Oracle (Hastings' Dictionary)

To attain a conception of the spirit and character and the infinite variety of Hellenic re- ligion and its relation to Hellenic life, it is above all necessary to study the practical development of the individual gods out of their primitive form into the full Greek idea. We can here take only one example.

We might select Athenaia, the champion and mother of Athens, originally a form of the Pelasgian Mother-Goddess, who became step by step an almost purely Olympian deity (at least in the popular idea, though never in the actual cultus*), patron of what the world holds in memory as most characteristic of Athens, protector of the democracy, of art and of letters, opposed to and yet closely connected with Poseidon, who was the champion of the oligarchic and aristocratic element in the city.

t But Apollo is, on the whole, the most typical and representative Hellenic deity, and his oracle at Delphi was the most powerful influence in guiding and moulding the growth of Hellenism. And as, in the much debated subject of Greek religion, it is useful to see more than one view, Mr. L. R. Farnell, the author of Cults of the Greek States, will treat this part of it.

— [If the study of any single Hellenic divinity can suffice for the comparison of the pagan and Christian classical world in respect of religious thought and rite, one may be justified in selecting the Apolline worship for the purpose. It may not indeed present us with the highest achievement of the Hellenic spirit in religious speculation : for instance, to trace the gradual evolution of ideas that made for mono- theism, we must turn rather to the worship of Zeus.

Nor, again, did it attempt to satisfy, as did the Dionysiac and Eleusinian cults, the personal craving for immortality and happiness after death which was working strongly in the Hellenic world before the diffusion of Christianity. Currents of mystic speculation, coming partly from the East, and bringing new problems concerning the provi- dence of the work and the destiny of the soul, scarcely touched and in no way transformed the personality of Apollo.

Until the old Hellenic system was passing away, he remained a bright and clearly outlined figure of the early national religion, a Pan-Hellenic god, whose attributes reflected and whose worship assisted the various stages of material, social, and moral development through which the race had passed. The study of the cult is of the highest value for the student of Hellenism, and not without value for the wider study of European ethics and religion.

To understand this, we must distinguish more carefully than is often done between the figure of worship and the figure of myth. This is the more necessary in the case of a religion such as the Hellenic, that was not fortified by any strong and imperious dogma which might bring the mythic * Her relation to the Eumenides, the Gorgon, and the serpent footed Erichthonios, shows her Chthonian and antique char. acter. t See Neil’s edition of Aristophanes’ Knights, p.

88 144 RELIGION OF GREECE RELIGION OF GREECE fancy under control. usuall Hence Greek myth, though bright and attractive, and often illumina- tive of actual worship, is sometimes repulsive, and no adequate expression of the serious mood of the worshipper.

If we confine our view, then, to the public cults—Greek devotion being mainly public —and to the myths that illustrate these, we soon discover that Apollo did not instantly reveal himself, as he emerged above the horizon of pre- historic Hellas, as the divinity of the higher life who brought a higher message to his worshippers. The Apollo of Aischylus and Pindar is not quite the same as the ‘Apano of the earliest Greek tribes.

The records of the historic period still preserve the impress of a wilder and more savage age. The meaning of the name Apollo, like that of most of the Divine names in Greece, escapes us.

A modern etymology that connects it with dé\Xa, the Doric word for ‘assembly,’ would yield us, if we could accept it, the very interesting result, that the aboriginal deity was not a mere ‘ Nature-god,’ a personification of some portion of the natural world, but already a political divinity full of ieee for the future public life of the race. But or etymological reasons the word dé)ha could not give rise to the derivative ’Aré\\wv, though they might both come from some common stem.

We must content ourselves with having the right to believe that he is at least an Aryan god, brought in by the Hellenic conquerors, and the common possession of several of the leading tribes. In countries where the autochthonous population claimed to have survived, such as Attica and Arcadia, he is clearly an immigrant, not an indi- genous deity. And Greek ritual preserved and hallowed the memory of his original entrance into Hellas from the north.

Herodotus’ time the Delians were still in the habit of receiving certain cereal offerings at the festival of Apollo that purported to come from the ‘Hyperboreans.’ The route which the offerings followed entered Greece from the north-west, and, passing southward as far as Dodona, then struck across eastward to the Malian Gulf, and so by the Eubean Carystos to Delos. Wild fancies have been conceived and foolish theories devised about these Hyperboreans.

Error arose from the illusory belief that any people, known however dimly to the Greeks, and known to be worshippers of Apollo, could have been styled ‘the people who live beyond the north wind.’ The key to the puzzle has been undoubtedly found by Ahrens, who as a philologist has made one of the very few. philological contributions to the study of Greek religion that are of any value. He discovered that the word ‘LzepBépeco is a slight popular corruption for ek aes or ‘TrepBeperato.

, a well-attested Mace- donian dialect form for the Delian word Ilepdepées that Herodotus declares was applied to the sacred ‘carriers’ of Apollo’s offerings. They are then northern Greeks, all bearing pure Greek names, which all have a religious origin proper to their ritualistic function.

And it is of the greatest in- terest to note that the route by which the oblations of the North-Greek tribes are reported to have travelled is the natural route of invasion which the Aryan conquerors are now supposed by modern historians to have followed. : Can we discover the original character of this divinity in the earliest days of the worship in Greece?

A belief that still appears to prevail in ordinary classical scholarship is that he began his career as a sun-god, displacing earlier and less per- sonal solar powers, and became gradually human- ized and withdrawn from this elemental sphere. But the belief is uncritically held, and breaks down before the evidence of the cult-facts. The epithets whereby a Greek divinity was addressed in prayer It seems that in. and official hymns give the best clue to the ideas ofancient worship.

None of those that are attached to Apollo can be naturally interpreted as desig. nating a god of the sun or of the lights of heaven. Avxeos, one of his most common titles, can come from the stem of Avxo-s, ‘ wolf,’ and not phoneticall from the stem of Avcy, an assumed old Greek wor for ‘light.

’ Avxyyevis, an epithet only used twice in the Jdiad in a conversation between Athena and the Lycian Pandaros, can mean, in accord with the laws of word, formation, either ‘ Lycian-born’ or ‘wolf-born’: the latter significance being in har- mony with a well-attested legend. AlyAjrns, ‘the god of the gleam’ at Anaphe, appears to have been a later transformation for an older form ’AcyeAdras, a term of quite different import.

At a comparatively later period, Apollo comes into touch with Helios, especially in Asia Minor; the same may be said of oe divinities, for whom no one would claim a solar origin. The first to identify him with Helios was Euripides ; but this poet is often quite reckless of the popular religious view, and the statement belongs to a certain theory of his.

In pagan North Europe, and in pagan Greece, the leading practices of ritual that have been dis- covered and interpreted by modern research aimed at peat J fertility and growth in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. This must be the chief in- terest of primitive society in the pastoral and apdeuiternl age ; and it is this that gives function and much of their character to most of the Hellenia divinities throughout all periods of their career, and especially to Apollo.

Doubtless, the earliest Hellenic invaders had already advanced beyond the social level of the hunter and the shepherd. Yet early cult and cult- ideas that survived the changes and progress of the ages preserve the traits of savage life.

Here and there Apollo was still the cave-dweller: for in- stance, near Magnesia on the Meeander, where his image and spirit filled his priests with superhuman force, so that in wild frenzy they bounded down steep rocks and uprooted strong trees: even in cultured Athens he was still worshipped in a cave on the Acropolis. To this period belong such con- ceptions as that of Apollo Avxeios, the wolf-god, the son of a wolf-mother, the god to whom wolves were offered in Argive ritual.

In Cyprus we come upon the worship of Apollo “fAdrys, the deity of the woodland, to whom certain trees were sacred ; and the bow, the weapon of early man, and always the chief badge of Apollo, belongs to him as the divinity of the chase, to whom the huntsman even in the days of Arrian offered a tithe of the spoil.

Through- out all Hellas he was worshipped also as the deity of flocks and herds, who tended sheep and horned cattle in the pastures, and broughy ae supply of milk, as Nowos and TaAdéos. The agricult life, which is again a higher stage, is also under his care. He guards the crops from mildew and vermin, preserves the boundaries of the tenements, and to his shrines at Delphi and Delos the Greek States far and wide send their tribute of corn.

His festivals, which fell in spring, summer, and early autumn, but never in winter, attest very clearly his vegetative and agricultural character. At Amycle, in Laconia, he succeeded {jo and absorbed the cult of an old hero of vegetation, Hyacinthus, probably a pre, Hellenic personage, the beautiful youth who dies young and is bewai as the incarnation of the bloom and the early fruits of the year.

His grave was beneath the base- ment of Apollo’s statue, and the first part of the Hyacinthia festival was consecrated to him ; the note of sorrow in the ritual is an echo from the rimitive life of the husbandman and harvester in urope and Asia. The Laconian festival of the | 3 RELIGION OF GREECE _ Kdpvea is one of peculiar interest, and it is im- possible here to cope with the questions that arise concerning it.

Our own view is that Apollo Kdpvevos, whose name means ‘the cattle-god,’ was worshipped by the Dorians in North Greece, and probably by the Dryopes before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnese; that the Dorians established his worship in Megara, Sicyon, Argos, and Sparta, though a previous migration, possibly of the Dryopes, may have already planted the worship in certain parts of Southern Greece.

The Spartan ritual has been well interpreted by Mannhardt: for nine days all the people lived in tents or huts, a reminiscence of primitive life, and the chief act of the festival was the pursuit of a man called ‘the runner,’ who was covered with garlands, by ouths who carried grape clusters; if they caught i, it was a good omen for the crops and vintage. The ritual is vegetation-magic and old European.

Upon this, as upon the ritual of the Hyacinthia, the higher worship of the god of song and music was engrafted.

To this early pastoral and agricultural period belongs the rite of human sacrifice which survived here and there in the worship of Apollo, and which was probably more frequent in the earlier period when it was common to all Aryan and to less pro- gressive races, In Cyprus those who touched the altar of Apollo were thrown from a rock; from the famous Leucadian promontory in Acarnania a victim was hurled once a year ‘as a piacular offer- ing’ to Apollo; andin the Attic Oapyj\a, an early harvest-festival consecrated to Apollo, where most of the ritual was harmless vegetation-magic, the cruel rite may have prevailed, even in the civilized age, of leading forth two human scapegoats and chard them to death by stoning or burning.

he human oblation, which Greek civilization tended to abolish or modify, is a practice—what- ever its true meaning—that is rooted in savagery. Yet it sometimes contains the germ of the idea of nae and vicarious atonement that can bear it in a higher religion. So far it has only been the primitive character of Apollo that we have attempted to outline. His real significance for the Greek ré\s touches higher issues.

He becomes, or already at the dawn of Greek history he was, one of a special group of deities that presided over the communion of the family, the clan, the village, and finally of the mods, the last development of these. is cone- shaped pillar stood in the street before the door of the citizen; and Apollo’Ayueds becomes Apollo Ipocraripios, the god ‘who stands before the dvor’ and shields the household from terrors of the seen and unseen world.

To the Ionic communities he stood in the special relation of ancestor, and the Dorian cities honoured him as the leader of their colonies, and sometimes as the founder and organ- izer of their social institutions. Two instances may be selected from the many that might be quoted, to show the importance of his cult for social and political progress. At Athens the court called él Aedduvlw was founded to try cases of homicide where justifiable circum- stances were pleaded.

When criminal law becomes able to consider such pleas, it is advancing from the barbaric to the civilized stage. It is of import- ance, therefore, to note that this great advance was associated at Athens, in part at least, with the name and cult of Apollo. Again, at Delphi the worship of the Pythian Apollo plevel a very useful part in the emancipation of slaves.

The slave who saved money could not, of course, be sure of buying his freedom from his master, for the latter might lay hands on the money and retain the slave; but he could, and from a vast number of Delphic inscriptions we have evidence that he