that on such days no marriage might take place, no assembly might be held, no courts might meet, no enterprise might begin. A sneeze, a stumble, might be reason for abandoning a trip or an undertaking; a minor eclipse could stop or turn back armies, and bring great wars to a disastrous end. Again, there were persons gifted with the power of effective cursing: an angered parent, a neglected beggar might lay upon one a curse that would ruin one’s life. Some persons possessed magic arts; they could mix love philters or aphrodisiacs, and could by secret drugs reduce a man to impotence or a woman to sterility.82 Plato did not consider his Laws complete without an enactment against those who injure or slay by magic arts.83 Witches are not medieval inventions; note Euripides’ Medea, and Theocritus’ Simaetha. Superstition is one of the most stable of social phenomena; it remains almost unchanged through centuries and civilizations, not only in its bases but even in its formulas.
VI. ORACLES
In a world so crowded with supernatural powers, the events of life seemed to depend upon the will of demons and gods. To discover that will the curious Greeks consulted soothsayers and oracles, who divined the future by reading the stars, interpreting dreams, examining the entrails of animals, or observing the flight of birds. Professional soothsayers hired themselves out to families, armies, and states;84 Nicias, before setting out upon the expedition to Sicily, engaged a troop of sacrificers, augurs, diviners;85 and though not all generals were as pious as this great slaveowner, nearly all were as superstitious. Men and women appeared who claimed inspiration and clairvoyance; in Ionia particularly certain women called Sibyls (i.e., the Will of God) issued oracles believed by millions of Greeks.86 From Erythrae the Sibyl Herophila was said to have wandered t
hrough Greece to Cumae in Italy, where she became the most famous of her kind, and lived, we are told, a thousand years. Athens, like Rome, had a collection of ancient oracles, and the government maintained in the prytaneum men skilled in their interpretation.87
Public oracles were set up at many temples in all parts of Greece; but the most famous and honored were in early days the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, and in the historical period that of Apollo at Delphi. “Barbarians” as well as Greeks consulted this oracle; even Rome sent messengers to ask or suggest the will of the god. Since the power of divination was supposed to belong particularly to the intuitive sex, three priestesses, each at least half a century old, were trained to consult Apollo through the medium of a trance. From a hollow in the earth below the temple came a peculiar gas, ascribed to the eternal decomposition of the python that Apollo had slain there; the officiating priestess, called Pythia, took her seat on a high tripod over this cleft, inhaled the divine stench, chewed narcotic laurel leaves, fell into delirium and convulsions, and, thus inspired, uttered incoherent words which the priests translated to the people. Very often the final reply admitted of diverse, even contrary, interpretations, so that the infallibility of the oracle was maintained whatever the event.88 Possibly the priests were no less puppets than the priestesses; sometimes they accepted bribes;89 and in most cases the voice of the oracle harmonized melodiously with the dominant influence in Greece.90 Nevertheless, where external powers did not constrain them, the priests taught valuable lessons of moderation and political wisdom to the Greeks. Though they condoned human sacrifice even after the moral sense of Greece had begun to revolt against it, and made no protest against the immoralities of Olympus, they aided the establishment of law, encouraged the manumission of slaves, and bought many slaves in order to give them liberty.91 They were not in advance of Greek thought, but they did not hinder it by doctrinal intolerance. They gave a helpful supernatural sanction to necessary Greek policies, and provided some degree of international conscience and moral unity for the scattered cities of Greece.