On the Origin of the Greek Religious Institutions

§. 1.

Since261 Greece is the centre of this discussion, the preliminary question arises: from where did the religious knowledge and the cult of the Greeks take their origin? The principal document for answering it remains Herodotus. With unmistakable love of truth, and at a relatively early time, he made inquiries of his own into the question, and their results 262 lie before us in the second book of his History, chapters 48–58, compared with chapters 43, 81, and 145 f. The views of other inquirers, however, such as Strabo in the sixteenth book, p. 1105 Almel., must not be left out of account.

Egypt, in Herodotus’s conviction, is the fatherland of the most important religious usages. From there the Hellenes received most of their temple deities, and from the Egyptians they learned the greater part of the sacred service, II. 50–58. That this opinion found wide acceptance in antiquity and was very widespread admits of no doubt. On the agreement of the biblical documents in their report of the high antiquity of Egyptian religious institutions, see the proofs in Spencer, de legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus II, Diss. I, sect. 2.

Antithesis: Plutarch, in the principal passage, de malign. Herodot. p. 857 D–E. Examination: the polemical purpose of this whole work. Are the poetic authorities adduced here fit to refute the father of history? Are the other counter-arguments historically admissible? Reminder of the content of other writings of Plutarch.

But on the other hand it must not be forgotten that Herodotus drew much from Dodonaean priestly legend, and that this priesthood had a particular interest in Egyptianizing Hellas as far as possible. Compare Heeren’s well-263considered remarks in the Ideen über die Politik [Ideas on the Politics, etc.] II, S. 462. Yet Herodotus, as we shall see below, also points to other paths besides the Egyptian for the religious cultivation of Greece. For the present we stay with the Egyptian.

Argive colony. The oldest, darker legends of the Inachids, Io, Epaphus, and so on. The more definite legends of Danaus. Perizonius, Origines Aegyptiacae cap. XVI, p. 327. The Ἀποβαθμοί [“Landing-place”], where this Egyptian colonist had stepped ashore with his children, remained a memorable place in the living legend of the Argives, Pausan. Corinth. 38, 4.

The legend of the Megarians about the colonist Lelex, likewise Egyptian, Pausan. Attic. 39, 6.

Thracian and Samothracian colony. Legends of Orpheus and other teachers, who are presented as pupils of the Egyptian priesthood, Diodor. Sicul. I, 92–96. Herodot. II, 81: synonymy of the Orphic and the Egyptian. How can this statement be reconciled with the other, II, 53? Discussion.

Antithesis. It is not merely a poetic antithesis, following the general usage of the poets in representing Thrace as the rude land of barbarians, but also a historical one. See the principal passage from the Atthis of Androtion in Aelian, Var. Histor. VIII. 6, with Perizonius’s 264 note, to be compared with the manuscript scholiast on Aristides, I, p. 118 Jebb. The passage concerns the lack of culture of the European barbarians, and of the Thracians in particular, and the groundlessness of the supposed Orphic wisdom. These assertions were bound up with the question of the descent of the family of the Eumolpidae. On it a party formed of those who claimed the oldest religious institutions for the Athenians, and in particular would not have the Eleusinia derived from Thrace.

Comparison of this opinion with Herodotus’s report, II, 51, of the religious instruction that the Athenians had received from the Pelasgians, who had previously lived on Samothrace. Likewise, reminder of the legends of the old worship of the Muses in Pieria, of which more below, in the chapters on Dionysus and on Demeter.

Thrace and Samothrace always remain one of the oldest seats of foreign religions, which were propagated from there southward to the Hellenes. This holds even if the derivation of the term for divine service, θρησκεία, from the Thracians (Θρηκῶν) is rather to be taken as an invention of the grammarians. The word has its origin in the dull sound of half-voiced prayer (θρέειν, θροεῖν [“to murmur, to utter”]), with which the notion of superstitious formalism in worship later became connected. See T. Hemsterhuis in Lennep, Etymolog. l. gr. p. 258 seq., and the commentators on the Epistle of James I. 26, 27.

265 Attic colony. Here everything is now more decided, even though the greatest historians disagreed over how the connection of Attic culture with the Egyptian should be explained. Read the rich passage of Proclus on Plato’s Timaeus p. 30, where the various opinions of Theopompus, Callisthenes, and Phanodemus are set out¹. Here in Attica, among several others, the name of the Saite Cecrops comes forward. In national legend and abiding poetic tradition he had become the image of Egyptian-Attic culture, adorned now one way, now another, yet so that the historical basis remained indelible. See the references in 266 Meursius, Regnum Athenarum lib. I, cap. 8, and de Fortuna Athenarum cap. I, and Wyttenbach on Plutarch, de S. N. V. p. 36.

Pelasgian colony in Thesprotia: a Dodonaean priestly settlement. Herodot. II. 54 seqq.; see above.

§. 2.

But, as remarked, the principal document cited above also points to other paths besides the Egyptian. First, it clearly distinguishes the Libyan worship of Poseidon from the other deities derived from Egypt; see Herodot. II. 50. With this must be connected the legends of the Libyan Ammonium (see ibid.) and of the Libyan Pallas (IV. 180 seq.; cf. Apollodor. I. 3. 6 and Heyne there), to which we shall return below.

The father of history also knows Phoenicia as one of the parent lands of Greek religion. In his opinion, the seer Melampus learned religious service from the Tyrian Cadmus and from those who settled with him in Boeotia, II. 49. But about this very Cadmus the most various opinions already prevailed in antiquity, in particular on the question whether he had come to Boeotia from Egypt or from Phoenicia. We see this, among other places, from the passage 267 of Pausanias on Minerva Siga²; see Boeotic. cap. 12. There the decision is for Phoenicia, in agreement with the passage of Herodotus just cited. Others had this colony, like that of Danaus, migrate from Egypt to Boeotia; see the passages from Diodorus in Photius, Bibl. Cod. CCXLIV, and compare Diodorus’s Eclogae, Vol. X, p. 215 Bipont. Boeotia too knew Egyptian cult; see Jablonski, Voces p. 244 seq. Critical preliminary questions in this inquiry: compare Fragmm. Historicorum graecorum antiquissimorum p. 35 seqq., and further discussion.

Samothrace and Thrace were the bridge over which culture and worship were brought to the Greeks from other sides as well. Here legend again intervenes with very indefinite and ambiguous names. The old worship on Samothrace, we heard above, was Pelasgian, and clearly distinct from the Egyptian; see Herodot. II. 51. The inquiry into the migration of religious knowledge to the Greeks therefore depends on several further inquiries. These concern the migrations of the Pelasgians themselves; the sense of this very general designation (by which, as is well known, the whole pre-Hellenic period 268 is denoted); the Pelasgian tribes that reliable sources allow us to distinguish; and their various dwelling places. To these preliminary questions Larcher has made a learned contribution in the eighth chapter of his Chronology.

To this belong the Samothracian myths of Dardanus in Dionys. Halicarn. Archaeol. I. 68 seq., and in others. Dardanus, so they told, had occupied the Troad from Samothrace. Where had he come from? From Etruria? See Heyne’s sixth excursus on Virgil’s Aeneid III, p. 486 seqq. Legends of Corythus. Arcadian Pelasgians cross over into Italy. Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. Their settlements in Attica and expulsion from there (cf. Fragg. Historr. gr. antiqq. p. 41, and Larcher l. l. p. 248 seqq.) to Lemnos and other islands of this region, and their new spread from there.

In the legends of Dardanus, old memories are preserved from the pre-Orphic period, and of the connection of Hither Asian, Samothracian, and Etruscan culture. In this mythic darkness these memories can no longer be raised to historical clarity, however much the most learned inquirers among the Greeks applied themselves to explaining them, as the first book of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo’s well-known inquiries into the Curetes and so on show.

More definite, on the other hand, are other reports of the connection 269 of the peoples of Hither Asia with the European ones, and of the mutual influence of their culture and religion. We recall here, by way of example, the migration of the Brigians or Phrygians, a Macedonian-Thracian people, over into Asia Minor (see the references in Fragmm. Historr. gr. antiqq. p. 170), and the legends of the settlement of the Phrygian Pelops in Greece, Pausan. Corinth. 22.

Scythian elements too are pointed out in Greek religion. But how far-reaching is this name Scythia, under which so much that was geographically unknown was gathered together! We recall here only some features that allow us to infer a migration of certain inventions and kinds of knowledge to the Greeks from the northeast. The rich myths of Prometheus lead to a Caucasian origin of various branches of Hellenic culture. The worship of Artemis in the Scythian Taurica likewise points this way from the northeast. And according to a priestly legend at Delos, the Hyperboreans sent gifts through the land of the Scythians to the Adriatic Gulf, then across to Dodona, and so on as far as Delos (see Herodot. IV. 22 seqq.).^a All these may well rest on old memories of the share the North had in taming Greece.

What else of Asiatic elements may have passed into Greek cult, 270 and the question of what was propagated here from India, Persia, and Upper Asia in general, there will be occasion to treat below.

So much remains certain: there was no people in Greece that did not have every reason to celebrate its Θεοξένια [Theoxenia, the feast of entertaining the gods]. The Athenians, otherwise so proud of the native religion of their fathers, celebrated it, as did several other inhabitants of Greek cities (see e.g. Pausan. Achaic. VII. 27). Indeed, it was a solemn festival in the Panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi (compare Casaubon and Schweighäuser on Athenaeus IX. 13, p. 13 of the notes).

Despite all these influences from abroad, in religious thought as in everything else, the Greek spirit nonetheless maintained its own peculiar character. The priesthood at Dodona did not succeed in Egyptianizing Hellas, and just as little could the other elements of foreign culture efface the national stamp that Greek myth and cult retained. The most tolerant pantheism might grant entry among the Greeks to the most diverse religious ideas, but they always remained Greeks, even in their religion. Only, with regard to the more or less of this, the different periods must be distinguished here.

That fundamental drive which we will call the Hellenic was no doubt always present, that inclination to anthropomorphic 271 genealogizing which later expressed itself in fairy-tale histories of the gods. But the oldest priestly legends (ἱεροὶ λόγοι, “sacred stories”), like the Herodotean one of Samothrace (II, 51), may well have borne the character of significant brevity. Only with the flowering of heroic legend did everything become more human, in the hands of singers who were no longer priests. In the mouths of those Egyptianizing Dodonaeans, such religious histories were then called inventions of today and yesterday,^b and suffered the disparagement of the priesthoods (Herodot. II. 143).

Here a pointer to the noteworthy passage Herodot. II. 53. What sense does it have, by context and language? In what respect are Homer and Hesiod called there οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην Ἕλλησι [“those who made a theogony for the Greeks”]? Various interpretations of these words. Comparison of other passages, especially II. 81. Reminder of the passage of Plato, Tim. p. 1043 C ed. Francof. (cf. above), with the remarks of Proclus p. 40, and of Justin Martyr, Cohortat. ad Graecos Sect. 13, p. 16 ed. Venet.

From the foregoing follows the immediate consequence for the progress of our survey. To grasp the worship of the gods of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans in its principal moments, we must start from Egypt, and no less cast a glance at the religions of Phoenicia and Asia Minor. To this can then be attached the outlines of the doctrine of the older cults and theo272gonies of Greece, and after that the survey of the temple deities who stand in clearer light.