VI. THE MAKING OF A GODDESS…

VI. THE MAKING OF A GODDESS

‘οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖκα μεμίμηται κυήσει καὶ γεννήσει ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν.’

In the last chapter we have traced the development from Keres to Erinyes, and have seen that, on the whole, this development was a downward course. The Erinyes are in a sense more civilized than the Keres; they are beings more articulate, more clearly outlined and concerned with issues moral rather than physical; but the career they start as angry souls they end as Poinae, ministers of vindictive torment; there is in them no element of hope, no kindly impulse towards purification, they end where they began as irreconcileable demons rather than friendly gods.

We have further marked the attempt of Aeschylus to turn the vindictive demons of the old religion into the gentler divinities of the new, and we have seen that, for all his genius, the attempt failed wholly. The Erinyes never, save here and there to a puzzled antiquarian, became really Semnae; the popular instinct of their utter distinctness remained sound. We have now to note that, where the genius of a poet fails, the slow-moving widespread instinct of a people may prevail; ghosts are not wholly angry, and the gentler form of ghost may and does become a god.

The line between a spirit (δαίμων) and a regular god (θεός) is drawn with no marked precision. The difference is best realized by remembering the old principle that man makes all the objects of his worship in his own image. Before he has himself clearly realized his own humanity—the line that marks him off from other animals, he makes his divinities sometimes wholly animal, sometimes of mixed, monstrous shapes. His animal-shaped gods the Greek quickly outgrew; something will be said of them when we come to the religion of the Bull-Dionysos. Mixed monstrous shapes long haunted his imagination; bird-woman-souls, Gorgon-bogeys, Sphinxes, Harpies and the like were, as has been seen, the fitting vehicles of a religion that was mainly of vague fear. But as man became more conscious of his humanity and pari passu grew more humane, a more complete anthropomorphism steadily prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human gods man mirrored his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered relations of life.

Xenophanes[678], writing in the 6th century B.C., knew that God is ‘without body, parts or passions,’ but he knew also that, till man becomes wholly philosopher, his gods are doomed perennially to take and retake human shape. His thrice-familiar words still bear repetition:

‘One God there is greatest of gods and mortals; Not like to man is he in mind or body. All of him sees, all of him thinks and hearkens.... But mortal man made gods in his own image Like to himself in vesture, voice and body. Had they but hands, methinks, oxen and lions And horses would have made them gods like-fashioned, Horse-gods for horses, oxen-gods for oxen.’

We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as necessarily a clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a certain element of barbarity is softened or extruded, but with this gain comes loss, the loss of the element of formless, monstrous mystery. The ram-headed Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic more religious than any of the beautiful divine humanities of the Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a store of lovely motives for art, but that spirit is scarcely religious which makes of Eros a boy trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming a stone at a lizard, of Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal. Xenophanes put his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He saw that it comprised and confined the god within the limitations of the worshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not very far.

Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods few and scattered. Pausanias[679] heard at Phigaleia of a horse-headed Demeter, and again of a fish-bodied Eurynome[680] whom some called Artemis, but for the most part by the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. mixed forms, half animal, half human, belong to beings half-way between man and god, demons rather than full-fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than beneficent. Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants.

In the design from a black-figured cylix[681] in fig. 59 we have a curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On the reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, but goats, the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine-stems. On the obverse (fig. 59) we have snake-bodied nymphs rejoicing in the grape harvest. Two of them hold a basket of net or wicker in which the grapes will be gathered, a third holds a great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth plays on the double flutes.

Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape-gathering, flute-playing snake-nymphs. They are δρακοντώδεις κόραι, but assuredly they are not Erinyes and we dare not even call them Eumenides. Probably any Athenian child would have named them without a moment’s hesitation, but we must be content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites, givers of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genii of fertility. They are near akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, and we are tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in literature, he may have lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid nymphs, his daughters. Later it will be seen that earth-born goddesses, though they shed their snake-form, keep as their vehicle and attribute the snake they once were.

THE MOTHER AND THE MAID.

The gods reflect not only man’s human form but also his human relations. In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a family group of the ordinary patriarchal type, a type so familiar that it scarcely arrests attention. Zeus, Father of Gods and men, is supreme; Hera, though in constant and significant revolt, occupies the subordinate place of a wife; Poseidon is a younger brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and daughters are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant insurrection against father and mother, but still they constitute a family, and a family subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority of a father.

But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these mirror the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is quite other than patriarchal. Hera, subject in the Homeric Olympus, reigns alone at Argos; Athene at Athens is no god’s wife, she is affiliated in some loose fashion to Poseidon, but the relation is one of rivalry and ultimate conquest, nowise of subordination. At Eleusis two goddesses reign supreme, Demeter and Kore, the Mother and the Maid; neither Hades nor Triptolemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess[682] knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses:

‘First in my prayer before all other gods I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess. Next Themis on her mother’s oracular seat Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent Another Titan, daughter too of Earth, Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.’

Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus[683] tells us that Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the future was foretold him by his mother:

‘Themis she And Gaia, one in form with many names.’

In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part traced through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect another condition of things, a relationship traced through the mother, the state of society known by the awkward term matriarchal[684], a state echoed in the lost Catalogues of Women, the Eoiai of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian heroines of the Nekuia. Our modern patriarchal society focusses its religious anthropomorphism on the relationship of the father and the son; the Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the figure of the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is still in some sense subordinate to the Father and the Son.

Of the many survivals of matriarchal notions in Greek mythology one salient instance may be noted. St Augustine[685], telling the story of the rivalry between Athene and Poseidon, says that the contest was decided by the vote of the citizens, both men and women, for it was the custom then for women to take part in public affairs. The men voted for Poseidon, the women for Athene; the women exceeded the men by one and Athene prevailed. To appease the wrath of Poseidon the men inflicted on the women a triple punishment, ‘they were to lose their vote, their children were no longer to be called by their mother’s name and they themselves were no longer to be called after their goddess, Athenians.’

The myth is aetiological, and it mirrors surely some shift in the social organization of Athens. The citizens were summoned by Cecrops, and it is noticeable that with his name universal tradition associates the introduction of the patriarchal form of marriage. Athenaeus[686] quoting from Clearchos, the pupil of Aristotle, says, ‘At Athens Cecrops was the first to join one woman to one man: before connections had taken place at random and marriages were in common—hence, as some think, Cecrops was called “Twy-formed” (διφυής), since before his day people did not know who their fathers were, on account of the number (of possible parents).’ A society that had passed to patriarchy naturally misjudged the marriage-laws of matriarchy and regarded it as a mere state of promiscuity. Cecrops, tradition[687] said, was the first to call Zeus the Highest, and with the worship of Zeus the Father it is possible that he introduced the social conditions of patriarchy. Apollo, the son of Zeus, was worshipped at Athens as Patrôos.

The primitive Greek was of course not conscious that he mirrored his own human relations in the figures of his gods, but, in the reflective days of Pythagoras, the analogy between human and divine was not left unnoted. The evidence he adduces as to the piety of women is perhaps the most illuminating comment on primitive theology ever made by ancient or modern. ‘Women,’ he[688] says, ‘give to each successive stage of their life the same name as a god, they call the unmarried woman Maiden (Κόρη), the woman given in marriage to a man Bride (Νύμφη), her who has borne children Mother (Μήτηρ), and her who has borne children’s children Grandmother (Μαῖα).’ Invert the statement and we have the whole matriarchal theology in a nutshell. The matriarchal goddesses reflect the life of women, not women the life of the goddesses.

Of these various forms of the conditions of woman, woman as maiden, bride, mother and grandmother, the last, grandmother, comes little into prominence; it only lends a name to Maia, the mother of Hermes. Nymphs we have everywhere, but the two cardinal conditions are obviously to a primitive society Mother[689] and Maiden. When these conditions crystallized into the goddess forms of Demeter and Kore, they appear as Mother and Daughter, but primarily the conditions expressed are Mother and Maid, woman mature and woman before maturity, and of these two forms the Mother-form as more characteristic is, in early days, the more prominent; Kore as daughter rather than maiden is the product of mythology. When we come to the religion of Dionysos, it will be seen that the Mother-goddess has for her attribute of motherhood a son rather than a daughter.

THE EARTH-MOTHER AS KARPOPHOROS OR LADY OF THE WILD THINGS.

The Mother-goddess was almost necessarily envisaged as the Earth. The ancient Dove-priestesses at Dodona[690] were the first to chant the Litany:

‘Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be, O great Zeus. Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.’

The two lines have no necessary connection; it may be that their order is inverted and that long before the Dove-priestesses sang the praises of Zeus they had chanted their hymn to the Mother. It was fitting that women priestesses should sing to a woman goddess, to Ga who was also Ma. Mother-Earth bore not only fruits but the race of man. As the poet Asius[691] said:

‘Divine Pelasgos on the wood-clad hills Black Earth brought forth, that mortal man might be.’

Pelasgos claimed no father, but he, the first father, had a mother. And here it must be noted that the local mother must necessarily have preceded Gaia the abstract and universal. Primitive man does not tend to deal in abstractions. Each local hero claimed descent from a local earth-nymph or mother[692]. Salamis, Aegina and ‘dear mother Ida’ are not late geographical abstractions; each is a local mother, a real parent, and all are later merged in the great All-Mother Ge.

The Earth-Mother and each and every local nymph was mother not only of man but of all creatures that live; she is the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ (πότνια θηρῶν). Art brings her figure very clearly before us. On an early stamped Boeotian amphora[693] in the National Museum at Athens (figs. 60 and 61) she is vividly presented. The Great Mother stands with uplifted hands exactly in the attitude of the still earlier figures recently discovered in the Mycenaean shrine at Cnossos. To either side of her is a lion, heraldically posed like the lions of the Gate at Mycenae; below her is a frieze of deer. The figure is supported or rather encircled by two women figures, one at either side. These seem to be part of a ring of encircling worshippers[694].

The design in fig. 62 from a painted Boeotian amphora[695], also in the Museum at Athens, shows a similar and even more complete conception of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Her two lions still keep heraldic guard, above her outstretched arms are two birds[696], her gown is decorated with the figure of a great fish. We are reminded of the Eurynome of Phigalia with her fish-tailed body.

The interesting thing about these early representations, these and countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper name. We call her rightly the Great Mother and the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but farther we cannot go. She has been named Artemis and Cybele, but for neither name is there a particle of evidence.

The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. The design in fig. 63 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb in Phrygia[697]. The great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies the whole height of the back wall of the tomb. ‘All things,’ as Cicero[698] says, ‘go back to earth and rise out of the earth.’ ‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return,’ and more tenderly Aeschylus[699]:

‘Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life And rears and takes again into her womb.’

And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the _metro_polis of the dead, and therefore ‘the Athenians of old called the dead “Demeter’s people”[700].’ On the festival day of the dead, the Nekusia at Athens, they sacrificed to Earth. To a people who practised inhumation, such ritual and such symbolism were almost inevitable. When the Earth-Mother developed into the Corn-Mother, such symbolism gained new life and force from the processes of agriculture. Cicero[701] records that in his day it was still the custom to sow the graves of the dead with corn: ‘that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die[702].’ Out of the symbolism of the corn sown the Greeks did not develope a doctrine of immortality, but, when that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the seed lay ready to hand.

THE MOTHER AS KOUROTROPHOS.

Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion as Kourotrophos, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the design in fig. 64 taken from an early black-figured amphora of the 6th century B.C. in the British Museum[703]. This figure of the Mother is usually explained as Leto with the twins Apollo and Artemis, but such an interpretation is, I think, over-bold, and really misleading. The artist knows that there is a Mother-Goddess; one child would be sufficient as an attribute of motherhood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he wishes to emphasise her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can conveniently hold, one on each shoulder.

We have no right to name the children Apollo and Artemis, unless inscribed or marked as such by attributes. This is clear from the fact that, on a fragment of a vase found in the Acropolis excavations and unhappily still unpublished, we have a figure closely analogous, though later in style, to our Kourotrophos, bearing on her elbows two little naked imps who are inscribed: the one is Himeros, the other E(ros). The mother can in this case be none other than Aphrodite. The attribution is confirmed by another fragment[704] in which only half of the Mother-goddess is preserved and one child seated on her elbow; the child is not inscribed, but against the mother, in archaic letters, is written Aphrodi(te); near her as on our vase is standing Dionysos.

Pausanias[705], when examining the chest of Cypselos, saw a design on which was represented ‘a woman carrying a white boy sleeping on her right arm; on the other arm she has a black boy who is like the one who is asleep; they both have their feet twisted (ἀμφοτέρους διεστραμμένους τοὺς πόδας); the inscriptions show that the boys are Death and Sleep, and that Night is the nurse of both.’ He adds the rather surprising statement that it ‘would have been easy to see who they were without the inscriptions.’

A woman with a child on each arm can then represent Aphrodite with Himeros and Eros; if one child is white and asleep and the other black, the group represents Night with Death and Sleep; if the group is to represent Leto and her twins, there must be something to mark the twins as Apollo and Artemis. On another amphora in the British Museum[706] there does exist just the necessary differentiation: the child on the left arm is naked, the child on the right though also painted black wears a short chiton. We are justified in supposing that the one is a boy the other a girl, and there is at least a high probability that the differentiation of sex points to Apollo and Artemis.

I have dwelt on this point because vase-paintings are here, as so often, highly instructive in the matter of the development and slow differentiation and articulation of theological types. At first all is vague and misty; there is, as it were, a blank formula, a mother-goddess characterized by twins. If we give her a name at all she is Kourotrophos. As her personality grows she differentiates, she is Aphrodite with Eros and Himeros, she is Night with Sleep and Death. When Apollo and Artemis came from the North they became the twins par excellence, and they are affiliated to the old religion; the Mother as Kourotrophos became Leto with Apollo and Artemis.

The like process goes on in literature, though it is less obviously manifest. At the opening of the Thesmophoria the Woman-Herald in Aristophanes[707] makes proclamation as follows:

‘Keep solemn silence. Keep solemn silence. Pray to the two Thesmophoroi, to Demeter, and to Kore, and to Plouton, and to Kalligeneia, and to Kourotrophos, and to Hermes, and the Charites.’

Discussion from the time of the scholiast onwards has raged as to who Kourotrophos is—is she Hestia, is she Ge? The simple truth is never faced that she is Kourotrophos, an attribute become a personality. Her personality, it is true, faded before the dominant personality of the Mother of Eleusis, but her presence in the ancient ritual-formulary speaks clearly for her original actuality. Once she had faded, all the other more successful goddesses, Ge, Artemis, Hekate, Leto, Demeter, Aphrodite, even Athene, contend for her name as their epithet. There is no controversy so idle and apparently so prolific as that which seeks to find in these ancient inchoate personalities, such as Kourotrophos and Kalligeneia, the epithets of the Olympians they so long predated.

* * * * *

The figure of the Mother as Kourotrophos lent itself easily to later abstractions. Themis is one of the earliest, and she attains a real personality; her sisters Eunomia and Dike are scarcely flesh and blood, they are beautiful stately shadows. The ‘making of a goddess’ is always a mystery, the outcome of manifold causes of which we have lost count. At the close of the 5th century B.C. at the end of the weary, fatal Peloponnesian war, Eirene, Peace, almost attained godhead, and godhead as the Mother. Cephisodotos, father of Praxiteles, made for the market-place at Athens a statue of her carrying the child Ploutos, the Athenians built her an altar and did sacrifice to her, Aristophanes brings her on the stage, but it is all too late and in vain, she remains an abstraction as lifeless as Theoria or Opora, and finds no place among the humanities of Olympus.

Tyche, Fortune, another late abstraction of the Mother, though she is scarcely more human than Eirene, obtained a wide popularity. Pausanias[708] saw at Thebes a sanctuary of Tyche; he remarks after naming the artists, ‘it was a clever plan of them to put Ploutos in the arms of Tyche as his mother or nurse, and Cephisodotos was no less clever; he made for the Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos.’

These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular with the Orphics. Their very lack of personality favoured a growing philosophic monotheism. The design in fig. 65 is carved in low relief on one of the columns of the Hall of the Mystae of Dionysos, recently excavated at Melos[709]. Tyche holds a child—presumably the local Ploutos of Melos—in her arms. Above her is inscribed, ‘May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious to Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.’ Tyche, Fortune, might be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any and every city, but to the mystic she had another and a deeper meaning; she, like the Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his life and soul. In her house, as will later be seen (Chap. XI.), he lodged, observing rules of purity and abstinence before he was initiated into the underworld mysteries of Trophonios, before he drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is one of the countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the Mother or the Daughter.

DEMETER AND KORE.

So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by hunting, the figure of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ would content his imagination. But, when he became an agriculturist, the Mother-goddess must perforce be, not only Kourotrophos of all living things, but also the Corn-mother, Demeter.

The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed[710]. The most popular etymology is that which makes her Δαμήτηρ, Earth-mother, Δᾶ, which occurs in such interjections[711] as φεῦ δᾶ, οἰοῖ δᾶ, being regarded as the equivalent of Γᾶ. From the point of view of meaning this etymology is nowise satisfactory. Demeter is not the Earth-Mother, not the goddess of the earth in general, but of the fruits of the civilized, cultured earth, the tilth; not the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but She-who-bears-fruits, Karpophoros. Mannhardt was the first to point out another etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author of the Etymologicon Magnum[712], after stringing together a whole series of senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like the truth. ‘Deo,’ he says, ‘may be derived from τὰς δηάς, for barley grains are called by the Cretans δηαί.’ The Cretan word δηαί is near akin to the ordinary Greek ζειά, the word used for a coarse wheat or spelt; the fruitful field in Homer[713] bears the epithet ζείδωρος, ‘spelt-yielding.’ Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 565), probably came from Crete, and brought her name with her; she is the Earth, but only in this limited sense, as ‘Grain-Mother.’

To the modern mind it is surprising to find the processes of agriculture conducted in the main by women, and mirroring themselves in the figures of women-goddesses. But in days when man was mainly concerned with hunting and fighting it was natural enough that agriculture and the ritual attendant on it should fall to the women. Moreover to this social necessity was added, and still is among many savage communities, a deep-seated element of superstition. ‘Primitive man,’ Mr Payne[714] observes, ‘refuses to interfere in agriculture; he thinks it magically dependent for success on woman, and connected with child-bearing.’ ‘When the women plant maize,’ said the Indian to Gumilla, ‘the stalk produces two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. They only know how to plant corn to ensure its germinating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we know.’ Such seems to have been the mind of the men of Athens who sent their wives and daughters to keep the Thesmophoria and work their charms and ensure fertility for crops and man.

It was mainly in connection with agriculture, it would seem, that the Earth-goddess developed her double form as Mother and Maid. The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ is both in one or perhaps not consciously either, but at Eleusis the two figures are clearly outlined; Demeter and Kore are two persons though one god. They take shape very charmingly in the design in fig. 66, from an early red-figured skyphos[715], found at Eleusis. To the left Demeter stands, holding in her left hand her sceptre, while with her right she gives the corn-ears to her nursling, Triptolemos, who holds his ‘crooked plough.’ Behind is Kore, the maiden, with her simple chiton for dress, and her long flowing hair, and the torches she holds as Queen of the underworld. Mother and Maid in this picture are clearly distinguished, but not infrequently, when both appear together, it is impossible to say which is which.

* * * * *

The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses, whether Mother or Maid, to the male figures that accompany them is one altogether noble and womanly, though perhaps not what the modern mind holds to be feminine. It seems to halt somewhere half-way between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they choose a local hero for their own to inspire and protect. They ask of him, not that he should love or adore, but that he should do great deeds. Hera has Jason, Athene Perseus, Herakles and Theseus, Demeter and Kore Triptolemos. And as their glory is in the hero’s high deeds, so their grace is his guerdon. With the coming of patriarchal conditions this high companionship ends. The women goddesses are sequestered to a servile domesticity, they become abject and amorous.

It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the Earth or Corn-goddess are not Mother and Daughter, but Mother and Maiden, Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the older and younger form of the same person, hence their easy confusion. The figures of the Mother and Daughter are mythological rather than theological, i.e. they arise from the story-telling instinct:

‘Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing, She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king Aïdoneus seized, by Zeus’ decree. He found her, as she played Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn with golden blade[716].’

The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. Aetiology is ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the young fruit of the earth, was caught by a lover, kept for a season, and in the spring-time returns to her mother; the mother is comforted, and the earth blossoms again[717]:

‘Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy field, And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings And taught them, Triptolemos first.’

Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold of the truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate[718] in fig. 67 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or Maid it is difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She is a great goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high polos on her head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch; before her is an omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pomegranate—is she Demeter or Persephone? I incline to think she is both in one; the artist has not differentiated her.

The dead, according to Plutarch’s[719] statement, were called by the Athenians ‘Demeter’s people.’ The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the tombs of Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But in Greece proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and the Maid take mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and her daughter Persephone, their individual functions tend more and more to specialize. Demeter becomes more and more agricultural, more and more the actual corn. As Plutarch[720] observes—with full consciousness of the anomalous blend of the human and the physical—a poet can say of the reapers:

‘What time men shear to earth Demeter’s limbs.’

The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual—the Mother is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of the underworld.

Demeter as Thesmophoros has for her sphere more and more the things of this life, laws and civilized marriage; she grows more and more human and kindly, goes more and more over to the humane Olympians, till in the Homeric Hymn she, the Earth-Mother, is an actual denizen of Olympus. The Daughter, at first but the young form of the mother, is in maiden fashion sequestered, even a little farouche; she withdraws herself more and more to the kingdom of the spirit, the things below and beyond:

‘She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born, Forgets the earth her mother, The life of fruits and corn. And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn.’

And in that kingdom aloof her figure waxes as the figure of the Mother wanes:

‘O daughter of earth, my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, I am also I also thy brother, I go as I came unto earth.’

She passes to a place unknown of the Olympians, her kingdom is not of this world.

‘Thou art more than the Gods, who number the days of our temporal breath, For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, Death.’

All this is matter of late development. At first we have merely the figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, the Two Despoinae. Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in Arcadia[721] she is at once Erinys and Lousia. But it is not surprising that, as will later be seen, a religion like Orphism, which concerned itself with the abnegation of this world and the life of the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure of the underworld Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to make her way alone into Olympus.

THE ANODOS OF THE MAIDEN EARTH-GODDESSES.

In discussing the Boeotian plate (fig. 67), it has been seen that it is not easy always to distinguish in art the figures of the Mother and the Maid. A like difficulty attends the interpretation of the series of curious representations of the earth-goddess now to be considered (figs. 68-72).

We begin with the vase-painting in fig. 68, where happily an inscription makes the interpretation certain. The design is from a red-figured krater, now in the Albertinum Museum at Dresden[722]. To the right is a conventional earth-mound (χῶμα γῆς). In front of it stands Hermes. He holds not his kerykeion, but a rude forked rhabdos. It was with the rhabdos, it will be remembered (p. 44), that he summoned the souls from the grave-pithos. Here, too, he is present as Psychagogos; he has come to summon an earth-spirit, nay more, the Earth-goddess herself. Out of the artificial mound, which symbolizes the earth itself, rises the figure of a woman. At first sight we might be inclined to call her Ge, the Earth-Mother, but the figure is slight and maidenly, and over her happily is written (Phe)rophatta. It is the Anodos of Kore—the coming of the goddess is greeted by an ecstatic dance of goat-horned Panes. They are not Satyrs: these, as will later be seen (p. 380), are horse demons. By the early middle of the 5th century B.C., the date of this red-figured vase, the worship of the Arcadian Pan was well-established at Athens, and the goat-men, the Panes, became the fashionable and fitting attendants of the Earth-Maiden. The inscriptions above their heads can, unfortunately, not be read.

A vase of much later date (fig. 69) shows us substantially the same scene. The design is from a red-figured krater[723] in the Berlin Antiquarium. The goddess again rises from an artificial mound decorated with sprays of foliage. The attendant figures are different. A goat-legged Pan leans eagerly over the mound, but Dionysos himself, with his thyrsos, sits quietly waiting the Anodos, and with him are his real attendants, the horse-tailed Satyrs. In the left-hand corner a little winged Love-god plays on the double flutes. The rising goddess is not inscribed, and she is best left unnamed. She is an Earth-goddess, but the presence of Dionysos makes us suspect that there is some reminiscence of Semele (p. 407). The presence of the Love-god points, as will be explained later (Chap. XII.), to the influence of Orphism.

More curious, more instructive, but harder completely to explain, is the design in fig. 70, from a black-figured lekythos in the Bibliothèque Nationale[724] at Paris. The colossal head and lifted hands of a woman are rising out of the earth. This time there is no artificial mound, the scene takes place in a temple or sanctuary, indicated by the two bounding columns. Two men, not Satyrs, are present, and this time not as idle spectators. Both are armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them strikes the head of the rising woman.

Some possible light is thrown on this difficult vase by the consideration of two others. First we have two designs from the obverse and reverse of an amphora[725], shown together in fig. 71. On the obverse to the left we have a scene fairly familiar, a goddess rising from the ground, watched by a youth, who holds in his hand some sort of implement, either a pick or a hammer. The meaning of the reverse design is conjectural. A man, short of stature and almost deformed in appearance, looks at a curious and problematic figure, half woman and half vase, set on a quadrangular basis. Before it, if the drawing be correct, is a spiked crown; round about, in the field, a number of rosettes. A design so problematic is not likely to be a forgery. Before its meaning is conjectured, another vase, whose interpretation is perfectly clear and certain, remains to be considered. Its meaning may serve to elucidate the others.

The design in fig. 72 is from a red-figured amphora[726] of the finest period, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. At a first glance, when we see the splendid figure rising from the ground with outstretched arms, the man with the hammer and Hermes attendant, we think that we have the familiar scene of the rising of Kore or Ge. As such, had no inscriptions existed, the design would certainly have been interpreted. But, as it happens, each figure is carefully inscribed. To the left Zeus, next to him Hermes, next Epimetheus, and last, not Ge or Kore, but Pandora. Over Pandora, to greet her uprising, hovers a Love-god with a fillet in his outstretched hands.

Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts. This is made doubly sure by another representation of her birth or rather her making. On the well-known Bale-cylix of the British Museum[727] Pandora, half statue half woman, has just been modelled by Hephaistos, and Athene is in the act of decking her. Pandora she certainly is, but against her is written her other name (A)nesidora[728], ‘she who sends up gifts.’ Pandora is a form or title of the Earth-goddess in the Kore form, entirely humanized and vividly personified by mythology.

* * * * *

In the light of this substantial identity of Pandora and the Earth-Kore, it is possible perhaps to offer an explanation of the problematic vase in fig. 71. Have we not on obverse and reverse a juxtaposition of the two scenes, the Rise of Kore, the Making of Pandora? On this showing the short deformed man would be Hephaistos, and Pandora, half woman half vase, may be conceived as issuing from her once famous pithos.

The contaminatio of the myths of the Making of Pandora and the Anodos of Kore may explain also another difficulty. In the making and moulding of Pandora, Hephaistos the craftsman uses his characteristic implement, the hammer[729]. This hammer he also uses to break open the head of Zeus, in representations of the birth of Athene (p. 366). On vases with the Anodos of Kore the Satyrs or Panes carry and use sometimes an ordinary pick, sometimes a hammer, like the hammer of Hephaistos. The pick is the natural implement for breaking clods of earth, the spade appears to have been unknown before the iron age—the hammers have always presented a difficulty. May they not have arisen in connection with the myth of the making of Pandora, and then, by confusion, passed to the Anodos of Kore?

Finally, returning to the difficult design in fig. 70, I would offer another suggestion. The fact that the scene takes place in a sanctuary seems to me to indicate that we have here a representation of some sort of mimetic ritual. The Anodos of Kore was, as has already been seen (p. 131), dramatized at certain festivals; exactly how we do not know. At the festival of the Charila (p. 107) a puppet dressed as a girl was brought out, beaten, and ultimately hanged in a chasm. Is it not possible that at some festival of the Earth-goddess there was a mimetic enactment of the Anodos, that the earth or some artificially-formed chasm was broken open by picks, and that a puppet or a real woman emerged. It is more likely, I think, that the vase-painter had some such scene in his mind than that the Satyrs with their picks or hammers represent the storm and lightning from heaven beating on the earth to subdue it and compel its fertility[730]. At Megara, near the Prytaneion, Pausanias[731] saw ‘a rock which was called Anaklethra[732], “Calling Up,” because Demeter, if anyone like to believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, called her up there.’ He adds, ‘the women of Megara to this day perform rites that are analogous to the legend told.’ Unhappily he does not tell us what these rites were. Lucian devotes a half-serious treatise to discussing the scope and merits of pantomimic dancing, Xenophon[733] in his Banquet lets us see that educated guests after dinner preferred the acting of a myth to the tumbling of a dancing girl, but the actual ritual pantomime of the ancients is to us a sealed book. Of one thing we may be sure, that the ‘things done’ (δρώμενα) of ritual helped to intensify mythological impersonation as much as, or perhaps more than, the ‘things spoken’ (ἔπη) of the poet.

PANDORA.

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes[734] she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic—matter for the oracles of ‘Bakis.’ The prophet instructing Peisthetairos reads from his script:

‘First to Pandora sacrifice a white-fleeced ram.’

The scholiast gives the correct and canonical interpretation ‘to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life.’ By his time, and long before, explanation was necessary. Hipponax[735] knew of her; Athenaeus, in his discussion of cabbages, quotes from memory the mysterious lines:

‘He grovelled, worshipping the seven-leaved cabbage To which Pandora sacrificed a cake At the Thargelia for a pharmakos.’

The passage, though obscure, is of interest because it connects Pandora the Earth-goddess with the Thargelia, the festival of the first-fruits of the Earth. Effaced in popular ritual she emerges in private superstition. Philostratos[736], in his Life of Apollonius, tells how a certain man, in need of money to dower his daughter, ‘sacrificed’ to Earth for treasure, and Apollonius, to whom he confided his desire, said, ‘Earth and I will help you,’ and he prayed to Pandora, sought in a garden, and found the desired treasure.

* * * * *

Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus. On a late, red-figured krater in the British Museum[737], obviously inspired by Hesiod, we have the scene of her birth. She no longer rises halfway from the ground, but stands stiff and erect in the midst of the Olympians. Zeus is there seated with sceptre and thunderbolt, Poseidon is there, Iris and Hermes and Ares and Hera, and Athene about to crown the new-born maiden. Earth is all but forgotten, and yet so haunting is tradition that, in a lower row, beneath the Olympians, a chorus of men, disguised as goat-horned Panes, still dance their welcome. It is a singular reminiscence, and, save as a survival, wholly irrelevant.

Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends; he tells it twice. Once in the Theogony[738], and here the new-born maiden has no name, she is just a ‘beautiful evil,’ a ‘crafty snare’ to mortals. But in the Works and Days[739] he dares to name her and yet with infinite skill to wrest her glory into shame:

‘He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord, For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair, And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair. And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet, The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of spring, While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything. Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place, Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways. He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice, Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her this was his choice, PANDORA, because in Olympus the gods joined together then And all of them gave her, a gift, a sorrow, to covetous men.’

Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself by the vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of theological animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest[740]:

‘He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.’

Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming retrogression, is a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to women a false because a magical prestige. With patriarchy came inevitably the facing of a real fact, the fact of the greater natural weakness of women. Man the stronger, when he outgrew his belief in the magical potency of woman, proceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave her as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non-natural, mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger had a need, real and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature had from the outset compelled a certain recognition of this truth, but that the physical was a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard saying, and its understanding was not granted to the Greek, save here and there where a flicker of the truth gleamed and went through the vision of philosopher or poet.

* * * * *

So the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, suffered eclipse: she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman; she opened her great grave-pithos[741], she that was Mother of Life; the Keres fluttered forth, bringing death and disease;—only Hope remained. Strangely enough, when the great figure of the Earth-Mother re-emerges, she re-emerges, it will later be seen, as Aphrodite.

THE MAIDEN-TRINITIES.

So far we have seen that a goddess, to the primitive Greek, took twofold form, and this twofold form, shifting and easily interchangeable, is seen to resolve itself very simply into the two stages of a woman’s life, as Maiden and Mother. But Greek religion has besides the twofold Mother and Maiden a number of triple forms, Women-Trinities, which at first sight are not so readily explicable. We find not only three Gorgons and three Graiae, but three Semnae, three Moirae, three Charites, three Horae, three Agraulids, and, as a multiple of three, nine Muses.

First it should be noted that the trinity-form is confined to the women goddesses. Greek religion had in Zeus and Apollo the figures of the father and the son, but of a male trinity we find no trace. Zeus and Apollo, incomers from the North, stand alone in this matter of relationship. We do not find the fatherhood of Poseidon emphasized, nor the sonship of Hermes; there is no wide and universal development of the father and the son as there was of the Mother and the Maiden. Dualities and trinities alike seem to be characteristic of the old matriarchal goddesses.

Evidence is not lacking that the trinity-form grew out of the duality. Plutarch[742] notes as one of the puzzling things at Delphi which required looking into, that two Moirae were worshipped there, whereas everywhere else three were canonical. It has already been seen (p. 242) that the number of the Semnae varied between two and three, and that, as three was the ultimate canonical number, we might fairly suppose the number two to have been the earlier. It is the same with the Charites. Pausanias[743] was told in Boeotia that Eteocles not only was ‘the first who sacrificed to the Charites,’ but, further, he ‘instituted three Charites.’ The names Eteocles gave to his three Charites the Boeotians did not remember. This is unfortunate, as Orchomenos was the most ancient seat of the worship of the Charites; their images there were natural stones that fell to Eteocles from heaven. Pausanias goes on to note that ‘among the Lacedaemonians two Charites only were worshipped; their names were Kleta and Phaenna. The Athenians also from ancient days worshipped two Charites, by name Auxo and Hegemone.’ Later it appears they fell in with the prevailing fashion, for ‘in front of the entrance to the Acropolis there were set up the images of three Charites.’ The ancient Charites at Orchomenos, at Sparta, at Athens, were two, and it may be conjectured that they took form as the Mother and the Maid.

The three daughters of Cecrops[744] are by the time of Euripides ‘maidens threefold’; the three daughters of Erechtheus[745], who are but their later doubles, are a ‘triple yoke of maidens,’ and yet—in the case of the daughters of Cecrops—there is ample evidence[746] that originally they were two, and these two probably a mother and a maid. Aglauros and Pandrosos are definite personalities; they had regular precincts and shrines, known in historical times, Aglauros on the north slope of the Acropolis[747], where the maidens danced, Pandrosos to the west of the Erechtheion[748]. But of a shrine, precinct, or sanctuary of Herse we have no notice. Ovid[749] probably felt the difficulty; he lodges Herse in a chamber midway between Aglauros and Pandrosos. The women of Athens swore by Aglauros and more rarely by Pandrosos[750]. Aglauros, by whom they swore most frequently, and who gave her name to the Agraulids, was probably the earlier and mother-form. Herse was no good even to swear by; she is the mere senseless etymological eponym of the festival of the Hersephoria, a third sister added to make up the canonical triad. The Hersephoria out of which she is made was not in her honour; it was celebrated to Athene, to Pandrosos, to Ge, to Themis, to Eileithyia.

The women trinities rose out of dualities, but not every duality became a trinity. Plutarch[751], in discussing the origin of the nine Muses, notes that we have not three Demeters, or three Athenes, or three Artemises. He touches unconsciously on the reason why some dualities resisted the impulse to become trinities. Where personification had become complete, as in the case of Demeter and Kore, or of their doubles, Damia and Auxesia, no third figure could lightly be added. Where the divine pair were still in flux, still called by merely adjectival titles that had not crystallized into proper names, a person more or less mattered little. Thus we have a trinity of Semnae, of Horae, of Moirae, but the Thesmophoroi, who as Thesmophoroi might have easily passed into a trinity, remain always, because of the clear outlines of Demeter and Kore, a duality.

When we ask what was the impulse to the formation of trinities, the answer is necessarily complex. Many strands seem to have gone to their weaving.

* * * * *

First, and perhaps foremost, in the ritual of the lower stratum, of the dead and of chthonic powers, three was, for some reason that escapes us, a sacred number[752]. The dead were thrice invoked; sacrifice was offered to them on the third day; the mourning in some parts of Greece lasted three days; the court of the Areopagus, watched over by deities of the underworld, sat, as has been seen (p. 242), on three days; at the three ways the threefold Hecate of the underworld was worshipped. It was easy and natural that threefold divinities should arise to keep ward over a ritual so constituted. When the powers of the underworld came to preside over agriculture, the transition from two to three seasons would tend in the same direction. For two seasons a duality was enough—the Mother for the fertile summer, the Maid for the sterile winter—but, when the seasons became three, a trinity was needed, or at least would be welcomed.

Last, the influence of art must not be forgotten. A central figure of the mother, with her one daughter, composes ill. Archaic art loved heraldic groupings, and for these two daughters were essential. Such compositions as that on the Boeotian amphora in fig. 60 might easily suggest a trinity[753].

* * * * *

Once the triple form established, it is noticeable that in Greek mythology the three figures are always regarded as maiden goddesses, not as mothers. They may have taken their rise in the Mother and the Maid, but the Mother falls utterly away. The Charites, the Moirae, the Horae, are all essentially maidens. The reverse is the case in Roman religion; trinities of women goddesses of fertility occur frequently in very late Roman art, but they are Matres, Mothers[754]. Three Mothers are rather heavy, and do not dance well.

In the archaic votive relief[755] in fig. 73 we have the earliest sculptured representation of the maiden trinity extant. Had the relief been uninscribed, we should have been at a loss how to name the three austere figures. Two carry fruits, and one a wreath. They might be Charites or Eumenides, or merely nymphs. Most happily the sculptor has left no doubt. He has written against them Κορας Σοτιας, ‘Sotias (dedicated) the Korai’ the Maidens.’ Sotias has massed the three stately figures very closely together; he is reverently conscious that though they are three persons, yet they are but one goddess. He is half monotheist.

The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in the relief[756] in fig. 74, found during the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations in the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of the relief is occupied by two figures of Panes, with attendant goats; between them an altar. The Panes are twofold, not because they are father and son, but because there were two caves of Pan, and the god is thought of as dwelling in each. After the battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was established in the ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids; by the time of Euripides[757], Pan is thought of as host and they as guests:

‘O seats of Pan and rock hard by To where the hollow Long Rocks lie, Where before Pallas’ temple-bound Agraulos’ daughters three go round Upon their grassy dancing-ground To nimble reedy staves, When thou, O Pan, art piping found Within thy shepherd caves.’

But Pan was a new-comer; the Agraulids were there from the beginning, as early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy though he is with Pan, the new-comer, the artist cannot, may not forget the triple maidens. He figures them in the upper frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that though three they are one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a threefold goddess, a Hecate[758].

But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more and more forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by Hermes in the dance; by Hermes Charidotes, whose worship as the young male god of fertility, of flocks and herds, was so closely allied to that of the Charites.

There is no more frequent type of votive relief[759] than that of which an instance is given in fig. 75. The cave of Pan is the scene, Pan himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, dance. The cave, the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, but the ancient dwellers there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. As a rule the reliefs are not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedication ‘to the Nymphs.’ The personality of the Agraulids has become shadowy, they are merely Maidens or Brides.

The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, paled before the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing attendant maidens; but sometimes, in the myths told of these very Olympians, it is possible to trace the reflection of the older potencies. A very curious instance is to be found in the familiar story[760] of the ‘Judgment of Paris,’ a story whose development and decay are so instructive that it must be examined in some detail.

THE ‘JUDGMENT OF PARIS.’

The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to please the taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar enough to make material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern opera-bouffe.

‘Goddesses three to Ida came Immortal strife to settle there— Which was the fairest of the three, And which the prize of beauty should wear.’

The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it was written, ‘Let the fair one take it,’ or, according to some authorities, ‘The apple for the fair one[761].’ The three high goddesses betake them for judgment to the king’s son, the shepherd Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according to this version, a καλλιστεῖον, a beauty-contest.

On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that remain, is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 76 is from a late red-figured krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[762]. Paris, dressed as a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is telling of his mission. Grouped around, the three goddesses prepare for the beauty-contest in characteristic fashion. Hera needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes well satisfied in a mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a Love-God fastens ‘a bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athene, watched only by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and, clean-hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown about her, and has—a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone when she cries:

‘“O Paris, Give it to Pallas!” but he heard me not, Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!’

It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a beauty-contest, the apple is absent.

It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds in her hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design in fig. 77, from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[763]. Fruit and flowers are held indifferently by one or all of the goddesses, and the reason will presently become clear. In the present case Hera holds a fruit, in fig. 81 the two last goddesses hold each a fruit. In fig. 77, against both Aphrodite and Hera, is inscribed Καλή, ‘Beautiful,’ and before the blinding beauty of the goddesses Paris veils his face. The inscription Χαρμίδης enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of the 5th cent. B.C.

Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in fig. 78 from a patera[764] in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. The three goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the centre one only distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow Hermes into the presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest alarm. In the curious design[765] in fig. 79, Hermes actually seizes Paris by the wrist to compel his attendance. There is here clearly no question of voluptuous delight at the beauty of the goddesses. The three maiden figures are scrupulously alike; each carries a wreath. Discrimination would be a hard task. The figures are placed closely together, as in the representation of the Maidens in fig. 73.

Finally, in fig. 80, a design from a black-figured amphora[766], we have the type most frequent of all; Hermes leads the three goddesses, but in the Judgment of Paris no figure of Paris is present. Without exaggeration it may be said that in three out of four representations of the ‘Judgment’ in black-figured vase-paintings the protagonist is absent. The scene takes the form of a simple procession, Hermes leading the three goddesses.

This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist who has examined the art types of the ‘Judgment.’ It has been variously explained. At a time when vase-paintings were supposed to have had literary sources, it was usual to attempt a literary explanation. Attention was called to the fact that Proklos[767], in his excerpts of the Kypria, noted that the goddesses, ‘by command of Zeus were led to Ida by Hermes’; of this leading it was then supposed that the vase-paintings were ‘illustrations.’ Such methods of interpretation are now discredited; no one supposes that the illiterate vase-painter worked with the text of the Kypria before him. Art had its own traditions.

Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. ‘Archaic art,’ we are told, ‘loved processions.’ Archaic art, concerned to fill the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed ‘love processions,’ but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, and it loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In depicting other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story in the terms of an inappropriate procession; it is indeed largely governed by traditional form, but not to the extent of tolerating needless obscurity. The ‘Judgment’ is a situation essentially stationary, with Paris for centre; Hermes is subordinate.

We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain effort of the imagination to conceive of the myth embodied otherwise. But, if we shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the natural lucid way of depicting the myth would be something after this fashion: Paris in the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, to whom he speaks or hands the apple or a crown; behind him, to indicate neglect, the two defeated goddesses; Hermes anywhere, to indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a form does indeed appear later, when the vase-painter thought for himself and shook himself free of the dominant tradition. The procession form, as we have it, was not made for the myth, it was merely adapted and taken over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ‘Did not the myth itself in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art form in which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was not?’ That form was the ancient type of Hermes leading the three Korai or Charites. In the design in fig. 80, the centre figure Athene is differentiated by her tall helmet and her aegis. Athene is the first of the goddesses to be differentiated—and why? She was not victorious, but the vase-painter is an Athenian, and he is concerned for the glory of ἡ Ἀθηναία Κόρη, the Maiden of Athens.

In the design in fig. 81, from a black-figured amphora in the Berlin Museum[768], the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds a flower, the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. Hermes, their leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep—irrelevant for the herald of the gods on his way to Ida, significant for the leader of the Charites, the god of the increase of flocks and herds. Does the picture represent a ‘Judgment,’ or Hermes and the Charites? Who knows? The doubt is here, as often, more instructive than certainty.

From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, that the ‘Judgment of Paris’[769] is really based on Hermes and the Charites, but literary evidence confirms the view. The Κρίσις, the Decision, of Paris is always as much a Choice as a Judgment; a Choice somewhat like that invented for Heracles by the philosopher Prodicus, though at once more spontaneous and more subtle than that rather obvious effort at edification. The particular decision is associated in legend with the name of a special hero, of one particular ‘young man moving to and fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight[770].’ It is an anguish of hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest tragedy of Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice was there. The exact elements of the Choice vary in different versions. Athene is sometimes Wisdom and sometimes War. But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur; Athene is Prowess; Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the ‘young man’ to decide? Which of the three is fairest? Or whose gifts he desires the most? It matters not at all, for both are different ways of saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and Roman, degrade the story into a beauty-contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses, vulgar in itself and complicated by bribery still more vulgar. But early versions scarcely distinguish the goddesses from the gifts they bring. There is no difference between them except the difference of their gifts. They are Charites, Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the Greek put it, their gifts are their σημεῖα, their tokens. And Hermes had led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as mere Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little reflection to see that Χάρις often wars against Χάρις, and that if one be chosen, others must be rejected[771].

* * * * *

As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the myth of the daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not rivals; and with them comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is significant. Homer tells the story by the mouth of Penelope[772]:

‘Their father and their mother dear died by the gods’ high doom, The maidens were left orphans alone within their home; Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see, And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s artifice.’

The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer the Maiden above all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus[773]. He puts the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a prayer to Artemis.

It is curious and significant that the early vase-painter, in dealing with the story of the daughters of Pandareos, knows of three goddesses only. The design in fig. 82 is from the lid of a pyxis, of early black-figured style, in a private collection at Athens[774]. The vase-painter is concerned mainly with the story of the theft of the great golden dog of Crete. He makes the dog of supernatural size, with a splendid high-curled tail. Pandareos has stolen it, and the theft has been discovered by Hermes, who comes hurriedly up to seize the prize. Pandareos[775] is just making off in eager haste. His two daughters, quaintly enveloped in one cloak to show their close relationship, stand by. Behind Hermes, with his huge kerykeion, come in familiar procession the three ancient maidens—Aphrodite with a wreath, her hair arrayed in a quaint twisted pigtail; Hera with a ram-headed sceptre; Athene with a helmet nearly as big as herself. The goddesses have come a little proleptically; Pandareos is still there, the maidens are not yet ‘alone within their home,’ but the vase-painter wants to tell all he knows, and, not being inspired by Homer, he is faithful to the old three goddesses. Artemis is—nowhere[776].

But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he represented, the figure of Artemis waxes more and more dominant, and this especially by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, Aphrodite. In the Hippolytus of Euripides they are set face to face in their eternal enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue of two moral ideals, but the human drama is played out against the shadowy background of an ancient racial theomachy, the passion of the South against the cold purity of the North.

Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the figure of Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of the ancient maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, clean strength. An epigram[777] to her honour in the Anthology is worth noting, because it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the maidenhood of the worshipper mirrors itself in the worship of a maiden, whether of the South or of the North:

‘Maid of the Mere, Timaretè here brings, Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings, Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all, Hold, Leto’s Child, above Timaretè Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.’

* * * * *

It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable task to take each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess assumed and examine it in turn, to enquire into the rise and development of each local Kore, of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, of Hecate, of Bendis and the like. Instead it will be necessary to confine ourselves to the three great dominant Korai of the ‘Judgment,’ Hera, Athene and Aphrodite.

ATHENE.

The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader’s mind, whether two of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim to the title maiden. Happily in the case of Athene no such difficulty arises. She is the Parthenos, the maiden; her temple is the maiden-chamber, the Parthenon; natural motherhood she steadfastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of heroes after the old matriarchal fashion; Ge, the real mother, bears Erichthonios, and Athene nurtures him to manhood; she bears the like relationship to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles (Ἡρακλέους κόρη[778]).

Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form of her name Athenaia is purely adjectival[779], she is the Athenian one, the Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato[780] in the Laws sees clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the incarnation of Athens, though, after the fashion of his day, he inverts cause and effect; he makes the worshipper in the image of the worshipped. Speaking of the armed Athene, he says, ‘and methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells among us, joying her in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play with empty hands, but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished her dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens should imitate her.’ It was she who imitated her youths and maidens, she who was the very incarnation of their life and being, dancing in armour as they danced, fighting when they fought, born of her father’s head when they were reborn as the children of Reason and Light.

Athene’s other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is the Kore of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of the clan of the Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus; later their male eponym was Pallas[781]:

‘Pallas had for lot The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears A brood of giants.’

The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the maiden. Suidas in defining the word says, ‘a great maiden, and it is an epithet of Athene.’ More expressly Strabo[782], in discussing the cults of Egyptian Thebes, says, ‘To Zeus, whom they worship above all other divinities, a maiden of peculiar beauty and illustrious family is dedicated; such maidens the Greeks call Pallades.’ This local Pallas had for her dominion the ancient court of the Palladium; her image as Pallas, not as Athene, was carried in procession by the epheboi[783]; but with the subjection of her clan her figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia. Pallas became a mere adjectival praenomen to Athene, as Phoebus to Apollo. It may be conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was resident on the Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably of sacred association to a local clan long before the dominance of the Acropolis; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae[784] hail the goddess:

‘I welcome Pallas’ fellowship.’

In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though unconsciously, true to fact.

To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the history of the city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they can be severed, its political rather than its religious developement. At first the maiden of the elder stratum, she has to contend for supremacy with a god of that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the late Mr R. A. Neil[785] has shown, was the god of the ancient aristocracy of Athens, an aristocracy based, as they claimed descent from Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The rising democracy not unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore, but in reviving her they strangely altered her being and reft from her much of her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos of Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she remains manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in fact, the Tyche, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, ‘immortal mistress of a band of lovers[786]’:

‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown But a head-band to wear Of violets one-hued with her hair, For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births they bear,’

a city,

‘Based on a crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.’

Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct from Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brain of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour:

‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s head,’

but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn[787] writer surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressiveness, yet it never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him Reason, Light and Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun:

‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed His galloping steeds for a space.’

The event is of cosmic import:

‘High Olympus reeled At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide Suddenly.’

Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus is glad,’ but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, theatrical show, and through it all we feel and resent the theological intent. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang; always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial[788]:

‘There is no mother bore me for her child, I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage), Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’

Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into a non-human, unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the art of the simple conservative vase-painter remembered humbler beginnings. The design in fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron in the Museum at Breslau[789]. In the centre of the design, Herakles is engaged in slaying a Hydra with an unusually large number of heads. Iolaos comes up from the right to engage some of the heads, the charioteer of Iolaos, Lapythos, waits in the chariot. Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning of the 6th century B.C. ‘Athena,’ the Maiden of Herakles, has also come up (to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just behind her, perched on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had there been no inscription we should at once have named it a ‘decorative Siren,’ but against the woman-headed bird is clearly written Ϝοῦς. At first sight the inscription does not seem to help much, but happily the lexicographers enable us to explain the word[790]. The Etymologicon Magnum tells us that by πώυγγες are meant αἴθυιαι, and that another form of the word was βοῦγγες. Hesychius merely states that the πῶυξ is ‘a kind of bird,’ and refers us to Aristotle[791] ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form φῶυξ. It seems clear that the Ϝοῦς of the Corinthian vase is a variant form of a name given to the Diver-bird.

The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth is not far remote from Megara. Pausanias[792], in discussing the genealogies of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to Megara. There he fell sick and died, and by the sea in the territory of Megara is his tomb, on a cliff which is called the cliff of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the Diver-bird. Bird myths haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela, Itys and Tereus[793] all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a regular cult at his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared, and the story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting a grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he makes Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of Ajax and her own empty prayers[794]:

‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’

Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman-headed bird in fig. 83, the conclusion seems inevitable that we have in her an early local form of Athene. The vase-painter had advanced to an anthropomorphic conception of the goddess, so he draws her in full human form as Athene, but he is haunted by the remembrance of the Megarian Diver, Aithuia, so he adds her figure, half as the double of Athene (hence the parallelism of attitude), half as attendant, and calls her Ϝοῦς. Athene on the Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that still at evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of the Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable would naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her vehicle and later her attribute: at seaside Megara the diver, at Athens the owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as Megara, and adds for completeness a little owl.

The design in fig. 84 is from a black-figured lekythos in a private collection in Sicily[795]. The scene represents Cassandra flying from Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To the left stands old King Priam, in helpless anguish. The notable point about the scene is that Athene, who, statue though she be, is apparently about to move to the rescue, has sent as her advance guard her sacred animal, a great snake. The snake is clearly regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the goddess. Just such a snake did Chryse, another local Kore, send out against the intruder Philoctetes[796], and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles expressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. This ‘house-guarding snake,’ we may conjecture, was the earliest form of every earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine statue of Pheidias, it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition said it was the earth-born hero Erichthonios, fostered by the goddess. But almost certainly this guardian snake was primarily the guardian genius and fate of the city, before that genius or fate emerged to the status of godhead. When the Persians besieged the citadel, Herodotus[797] says, the guardian snake left the honey cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and, ‘when the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had abandoned the citadel.’

The design in fig. 85 is from a late red-figured lekythos in the National Museum at Athens[798]. The scene represented is a reminiscence of the Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is present, Athene, and by her side, equal in height and majesty, a great snake. The artist seems dimly conscious that the snake is somehow the double of Athene[799]. To the left is the figure of a woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring the little xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen.

Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase-paintings she still appears with wings. On the obverse of the black-figured cup[800] in fig. 86 the artist gives her wings: but for her helmet we might have called her an Erinys. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene is specially concerned to slough off all traces of primitive origin, she lays suspicious emphasis on the fact that she can fly without wings[801]:

‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings, Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’

On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art type of a divinity might remain in flux.

APHRODITE.

The next of the three ‘Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. A doubt perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore she is in her eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She is rather Nymphe the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order; she is never wife, never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. In the lovely Homeric hymn it is clear that her will is for love, not marriage. Admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt foolish and futile is made to attach her to one husband, the craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her other name as his bride is Charis[802]. She is the Charis of physical beauty incarnate.

In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, barely tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like the other alien, Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. Her Homeric titles, Kypris and Kythereia, show that originally and locally she is goddess of the island South, never really at home in the cold austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell. She has about her too much of the physical joy of life ever to find an abiding home far from the sunshine.

Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is in Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human passion. The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they tend to be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the influence of literature conjointly bring together a number of local divinities, perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide functions and attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who locally was Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one element; Hermes, who at home had dominion over flocks and herds and all life and growth, becomes merely a herald.

Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may suspect, gone on in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It would be rash to assert that she was primarily an earth-goddess, but certain traits in her cult and character show clearly that she had analogies with the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Fertile animals belong to her, especially the dove and the goat, the dove probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine recently discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses, a quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears on her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand years B.C., may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the cylindrical bodies of other similar figures snakes are coiled, as though to mark an earth-goddess. In those early days differentiation was not sharply marked, and as yet we dare not give to these early divinities Olympian names.

At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the charming relief in fig. 87[803], a relief which from its style must date about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is seated Demeter-like upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as Queen. Worshippers approach, man and wife and children. The offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove, mark the goddess as Aphrodite.

* * * * *

The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably took its rise in part from a popular and dubious etymology—seems, at first sight, to sever Aphrodite wholly from the company of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even here, when we come to examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once manifest that the Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted.

The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria[804] now in the museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle of the 5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance of the birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the picture a goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, but whether from sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not concerned to express. Had he wished to utter his meaning more precisely nothing would have been easier than to represent the sea by the curved lines that in his day were the conventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I think significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia with which he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood and his presence at once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we are bound to remember that on the Ashmolean amphora already discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of Pandora, not of Aphrodite, that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia. Moreover, it must also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69) a Love-god greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or Semele[805].

So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa hydria we have the Anodos of a goddess greeted by Eros. But to the right of the picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another figure, a woman, and she holds out a piece of drapery with which she is about to clothe the rising goddess. This is a new element in the Anodos type and it is this element that inclines me, with certain reservations and qualifications, to call the goddess Aphrodite, though I am by no means sure that the vase-painter conceives her as rising from the sea.

On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is received and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites or Horae, on her Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in Paphos. Of the Bath we hear in the lay of Demodocus[806]. He tells how after the joy and terror of her marriage with Ares she uprose

‘And fast away fled she, Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea, To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone, Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon, Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old, And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.’

Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn[807]:

‘For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.’

The two events, the ritual Bath and the Sea-birth, are not I think clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their counterpart in the making and decking of Pandora, The ritual bath[808] Aphrodite shared with the two other Korai, Athene and Hera. Callimachus devotes a Hymn to the ‘Bath of Pallas.’ Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for the prize of beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled unguents; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she must renew her virginity by the bath in the river Inachus. The renewal of virginity is no fancy. Pausanias[809] saw at Nauplia a spring called Canathus and the Argives told him that every year Hera bathed in it and became a virgin. He adds significantly, ‘this story is of the mysteries and is their explanation of a rite which they celebrate to Hera.’ Virginity was to these ancients in their wisdom a grace not lost but perennially renewed, hence the immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite.

The artist of the Genoa hydria probably knew of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea, he certainly knew of her reception by Eros; but that he remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, clear from the fact that the scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated in the vase-painter’s fashion by the altar and sacred palm-tree standing to the right just below the handle. Probably the sanctuary at Paphos is intended.

The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to the understanding of another monument, earlier and far more beautiful.

The design in fig. 89 is from a sculptured slab[810], one of three that served to decorate the so-called ‘Ludovisi Throne’ now in the Boncompagni collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. Again we have manifestly an Anodos, again the like uncertainty as to who the goddess is and whence she uprises. The two women who support her, and to whom in her uprising she clings, stand on a sloping bank of shingle. Between the edges of the banks is no indication of the sea, simply a straight line. Is the goddess rising from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath? Archaeologists offer explanations apparently the most diverse, and it is this doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at the lesser mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No one, so far as I am aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as it were halting between, reminiscences of each and all. Or rather the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth are as yet undifferentiated. By their articulation and separation we have immeasurably lost.

One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no Eros. The relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, the delicate over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of the lovely breasts, all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the severe style; they belong to the last bloom of archaism just before the perfect utterance of Pheidias. Pheidias[811] on the pedestal of the image of Zeus at Olympia sculptured ‘Eros receiving Aphrodite as she rises from the sea and Peitho crowning Aphrodite.’ Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric tradition, hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. The artist of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, but the drapery held by Peitho, the altar and the palm-tree, recall rather the Bath than the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief embodies a tradition more theological, less mythological, than either Pheidias or the vase-painter. He is inspired by the Anodos[812] and the Bath, which was but one of its ritual humanized forms, and a form that we may venture to call matriarchal. What he is concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of Aphrodite, Aphrodite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure of a Trinity of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens.

Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, but a poet remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the air, she is of earth also:

‘We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, O Love, Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove; Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea, Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.’

* * * * *

Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an island Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes Ourania, the Heavenly One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing through heaven on her great swan[813]. She is the only goddess who in passing to the upper air yet kept life and reality. Artemis becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity; Athene, as we have seen, becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus, is but a lovely metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control over nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, remained, intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence Aphrodite keeps her godhead to the end. For a while, owing to special social conditions, and, as will be seen, owing to the impulse of Orphism, her figure is effaced by that of her son Eros, but effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity as Mother rather than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix[814] we have the old radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by Ourania, by Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and every various form of the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven:

‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure, Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun.

Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds And thine approach; for thee the daedal earth Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile, And heaven shines with floods of light appeased.

Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world Nor without thee can any living thing Win to the shores of light and joy and love, Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land The works of furious war quieted cease.’

HERA.

The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, not maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen in Olympus by virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred Marriage is the prototype of all human wedlock. This is true for Homeric theology, but a moment’s reflection on the facts of local cultus and myth shows that this marriage was not from the beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic legend is queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, where Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the ancient Heraion where Hera was worshipped alone long predates the temple of Zeus. At Argos the early votive terra-cottas[815] are of a woman goddess, and the very name of the sanctuary, the Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos, at the curious festival of the Tonea[816], it is the image of a woman goddess that is carried out of the town and bound among the bushes, and Strabo[817] tells us that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the island of the Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias[818] says that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a girl she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete or Full-Grown (τελεία), separated from Zeus and returned to Stymphalus she was called Chera (Widow). Long before her connection with Zeus, the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s life; Teleia, full-grown, does not necessarily imply patriarchal marriage.

Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days when Hera was no wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, unless the poet was the lowest of low comedians, what means her ceaseless turbulence and the unending unseemly strife between the Father of Gods and Men and the woman he cannot even beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny over Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric days in her own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been forcibly married, but she is never really wife, and a wife’s submission she leaves to the shadowy double of Zeus, who echoed his nature and (significant fact) took his name, she who was the real Achaean patriarchal double—Dione[819].

Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one Altar (ὁμοβώμιοι), and against the conjunction the older women divinities are but too often powerless. In the designs[820] in figs. 90 and 91 we have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in which the Olympian pair extrude the objects of an ancient local cult. In fig. 90 we have a votive relief to the Nymphs of the familiar type: three maiden figures linked together. That the figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is the inscription, ‘To the Mistress Nymphs (Κυρίαις Νύμφαις).’ The relief, one of a large series found together at Orochák and now in the local Museum at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 91 shows a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large stature to mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront; they hold each an expectant phiale for libations; to them only is sacrifice to be made. It is they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the background, minished and all but effaced, are the three ancient Maidens. The local peasant is conservative[821], and we may hope they too had their meed of offering.

The intrusion of Zeus[822] and Hera on the local cultus of the Nymphs brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius[823] in his Life of Epimenides. Theopompus in his ‘Wonderful Things’ told how when Epimenides was preparing the sanctuary of the Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven saying, ‘Epimenides, not of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.’ Perhaps Epimenides went further than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the matter of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen (p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the Semnae; he introduced ceremonies of purification brought from Crete, and wholly alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus to reassert himself.

The conflict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in the design in fig. 92, from a votive relief[824] found at Eleusis and now in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the design, which belongs to the class known in English as ‘Funeral Banquets,’ will be discussed more in detail later, when we come to hero-worship. For the present it is enough to note that on the left side of the relief we have the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the old matriarchal couple, seated side by side as equals, on the right a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the man reclining at the banquet and holding a great rhyton, the wife submissively seated by his side. In naming them it is safest at present not to go beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their heads the non-committal words, ‘To the God,’ and ‘To the Goddess.’

It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously took over to himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth-Maidens. Even more marked is the triumph of the Olympian Son, Apollo[825]. The design in fig. 93 is from a rather late red-figured amphora in the Naples Museum[826]. A wayfarer, possibly Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult the god; he finds him seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the laurel and the lyre in his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to the Ion of Euripides[827]:

‘To Delphi, where Phoebus, on earth’s mid navel o’er the world Enthronèd, weaveth in eternal song The sooth of all that is or is to be.’

The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess who utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred tripod, and he paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head and the sacred taenia in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo is by this time Lord of All.

In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, where the contest is between the old angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits of the blood feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies are at least in part with the new-comer. But even here, so stately and yet so pitiful are the ancient goddesses that our hearts are sore for the outrage on their order. And on the vase-painting, when we remember that the omphalos is the very seat and symbol of the Earth-Mother[828], that hers was the oracle and hers the holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion is hard to bear.

The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly presented in the design in fig. 94, from a votive relief[829] in the local Museum at Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the omphalos on a low basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At either side of it are perched new guardians, the great eagles of Olympian Zeus. The story[830] said that starting from either end of the world they met at Pytho, at the omphalos. The birds were variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither swans nor eagles have anything to do with the Earth-goddess; they are Ouranian eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the omphalos, they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering over the omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He holds out a cup, and libation to him is poured by his sister Artemis. The Olympian victory is complete.

* * * * *

So far we have dealt with the Making of a goddess; we have seen one woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, as duality and trinity; we have seen these shapes crystallize into Olympian divinities as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it were resume themselves again into the great monotheistic figure of Venus Genetrix. We have noted evidence, very scattered and fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the goddess as bird and snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak point in the argument is just this transitional phase. The goddesses, when they first come into our ken, are goddesses, fully human and lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and beautified by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. In a word links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake or bogey to goddess. Two reasons may be suggested. The full development of the women divinities seems to have been earlier accomplished, the sublimation earlier complete, and hence the early phases of that development are more effaced; and next these goddess figures became more completely material for poetic treatment. In the Making of a god we catch in some figures the process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the passage from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest.

VII. THE MAKING OF A GOD

‘ἰὼ θεοὶ νεώτεροι, παλαιοὺς νόμους καθιππάσασθε.’

Frequently, in his wanderings through Greece, Pausanias came upon the sanctuaries of local heroines, and these sanctuaries are almost uniformly tombs at which went on the cultus of the dead. At Olympia[831] inside the Altis he noted the Hippodameion or sanctuary of Hippodameia, a large enclosure surrounded by a wall. Into this enclosure once a year women were permitted to enter to sacrifice to Hippodameia and do other rites in her honour. The tomb of Auge[832] was still to be seen at Pergamos, a mound of earth enclosed by a stone basement and on the top the figure of a naked woman. At Leuctra[833] in Laconia there was an actual temple (ναός) of Cassandra with an image; the people of the place called her Alexandra, ‘Helper of Men.’ At Sparta[834] Helen had a sanctuary, and in Rhodes she was worshipped as She of the Tree, ‘Dendritis,’ and to her as Dendritis, if we may trust Theocritus[835], maidens brought offerings. At her wedding they sing:

‘O fair, O gracious maiden, the while we chant our lay, A wedded wife art thou. But we, at dawning of the day, Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place, And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face, Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe. For thee the first of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow; To thee where grows the shadowy plane the first oil shall be poured, Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored: And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see, A message graven Dorian-wise: “Kneel; I am Helen’s tree.”’

Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctuary and a sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 95 and 96 is from a lekythos[836] in the Louvre, of the kind usually known as ‘proto-Corinthian.’ Its style dates it as not later than the 7th century B.C., and it is our earliest extant monument of ‘the rape of Helen.’ The subject seems to have had a certain popularity in archaic art, as it occurred on the throne of Apollo at Amyclae[837]. In the centre of the design stands a woman-figure of more than natural size. Two men advance against her from the right; the foremost seizes her by the wrist. In his left hand he holds a sceptre. He is Theseus, and behind him comes Peirithoös, brandishing a great sword. To the left of Helen are her two brothers, the horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important to note that Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr Blinkenberg, who rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ‘ses mains levées expriment la surprise et l’effroi,’ but since the discovery of the early image of the Mycenaean goddess with uplifted hands[838] it will at once be seen that the gesture is hieratic rather than human. This early 7th century document suggests that ‘the rape of Helen’ was originally perhaps the rape of a xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a wife from her husband. Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the vase is more divine than human.

For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old order of daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and sinful, yet in a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether goddess, for she is Beauty herself:

‘O Light and Shadow of all things that be, O Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea, Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name? O Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee?’

Hebe, another local heroine, has at Phlius[839] a sacred grove and a sanctuary, ‘most holy from ancient days.’ The goddess of the sanctuary was called by the earliest authorities of the place Ganymeda, but later Hebe. Her sanctuary was an asylum, and this was held to be her greatest honour that ‘slaves who took refuge there were safe and prisoners released hung their fetters on the trees in her grove.’ That a sanctuary should be an asylum is a frequent note of antiquity. When the immigrant conqueror reduces the whole land to subjection, he, probably from superstitious awe, leaves to the conquered their local sanctuary, the one place safe from his tyranny. Hebe-Ganymeda, female correlative of Ganymedes, is promoted to Olympus, but significantly she is admitted only as cupbearer and wife of Herakles. Olympus here as always mirrors human relations. Hera by marriage with Zeus is admitted to full patriarchal citizenship, her shadowy double Hebe is but her Maid of Honour.

As a rule then the local heroine remains merely the object of a local cult. Where she passed upward to the rank of a real divinity, the steps of transition are almost wholly lost. We feel inwardly sure that Hera and Aphrodite were once of mere local import, like Auge or Iphigeneia, but we lack definite evidence. In the case of Athene the local origin, it has been shown (p. 301), is fairly clear.

The reason why the local heroine failed to emerge to complete godhead is sometimes startlingly clear. Her development was checked midway by the intrusion of a full-blown goddess of the Olympian stock. Near to Cruni in Arcadia Pausanias[840] saw the grave of Callisto. It was a high mound on which grew trees, some of them fruit-bearing, some barren. ‘On the top of the mound,’ Pausanias adds, ‘is a sanctuary of Artemis with the title Calliste.’ Nothing could be clearer. Over the tomb of the old Bear-Maiden, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis the Northerner, the Olympian, has superposed her cult, and to facilitate the shift she calls herself Calliste, the Fairest. Possibly here, as at Athens under the title of Brauronia, she kept up the ancient bear-service[841].

The passage from ghost to goddess is for the most part lost in the mists of time, but of the analogous process from ghost to god the steps are still in historical times clearly traceable. The reason is clear. The intrusion of the patriarchal system, the practice of tracing descent from the father instead of the mother, tended to check, if it was powerless wholly to stop, the worship of eponymous heroines. Conservatism compelled the worship of old established heroines, but no fresh canonizations took place. The ideal woman of Pericles was assuredly not the stuff of which goddesses were made. If we would note the actual process of the manufacture of divinity, it is to hero-worship we must turn[842].

THE HERO AS SNAKE.

The design in fig. 97 is from an archaic relief[843] of the sixth century B.C., now in the local Museum at Sparta. It forms one of a series of reliefs found near Sparta, all of which are cast approximately in the same type. A male and a female figure are seated side by side on a great throne-like chair. The female figure holds her veil, the male figure a large cantharus or two-handled cup, as if expecting libation. Worshippers of diminutive size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that may be a cake, an egg or a fruit. The reliefs are, for the most part, uninscribed, but on some of rather later date names are written near the figure, and they are the names of mortals, e.g. ‘Timocles[844].’ It is clear that we have in these monuments representations of the dead, but the dead conceived of as half divine, as heroized—hence their large size compared with that of their worshipping descendants. They are κρείττονες, ‘Better and Stronger Ones.’

The artist of the relief in fig. 97 is determined to make his meaning clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated figures, is a great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. From the edge of his lower lip hangs down a long beard; a decoration denied by nature. The intention is clear; he is a human snake, the vehicle, the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost. Snakes lurk about tombs, they are uncanny-looking beasts, and the Greeks are not the only people who have seen in a snake the vehicle of a ghost. M. Henri Jumod[845], in discussing the beliefs of the Barongas, notes that among this people the snake is regarded as the chikonembo or ghost of a dead man, usually of an ancestor. The snake, so regarded, is feared but not worshipped. A free-thinker among the Barongas, if bored by the too frequent reappearance of the snake ancestor, will kill it, saying ‘Come now, we have had enough of you.’

Zeus Meilichios, it has been seen (p. 18), was worshipped as a snake. If we examine the great snake on his relief in fig. 1 (p. 18) it is seen to be also bearded. The beard in this case is not at the end of the lip, but a good deal further back.

The addition of the beard was no doubt mainly due to frank anthropomorphism; the snake is in a transition stage between animal and human, and human for the artist means divine. He gives the snake a beard to mark his anthropomorphic divinity, just as he gave to the bull river-god on coins a human head with horns. The further question arises, ‘Was there anything in nature that might have acted as a possible suggestion of a beard?’ An interesting answer to this question has been suggested to me by an eminent authority on snakes, Dr Hans Gadow, and to him I am indebted for the following scientific particulars.

The snake represented in fig. 1 (p. 18) Dr Gadow believes to be the species known as Coelopeltis lacertina. It occurs from Spain to Syria and specimens of 6 ft. long are not uncommon. The creature’s head, according to Dr Gadow, is reproduced with admirable fidelity; the name lacertina is due to the lizard-like, instead of snake-like, depressed head. Moreover this species is really poisonous, but only to its proper prey, e.g. mice, rats, lizards, etc., while it is practically harmless to man, on account of the position of the poison fangs, which are far back in the mouth instead of near the front. This is a somewhat exceptional arrangement and probably well known to the ancients. In fact the Coelopeltis lacertina is a snake with poison that does not ordinarily strike. On occasion it could bite a man’s hand, i.e. if it opened its mouth very wide, as wide as a striking cobra. This position of the dropped jaw, according to Dr Gadow, is very noticeable and must have been observed by the ancients. The angle of the dropped jaw is just that of the beard on the snake in fig. 1 (p. 18). It seems possible and even highly probable that the dropped jaw, seen at a distance, might have suggested a beard, or that an artist representing an actual dropped jaw may have been copied by another who misinterpreted the jaw into a beard. In any case the scheme of the dropped jaw would be ready to hand and would help to soften the anomaly of the bearded snake[846].

* * * * *

In snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb, and to indicate this fact not uncommonly on vase-paintings we have a snake depicted on the very grave mound itself. The design in fig. 98, from a black-figured lekythos[847] in the Museum at Naples, is a good instance. The funeral mound which occupies the centre of the design is, on the original vase, white, and on it is painted a black snake; the mound itself is surmounted by a black stele: whether the vase-painter regards his snake as painted actually outside the tomb or as representing the snake-hero actually resident within, is not easy to determine. The figure of a man on the left of the tomb with uplifted sword points probably to the taking of an oath, it may be of vengeance.

In the curious design in fig. 99, from a kotylos also in the Naples Museum[848], we have again a funeral mound, again decorated with a huge snake, this time represented with dropped jaw and beard. The tomb seems to have become a sort of mantic shrine. Two men are seated watching attentively the portent of the eagle and the snake. On the reverse of the vase, to the right, the tomb-mound is decorated with a stag, and the portent is an eagle devouring a hare.

Herodotus[849] notes that among the Libyan tribe of the Nasamones tombs were used for two purposes, for the taking of oaths and for dream oracles. ‘In their oaths and in the art of divination they observe the following practice: they take oaths by those among them who are accounted to be most virtuous and excellent, by touching their tombs, and when they divine they regularly resort to the monuments of their ancestors, and having made supplication they go to sleep, and whatever vision they behold of that they make use.’ Herodotus like many travellers was more familiar, it would seem, with the customs of foreigners than with those of his own people. He notes the two customs as though they were alien curiosities, but the practice of swearing on a tomb must have been familiar to the Greeks. The slave in the Choephori says to Electra[850]:

‘Reverencing thy father’s tomb like to an altar, Mine inmost thoughts I speak, doing thy hest.’

By the hero Sosipolis at Olympia[851] oaths were taken ‘on the greatest occasions’—by Sosipolis who in true hero-fashion was wont to appear in snake-form. That these oaths were taken on his actual tomb we are not told, but the sanctuary of a snake-hero can scarcely in its origin have been other than his tomb. Almost every hero in Greece had his dream oracle. Later as the hero was conceived of as in human rather than animal shape the connection between hero and snake is loosened, and we get the halting, confused theology of Aeneas[852]:

‘Doubtful if he should deem the gliding snake The genius of the place, or if it were His father’s ministrant.’

In fig. 100 we have an altar to a hero found in Lesbos[853], not the old primitive grave mound which was the true original form, but a late decorative structure such as might have served an Olympian. It is inscribed in letters of Roman date, ‘The people to Aristandros the hero, son of Cleotimos,’ and that the service is to a hero is further emphasized by the snakes sculptured on the top round the hollow cup which served for libations. There are two snakes; it is no longer realized that the hero himself is a snake, but the snake reminiscence clings.

* * * * *

If the question be raised, ‘why did the Greeks image the dead hero as a snake?’ no very certain or satisfactory answer can be offered. Aelian[854] in his treatise on ‘The Nature of Animals’ says that the backbone of a dead man when the marrow has decayed turns into a snake. The chance, sudden apparition of a snake near a dead body may have started the notion. Plutarch[855] tells how, when the body of Cleomenes was impaled, the people, seeing a great snake wind itself about his head, knew that he was ‘more than mortal’ (κρείττονος). Of course, by the time of Cleomenes, the snake was well established as the vehicle of a hero, but some such coincidence may very early have given rise to this association of ideas. Plutarch adds that ‘the men of old time associated the snake most of all beasts with heroes.’ They did this because, he says, philosophers had observed that ‘when part of the moisture of the marrow is evaporated and it becomes of a thicker consistency it produces serpents.’

The snake was not the only vehicle. As has already been noted (p. 305), the spirit of the dead could take shape as a human-headed bird or even perhaps, if a bird happened to perch on a tomb, as a mere natural hoopoe or swallow. Between the bird-souls and the snake-souls there is this difference. So far as we know, the human-headed bird was purely a creature of mythology, whereas the bearded human snake was the object of a cult. Also the bird-soul, though sometimes male, tends, on the whole, to be a woman; the snake, even when not bearded, is usually the vehicle of a male ghost; as such he is the incarnation rather of the hero than the heroine. So close is the connection that it gave rise to the popular expression ‘Speckled hero,’ which arose, Photius[856] explains, because snakes which are speckled are called heroes. Of these snake-heroes and their cultus Homer knows absolutely nothing, but the belief in them is essentially primitive and recrudesces with other popular superstitions.

THE CULTUS-TITLES.

The great snake, later worshipped as Zeus Meilichios, was, we have already seen (p. 21), not Zeus himself, but an underworld being addressed by the title Meilichios, gracious, kindly, easy to be intreated. It will now be evident that his snake form marks him as the vehicle or incarnation of a ghost, a local hero. He was only one of a large class of local divinities who were invoked not by proper names but by adjectival epithets, descriptive of their nature, epithets which gradually crystallized into cultus-titles. That these titles were really adjectival is shown sometimes by the actual word, e.g. Meilichios, which retains its adjectival sense, sometimes by the fact that it is taken on as a distinguishing epithet by an Olympian, e.g. Zeus-Amphiaraos. These cultus-titles mark an important stage in the making of a god and must be examined somewhat more in detail.

Herodotus[857] in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes the following significant statement: ‘The Pelasgians formerly made all sorts of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, as I know from what I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none of them either name or eponym, for such they had not yet heard: they addressed them as gods because they had set all things in order and ruled over all things. Then after a long lapse of time they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they inquired of the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the oracle there is held to be the most ancient of all the oracles in Greece and was at that time the only one. When therefore the Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they should adopt the names that came to them from the barbarians, the oracle ordained that they should use them. And from that time on they sacrificed to the gods making use of their names.’

If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, some sort of name, some mode of address they must have had. Is it not at least possible that the advance noted by Herodotus is the shift from mere cultus-title, appropriate to any and every divinity, to actual proper name which defined and crystallized the god addressed? Any and every hero or divinity might rightly be addressed as Meilichios, but a single individual personality is caught and crystallized in the proper name Zeus. When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case with Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual god. Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself, may have been adjectival to begin with, mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost they have become proper and personal.

It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place owing to an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridgeway’s[858] theory, was the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus and his shadow-wife Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother with her dove-priestesses; there surely the Pelasgians with their ‘nameless’ gods, their heroes and heroines addressed by cultus epithets, met and mingled with the worshippers of Zeus the Father and Apollo the Son and Artemis his sister, and learnt to fix the personalities of their formless shifting divinities, learnt the lesson not from the ancient civilized Egyptians but from the northern ‘barbarians.’

The word hero itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius[859] tells us that by hero was meant ‘mighty,’ ‘strong,’ ‘noble,’ ‘venerable.’ In Homer the hero is the strong man alive, mighty in battle; in cultus the hero is the strong man after death, dowered with a greater, because a ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, κρείττονες, ‘Better and Stronger Ones.’ The avoidance of the actual proper name of a dead man is an instructive delicate decency and lives on to-day. The newly dead becomes, at least for a time, ‘He’ or ‘She’; the actual name is felt too intimate. It is a part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a tendency already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost too close, to call your friend ‘the kind one,’ or ‘the old one,’ or ‘the black one,’ and never name his silent name. Of course the delicate instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, and gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of de mortuis nil nisi bene.

* * * * *

It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their heroized dead and underworld divinities by ‘euphemistic’ titles, Eumenides for Erinyes, χρηστέ, ‘Good One,’ when they meant ‘Bad One.’ Such is the ugly misunderstanding view of scholiasts and lexicographers. But a simpler, more human explanation lies to hand. The dead are, it is true, feared, but they are also loved, felt to be friendly, they have been kin on earth, below the earth they will be kind. But in primitive days it is only those who have been kin who will hereafter be kind; the ghosts of your enemies’ kin will be _un_kind; if to them you apply kindly epithets it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical usage.

Of such euphemism Homer[860] has left us a curious example. Zeus would fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and fatuity of mortal man:

‘Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One, Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon’s son, Far-famed Orestes, slew.’

Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ‘the Blameless One.’ The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. These Olympians, these gods ‘who live at ease,’ go too far.

The epithets in Homer are often worn very thin, but here, once the point is noted[861], it is manifest that ἀμύμων, ‘the Blameless One,’ is a title perfectly appropriate to Aigisthos as a dead hero. Whatever his life on the upper earth, he has joined the company of the κρείττονες, ‘the Stronger and Better Ones.’ The epithet ἀμύμων in Homer is applied to individual heroes, to a hero’s tomb[862], to magical, half-mythical peoples like the Phaeacians and Aethiopians[863] who to the popular imagination are half canonized, to the magic island[864] of the god Helios, to the imaginary, half-magical Good Old King[865]. It is used also of the ‘convoy[866]’ sent by the gods, which of course is magical in character; it is never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians themselves. There is about the word a touch of what is dead and demonic rather than actually divine.

Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, the dark superstitions of a primitive race; he knows nothing at least ostensibly of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at his tomb, nothing of his snake-shape; but Homer’s epithets came to him already crystallized and came from the underlying stratum of religion which was based on the worship of the dead. And here comes in a curious complication. To Homer, though he calls him mechanically, or if we like ‘euphemistically,’ the ‘Blameless One,’ Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black as Aeschylus painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first made the epithet? The story of Aigisthos is told by the mouth of the conquerors. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive population, there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. Thyestes, father of Aigisthos, had been banished[867] from his home; Aigisthos is reared as an alien and returns to claim his own. Clytaemnestra too was of the old order, a princess of the primitive dwellers in the land, regnant in her own right. Agamemnon leaves her, leaves her significantly in the charge of a bard[868], one of those bards pledged to sing the glory of the conquering Achaeans, and the end is inevitable: she reverts to the prince of the old stock, Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted before her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a princess of the land and his too are the sorrows of the king-consort. The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias[869]. We hear of no cult; possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it dwindled and died, but in old days we may be sure ‘the Blameless One’ had his meed of service at Argos, and the epithet itself remains as eternal witness.

Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ‘Blameless’ than Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia[870] Odysseus says:

‘Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see, Child of Salmoneus, Blameless One, a noble sire he.’

The case of Salmoneus is highly significant. He too belongs to the old order, as indeed do all the Aeolid figures connected with the group of dead heroines, and more, in his life he was in violent opposition to the new gods. To Hesiod[871] he is ‘the Unjust One’ (ἄδικος). He even dared to counterfeit the thunder and lightning of Zeus, and Zeus enraged slew him with a thunderbolt. The vase-painting already discussed (p. 60) is the very mirror of the picture drawn by Vergil[872] of the insolent king:

‘Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town In triumph went he; for himself, mad man, Honours divine he claimed.’

To every worshipper of the new order his crime must have seemed heinous and blasphemous, but among his own people he was glorious before death and probably ‘Blameless’ after.

The case of Tityos, Son of Earth, presents a close parallel, though Tityos never bore the title of ‘Blameless.’ To the orthodox worshipper of the Olympians he was the vilest of criminals; as such Homer[873] knew him:

‘For he laid hands on Leto, the famous bride of Zeus, What time she fared to Pytho through the glades of Panopeus.’

And for this his sin he lay in Hades tortured for ever. This is from the Olympian point of view very satisfactory and instructive, but when we turn to local tradition Tityos is envisaged from quite another point of view. Strabo[874], when he visited Panopeus, learnt that it was the fabled abode of Tityos. He reminds us that it was to the island of Euboea that, according to Homer[875], the Phaeacians conducted fair-haired Rhadamanthys that he might see Tityos, Son of Earth. We wonder for a moment why the just Rhadamanthys should care to visit the criminal. Homer leaves us in doubt, but Strabo makes the mystery clear. On Euboea, he says, they show a ‘cave called Elarion from Elara who was mother to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind of honours are mentioned which are paid to him.’ One ‘blameless’ hero visits another, that is all. Golden-haired Rhadamanthys found favour with the fair-haired Achaeans; but for Tityos, the son of Earth, there is no place in the Northern Elysium.

* * * * *

We may take it then that the ‘euphemistic’ epithets were applied at first in all simplicity and faith to heroes and underworld gods by the race that worshipped them. The devotees of the new Achaean religion naturally regarded the heroes and saints of the old as demons. Such was in later days the charitable view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian gods in their turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the black side of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the unconscious use of a crystallized epithet like ‘Blameless’ lets out the real truth. The ritual prescription that heroes should be worshipped by night, their sacrifice consumed before dawn, no doubt helped the conviction that as they loved the night their deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic and not lacking in savage touches. At Daulis[876] Pausanias tells of the shrine of a hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the people of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was; some said Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, and when animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the blood of the victim through a hole into the grave; the flesh was consumed on the spot. Such plain-spoken ritual would go far to promote the notion that the hero was bloodthirsty.

Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy between old and new, between the hero and the Olympian. Pausanias[877] describes in detail the elaborate ceremonial observed in sacrificing to Pelops at Olympia. The hero had a large temenos containing trees and statues and surrounded by a stone wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a hero, was towards the west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim was a black ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words: ‘Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, whether he be of Elis or a stranger, may not enter the temple of Zeus.’ But we are glad to know from Pindar[878] that no spiteful ritual prescription of the Olympian could dim the splendour of the local hero:

‘In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios’ ford, Now hath he still his share; Frequent and full the throng that worship there.’

The scholiast comments on the passage: ‘Some say that it was not (merely) a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the followers of Herakles sacrificed to him before Zeus.’

At yet another great Pan-Hellenic centre there is the memory, though more faded, of the like superposition of cults. The scholiast on Pindar[879] says that the contest at Nemea was of the nature of funeral games (ἐπιτάφιος) and that it was in honour of Archemoros, but that later, after Herakles had slain the Nemean lion, he ‘took the games in hand and put many things to rights and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.’

More commonly there is between the Olympian and the hero all appearance of decent friendliness. A compromise is effected; the main ritual is in honour of the Olympian, but to the hero is offered a preliminary sacrifice. A good instance of this procedure is the worship of Apollo at Amyclae[880] superposed on that of the local hero Hyakinthos. The great bronze statue of Apollo stood on a splendid throne, the decorations of which Pausanias describes in detail. The image itself was rude and ancient, the lower part pillar-shaped, but for all that the god was a new-comer. ‘The basis of the image was in form like an altar, and they say that Hyakinthos was buried in it, and at the festival of the Hyakinthia before the burnt sacrifice (θυσίας) to Apollo, they devote offerings (ἐναγίζουσιν) to Hyakinthos into this altar through a bronze door.’

Apollo and Hyakinthos established a modus vivendi. Apollo instituted his regular Olympian sacrifices (θυσίαι) and left to Hyakinthos his underworld offerings (ἐναγίσματα). But not every Olympian was so successful. Ritual is always tenacious. So too at Delphi, Apollo may seat himself on the omphalos, but he is still forced to utter his oracles through the mouth of the priestess of Gaia. Zeus, we have seen, arrogated to himself the title of Meilichios; he had the old snake reliefs dedicated to him, but he was powerless to change the ritual of the hero, and had to content himself, like an underworld god, with holocausts. All that he could do was to emphasize the untruth that he, not the hero, was Meilichios, Easy to be intreated.

All that could be effected by theological animus was done. It has been seen (p. 9) how in the fable of Babrius the hero-ancestor is positively forbidden to give good things, and meekly submits; and, long before Babrius, the blackening process had set in. The bird-chorus in Aristophanes[881] tells of the strange sights it has seen on earth:

‘We know of an uncanny spot, Very dark, where the candles are not; There to feast with the heroes men go By day, but at evening, oh no! For the night time is risky you know. If the hero Orestes should meet with a mortal by night, He’d strip him and beat him and leave him an elegant sight.’

Orestes was of course a notable local thief, but the point of the joke is the ill-omened character of a hero. The scholiast says that ‘heroes are irascible and truculent to those they meet and possess no power over what is beneficial.’ He cites Menander as his authority, but adds on his own account that this explains the fact that ‘those who go past hero-shrines keep silence.’ So easy is it to read a bad meaning into a reverent custom. So possessed are scholiasts and lexicographers by the Olympian prejudice that, even when the word they explain is dead against a bad interpretation, they still maintain it. Hesychius[882], explaining κρείττονας, ‘Better or Stronger Ones,’ says ‘they apply the title to heroes, and they seem to be a bad sort of persons; it is on this account that those who pass hero-shrines keep silence lest the heroes should do them some harm.’ Among gods, as among mortals, one rule holds good: the king can do no wrong and the conquered no right.

ASKLEPIOS AND THE HEROES OF HEALING.

Heroes, like the ghosts from which they sprang, had of course their black angry side, but, setting aside the prejudice of an Olympianized literature, it is easy to see that in local cultus they would tend rather to beneficence. The ghost you worship and who by your worship is erected into a hero is your kinsman, and the ties of kinship are still strong in the world below. ‘In almost all West African districts,’ says Miss Mary Kingsley[883], ‘is a class of spirits called “Well-disposed Ones” and this class is clearly differentiated from “Them,” the generic term for non-human spirits. These “Well-disposed Ones” are ancestors and they do what they can to benefit their particular village or family fetish who is not a human spirit or ancestor.’ So it was with the Greek; he was careful not to neglect or offend his local hero, but on the whole he relied on his benevolence:

‘When a man dies we all begin to say The sainted one has passed away, he has ‘fallen asleep,’ Blessed therein that he is vexed no more. And straight with funeral offerings we do sacrifice As to a god and pour libations, bidding Him send good things up here from down below[884].’

The cult of heroes had in it more of human ‘tendance’ than of demonic ‘aversion.’

The hero had for his sphere of beneficence the whole circle of human activities. Like all primitive divinities he was of necessity a god-of-all-work; a primitive community cannot afford to departmentalize its gods. The local hero had to help his family to fight, to secure fertility for their crops and for themselves, act as oracle when the community was perplexed, be ready for any emergency that might arise, and even on occasion he must mend a broken jug. But most of all he was adored as a Healer. As a Healer he rises very nearly to the rank of an Olympian, but through the gentleness of his office he keeps a certain humanity that prevents complete deification. A typical instance of the Hero-Healer is the god Asklepios.

* * * * *

We conceive of Asklepios as he is figured in many a Greek and Graeco-Roman statue, a reverend bearded god, somewhat of the type of Zeus, but characterized by the staff on which he leans and about which is twined a snake. The snake, our hand-books tell us, is the ‘symbol of the healing art,’ and hence the attribute of Asklepios, god of medicine.

The design in fig. 101, from a votive relief[885] found in the Asklepieion and now in the National Museum at Athens, gives cause for reflection. The god himself stands in his familiar attitude, waiting the family of worshippers who approach with offerings. A little happy honoured boy is allowed to lead the procession bringing a sheep to the altar. Behind the god is his attribute, a huge coiled snake, his head erect and level with the god he is. Take away the human Asklepios and the scene is yet complete, complete as on the Meilichios relief in fig. 2, the great hero snake and his worshippers.

The relief in fig. 101 is under a foot in length, the offering probably of some poor man who clung to his old faith in the healing snake-hero. It forces us in its plain-spoken simplicity to face just the fact that the dedicator of the next relief[886] (fig. 102) is so anxious to conceal. This second relief is the offering of a rich man, the figures are about half life-size; it was found in the same Asklepieion on the S. slope of the Acropolis. Asklepios no longer stands citizen-fashion leaning on his staff: he is seated in splendour, and beside him is coiled a very humble attributive snake. Behind are two figures, probably of a son and a daughter, and they all three occupy a separate chapel aloof from their human worshippers.

In token of his humble birth as the ghost of a mortal the snake always clings to Asklepios, but it is not the only evidence. An essential part of his healing ritual was always and everywhere the ἐγκοίμησις[887], the ‘sleeping in’ his sanctuary. The patient who came to be cured must sleep and in a dream the god either healed him or revealed the means of healing. It was the dream oracle sent by Earth herself[888] that Apollo the Olympian came to supersede. All the strange web of human chicanery that was woven round the dream cure it would here be irrelevant to examine: only the simple fact need be noted that the prescribed ritual of sleep was merely a survival of the old dream oracle of the hero. It was nowise peculiar to Asklepios. When men came to the beautiful little sanctuary of Amphiaraos[889] at Oropus they purified themselves, sacrificed a ram, and spreading the skin under them they went to sleep ‘awaiting a revelation in a dream.’

The dream oracle remained always proper to the earth-born heroes; we hear of no one sleeping in the precinct of Zeus, or of Apollo, and the belief in the magic of sleep long outlasted the service of the Olympians. To-day year by year on the festival of the Panagia a throng of sick from the islands round about make their pilgrimage to Tenos, and the sick sleep in the Church and in the precinct and are healed, and in the morning is published the long list of miraculous cures (θαύματα). It is only the truth and the true gods that lived. The Panagia has taken to herself all that was real in ancient faith, in her are still incarnate the Mother and the Maid and Asklepios the Saviour. Like most primitive faiths the belief in the dream cure appealed to something very deep-down and real, however misunderstood and perverted, something in the secret bidding of nature that said, that always will say:

‘Sleep Heart, a little free From thoughts that kill. Nothing now hard to thee Or good or ill. And when the shut eyes see Sleep’s mansions fill, Night might bring that to be Day never will.’

The worship of Asklepios, we know from the evidence of an inscription[890], was introduced at Athens about 421 B.C.: it was still no doubt something of a new excitement when Aristophanes wrote his Plutus. But Athens was not left till 421 B.C. without a Hero-Healer. Asklepios came to Athens as a full-blown god, came first from Thessaly, where he was the rival of Apollo, and finally from his great sanctuary at Epidauros, and, when he came, we have definite evidence that his cult was superimposed on that of a more ancient hero. ‘Affiliated’ is perhaps the juster word, for when a hero from without took over the cult of an indigenous hero there is no clash of ritual as in the case of an Olympian, no conflict between θυσίαι and ἐναγισμοί; both heroes alike are content with the simple offering of the pelanos.

* * * * *

In the course of the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations Dr Dörpfeld came upon a small sanctuary consisting of a precinct, an altar, and a well[891]. The precinct wall, the well and the conduit leading to it were clearly, from the style of their masonry, of the date of Peisistratos. Within and around the precinct were votive offerings that pointed to the worship of a god of healing, reliefs representing parts of the human body, breasts and the like, a man holding a huge leg marked with a varicose vein, reliefs of the usual ‘Asklepios’ type, and above all votive snakes. Had there been no inscriptions the precinct could have been at once claimed as ‘sacred to Asklepios,’ and we should have been left with the curious problems, ‘Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the south, one on the west of the Akropolis; and, if the god had already a shrine on the west slope in the days of Peisistratos, why did he trouble to make a triumphant entry into Athens on the south slope in 421 B.C.?’

Happily we are left in no such dilemma. On a stele found in the precinct we have the following inscription[892]: ‘Mnesiptolemè on behalf of Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.’ If the inscription stood alone, we should probably decide that Asklepios was worshipped in the precinct under the title of Amynos, the Protector. Whatever the original meaning of the word Asklepios—and we may conjecture it was merely a cultus-title—it soon became a proper name, and could therefore easily be associated with an adjectival epithet.

A second inscription[893] happily makes it certain that Amynos was not merely an adjective, but an adjectival title of a person distinct from Asklepios. It runs as follows: ‘Certain citizens held it just to commemorate concerning the common weal of the members of the thiasos of Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion.’ Here we have the names of three personalities manifestly separate and enumerated in significant order. We know Asklepios and most fortunately Dexion. The author of the Etymologicon Magnum[894], in explaining the word Dexion, says: ‘The title was given by the Athenians to Sophocles after his death. They say that when Sophocles was dead the Athenians, wishing to give him added honours, built him a hero-shrine and named him Dexion, the Receiver, from his reception of Asklepios—for he received the god in his own house and set up an altar to him.’ For the heroization of Sophocles we have earlier evidence than the Etymologicon Magnum. The historian Istros[895] (3rd cent. B.C.) is quoted as saying that the Athenians ‘on account of the man’s virtue passed a vote that yearly sacrifice should be made to him.’

It seems an extraordinary story, but, if we do not press too hard the words of the panegyrist, the explanation is natural enough. Sophocles was not exactly canonised ‘because of his virtue.’ He became a hero, officially, because he had officially received Asklepios, and the ‘Receiver’ of a god, like the ‘Founder’ of a town, had a right to ritual recognition. ‘Dexion’ is the Receiver of the god, and from the fact that the inscription with his name is set up in the little precinct on the west slope of the Acropolis we may be sure his worship went on there. It was in that little precinct, we may conjecture, that he served as priest. This conjecture is made almost certain by the fact that a later inscription[896] (1st cent. B.C.), with a dedication to Amynos and Asklepios, is dated by the priesthood of a ‘Sophocles,’ probably a descendant of the poet. Sophocles as a hero was not a success, probably he was too alive and human as a poet; he was in his own precinct completely submerged by the god he ‘received.’

The theological history of the little precinct is quite clear. The inscription preserves the ritual order of precedence. The sanctuary began, not later than Peisistratos, as an Amyneion, shrine of a local hero worshipped under the title of Amynos, Protector. At some time, probably owing to the recent pestilence which the local hero had failed to avert, it was thought well to affiliate a Healer-god who had attained enormous prestige in the Peloponnesus. The experiment was quietly and carefully tried in the little Amyneion before the foundation of the great Asklepieion on the south slope. It was a very simple matter. A sacred snake would be sent for[897] from Epidauros, to join the local snake of Amynos. Both were snakes, both were healers; the same offerings served for both, the votive limbs, the pelanoi. Sophocles the human Receiver, who had introduced Asklepios in due course, naturally enough dies, and a third healing hero is added to the list. Dexion fades, and Asklepios gradually effaces Amynos and takes his name as a ceremonial title.

* * * * *

Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know Sophocles as human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of Amynos, Asklepios, Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing. But we must take it only as one instance of the ladder from earth to heaven that had its lowest rungs planted in every village scattered over Greece—a ladder that reached sometimes, but not always or even often, up to high Olympus itself. Whether a local hero became a god depended on a multitude of chances and conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every effort to meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive Pelasgian[898] stock. His name, if the most recent etymology[899] be accepted, means only the young dear Hero—the Hero par excellence. No pains were spared to affiliate him. He is allowed the Olympian burnt sacrifice[900], he is passed through the folds of Hera’s robe to make him her child by adoption[901], he is married in Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly translated, the vase-painter[902] diligently paints his reception into Olympus, he is always elaborately entering, yet he is never really in, he is too much a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian, and literature, always over-Olympianized, makes him too often the laughing-stock of the stage.

More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity of healing, but never to emerge as a Pan-Hellenic god. In the design in fig. 103 we have a good instance—from a vase[903] found in Boeotia and now in the National Museum at Athens. On the obverse a bearded man, wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. A table with cakes stands by his couch. An enormous coiled snake is about to drink from the wine-cup in his hand. On the reverse a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a girl brings offerings—an oinochoë, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung votive offerings—a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the complexity of hero-cults would at once name the god with the snake on the obverse Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs on the reverse Hygieia; but to these names they have no sort of right. Found as the vase was in Boeotia, the vase-painter more probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly Trophonios, and Agathe Tyche. All we can say is that they are a couple of healing divinities—hero and heroine divinized.

The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the snake is the hero; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, feeding out of the wine-cup. The snake is not bearded, but he has a touch of human unreality in that he is about to drink out of the wine-cup. These humanized snakes are fed with human food; their natural food would be a live bird or a rabbit. Dr Gadow kindly tells me that a snake will lap milk, but if he is to eat his sacrificial food, the pelanos, it must be made exceedingly thin; anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly due a ‘honey cake,’ and at Lebadeia[904] in the shrine of Trophonios, where it was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the country ‘cast into his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.’

Representations of the hero reclining at a feast occur very frequently on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They appear very rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good instance is the design in fig. 104 from a late red-figured krater in the Berlin Museum[905]. The attempt to give a name to the recumbent man is quite fruitless: the great snake marks him as a dead hero. The woman and boy can scarcely be said to be worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and fruit; it is rather the feast that went on in life figured as continuing after death.

* * * * *

It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 104, reliefs usually known as ‘Hero-Feasts’ or ‘Funeral Banquets.’ They are monuments especially instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is seen so clearly the transition from hero to god, and also the gradual superposition of the Olympians over local hero-cults.

THE ‘HERO-FEASTS.’

Plato[906] in the Laws arranges the objects of divine worship in a regular sequence: first the Olympian gods together with those who keep the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of unlucky omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized as ‘orgiastic’; fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes the list with living parents to whom much honour should be offered. As early as Hesiod[907] theology attempted some differentiation between heroes and daemons; daemons being accounted divine in some higher sense. Of all this minute departmentalism ritual knows nothing. The only recognized distinction is that burnt offerings are the meed of the Olympians, offerings devoted (ἐναγισμοί) of the chthonic gods. Between the chthonic gods and the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the only distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas it is apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons not fully divinized.

In like fashion votive reliefs of the type known as Hero-Feasts draw no distinction between hero and daemon, nor indeed do they clearly distinguish between ordinary dead man and hero. As a rule the ‘Hero-Feasts’ are depicted on reliefs set up in sanctuaries rather than graveyards, but they occur sometimes on actual tombstones[908] set up in actual cemeteries.

The ‘Hero-Feast’ is found broadcast over Attica, the Peloponnese and the islands; there is scarcely a local museum that does not contain specimens. The design in fig. 105 is from a relief in the local museum at Samos[909]. Three heroes are lying at the banquet; one holds a large rhyton. A snake coiled about a tree is about to drink from it. Snake and tree mark a sanctuary, otherwise the scene is very homelike and non-hieratic. Of the inscription only two letters remain, and they tell nothing. The round shield and the horse’s head and the dog tell us we have to do with actual heroes, but who they were it is impossible to say.

The relief in fig. 106 is also from Samos[910]. It is of the usual type—the recumbent man, the seated woman, the boy about to draw wine. The field is full of characteristic tokens; for the man, the horse’s head, the cuirass, helm, shield and greaves; for the woman, the work-basket of the shape so often occurring on Athenian grave-reliefs, and, it may be, the tame bird which stands on the casket pecking at a fruit. The snake is for both, for both are dead. The inscription at first surprises us; it is as follows: ‘Lais daughter of Phoenix, heroine, hail.’ There is no mention of the hero, but on examination of the stone it is seen that a previous inscription has been erased[911]. Some one cared more for Lais than for her husband, hence the palimpsest.

These two specimens from Samos have been selected out of countless others because in them it is quite certain that heroized mortals are represented. The earliest specimens of the ‘Hero-Feast’ discovered had no inscriptions, and though horse and snake were present an attempt was made to interpret them as sacred to Asklepios; the snake was ‘the symbol of healing,’ the horse that mysterious creature the ‘horse of Hades[912].’ The most ardent devotee of symbolic interpretation can scarcely make mythology out of the greaves and the work-basket.

* * * * *

Reliefs of the ‘Hero-Feast’ type are all of late date. The earliest one is doubtfully assigned to the end of the 5th century; the great majority are much later. The reason is not far to seek. In the fine period of Greek Art, the period to which we owe most of the grave-reliefs found at Athens, hero-worship is submerged. It is a time of rationalism, and the funeral monuments of that time tend to represent this life rather than the next. I have tried elsewhere to show that early Attic grave-reliefs are cast in the type of the Sparta hero-reliefs, but nowhere in Attic grave-reliefs of the 5th century do we find the dead heroized. But once the age of reason past, hero-worship re-emerged, and it would seem in greater force than before.

In the fine period of art hero-reliefs do exist, but not as funeral monuments. One of the earliest and finest[913] we possess is represented in fig. 107. It is not at all of the same type as the ‘Hero-Feast,’ and is figured here partly for its beauty and interest, partly to mark the contrast. A hero occupies the central place, leading his horse, followed by his hound. That he is a hero we are sure, for in front of him is his low, omphalos-like altar, and to the left a worshipper approaches. Unhappily there is no inscription, but yet we are tempted to give the hero a name.

Horse and horseman are set against a rocky background. The marble of which the relief is made is Pentelic, the style Attic, with many reminiscences of the Parthenon marbles. It is therefore not too bold to see in the rocky background a slope of the Acropolis. To the right above the hero is a seated figure, with only the lower part of the body draped. Zeus is so represented and Asklepios. Zeus has no shrine in the slopes of the Acropolis, nor is it probable he would be depicted on a relief of this date seated in casual fashion as a spectator. The figure is almost certainly Asklepios. Given that the figure is Asklepios, the narrative of Pausanias[914] supplies the clue to the remaining figures. ‘Approaching the Acropolis by this road, next after the sanctuary of Asklepios is the temple of Themis, and in front of this temple is a mound upreared as a monument to Hippolytos.’ Then Pausanias tells the story of Phaedra and Hippolytos; he does not actually mention the sanctuary of Aphrodite, but he says ‘the old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were the work of no obscure artists.’ Images of course presuppose a sanctuary, and such a sanctuary we now know from inscriptions and votive offerings found on the spot to have existed, and that it was dedicated to Aphrodite Pandemos. The figures on the relief exactly correspond to the account of Pausanias. To the right, i.e. to the East, the figure of Asklepios; next Themis with her temple, clearly indicated by the two columns between which she stands; immediately in front of her Hippolytos with his sacred altar-mound. Above it Aphrodite, literally ‘over Hippolytos’ (Ἱππολύτῳ δ’ ἔπι). It is as Euripides[915] knew it:

‘And Phaedra then, his father’s Queen high born, Saw him, and as she saw her heart was torn With great love by the working of my will. And there, when he was gone, on Pallas’ hill Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam, She built a shrine and named it Love-at-Home. And the rock held it, but its face always Seeks Trozen o’er the seas.’

It is worth noting that the relief, now in the Torlonia Museum at Rome, was found not far from Aricia, where the hero Virbius, the Latin equivalent of Hippolytos, was worshipped.

It is possible that in the tragedy of the wrath of Aphrodite against the hero who worshipped Artemis, and in the title of the goddess ‘over Hippolytos,’ later misunderstood as ‘because of,’ ‘for the sake of’ Hippolytos, we have a reminiscence of a superposition of cults—that the actual contest was between a local hero and Aphrodite who had waxed to the glory of an Olympian. Such a view can however scarcely be deduced from the relief in question, which seems to present relations merely topographical and perfectly peaceful.

* * * * *

The design in fig. 108, from a relief in the Jacobsen[916] collection at Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen, shows a clearer case of supersession. The design is not earlier than the 4th century B.C. and of the usual type of ‘Hero-Feast’; we have the reclining man, seated wife, attendant cupbearer, and, to make the scene quite complete, three worshippers of smaller size. The procession of worshippers is a frequent, though not uniform, element in the reliefs representing ‘Hero-Feasts.’ When present they serve to show very clearly that the hero and his wife are objects of worship. As a rule it is, we have seen, safest not to name the hero. In the cases so far where he or the heroine is inscribed, the name has been that of a mortal. In the present case the inscription has a surprise in store for us. Assuredly no one, without the inscriptions, would have ventured to conjecture the inscribed names. The inscription runs as follows:

‘Aristomache and Theoris dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios Philios, and to Philia the mother of the god, and to Tyche Agathe the wife of the god.’

Philia, the Friendly One, is mother not wife of Zeus Philios, ‘Zeus the Friendly’; it is the old matriarchal relation of Mother and Son (p. 273). But the dedicators, wedded themselves no doubt after patriarchal fashion, seem to feel a need that Zeus Philios should be married; they give him not his natural shadow-wife Philia—she has been used up as mother—but Tyche Agathe, ‘Good Fortune.’ In the procession of worshippers there are two women with a man between them: probably they are his mother and wife and wish to see their relation to him mirrored in their dedication. But they are content with the traditional type of Hero-Feasts, possibly the only type that the conservative workman kept in stock in his workshop.

It is worth noting that this interesting relief came from a precinct of Asklepios in Munychia down at the Peiraeus, the same precinct which yielded the snake reliefs (figs. 1 and 2) dedicated to Meilichios. There were also found the relief in fig. 4, several reliefs adorned with snakes only, some reliefs representing Asklepios, and various ritual inscriptions. The precinct seems to have become a sort of melting-pot of gods and heroes. Tyche we know at Lebadeia as the wife of the Agathos Daimon, the Good or Rich Spirit, and it is curious to note that Zeus on the relief holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. His other title Epiteleios points the same way. Hesychius[917] tells us that the word ἐπιτελείωσις means the same as αὔξησις, ‘increase,’ and Plato[918] gives the name ἐπιτελειώσεις, ‘accomplishments,’ to family feasts held in thanksgiving for the birth and welfare of children.

It seems obvious that the precinct once belonged to a hero, worshipped under the form of a snake, and as Meilichios, god of the wealth of the underworld—a sort of Agathos Daimon or Good Spirit. He must have had two other titles—Epiteleios, the Accomplished, and Philios, the Friendly One. At some time or other Asklepios took over the shrine of Meilichios, Philios, Epiteleios, as he took over the shrine of Amynos, but Zeus also put in a claim and the two divided the honours of the place. The old snake-hero was forgotten, overshadowed by the Olympian and the great immigrant healer; but the Olympian does not wholly triumph. He cannot change the local ritual, and he must consent to a certain interchange of attributes.

This is quaintly shown in the two reliefs placed side by side in fig. 109[919]. The larger one to the left shows a seated god holding a cornucopia; beneath his chair is an eagle. In deference to this characteristically Olympian bird we should expect the dedication to be to Zeus. We find it is to the ‘Good Spirit.’ In the smaller relief a similar bird is perched below the chair, and a humble pig is the sacrifice, as it is to Zeus Meilichios; the inscription tells us that ‘the Club-men dedicated it to Zeus Philios in the archonship of Hegesios.’ The relief is dated by this archonship as set up in the year 324/3 B.C. The Friendly Zeus was the god of good fellowship and was of wide popularity[920]. To cheerful, hilarious souls it was comforting to think that there was another Zeus, less remote, more of the cornucopia and less of the thunderbolt, and that he was ready to join a human feast. The diner-out needs and finds a god in his own image, and Zeus—Zeus with his title of Philios, accustomed as he was to Homeric banquets, was ready for the post. So the comic parasite reasons[921]:

‘I wish to explain clearly What a holy orthodox business this dining-out is— An invention of the gods; the other arts Were invented by men of talent, not by the gods. But dining-out was invented by Zeus the Friendly, By common consent the greatest of all the gods. Now good old Zeus comes straight into people’s houses In his free and easy way, rich and poor alike. Wherever he sees a comfortable couch set out And by its side a table properly laid, Down he sits to a regular dinner with courses, Wine and dessert and all, and then off he goes Straight back home, and he never pays his shot.’

The fooling is obviously based on ritual practice in the ‘Hero-Feast’ that developed into the Feasts of the Gods, the Theoxenia.

* * * * *

Our argument ends where it began—with Zeus Meilichios, an early chthonic stratum of worship, a later Olympian supersession. The two religions, alien in ritual, alien in significance, never more than mechanically fused. We have also seen that the new religion was powerless to alter the old save in name; the Diasia becomes the festival of Zeus, the ritual is a holocaust offered to a snake; Apollo and Artemis take over the Thargelia, but it remains a savage ceremony of magical purification.

It might seem that we had reached the end. In reality, for religion in any deep and mystical sense, we have yet to watch the beginning; we have yet to see the coming of a god, who came from the North and yet was no Achaean, no Olympian, who belonging to the ancient stock revived the ancient ritual, the sacrifice that was in its inner content a sacrifice of purification, but revived it with a significance all his own, the god who took over the ritual of the Anthesteria, Dionysos.

DIONYSOS ON HERO-RELIEFS.

The passing from the old to the new is very curiously and instructively shown in the two designs in figs. 110 and 111. The design in fig. 110 is from a relief found in the harbour of Peiraeus and now in the National Museum at Athens[922]. The material is Pentelic marble; in places the surface has suffered considerably from the corrosion of sea-water. The fine style of the relief dates it as probably belonging to the end of 5th century B.C.

The general type of the relief is of course the same as that of the ‘Hero-Feast[923].’ A youth on a couch holds a rhyton, the usual woman is seated at his feet, the usual procession stands to the left. But it is a ‘Hero-Feast’ with a difference. The group of ‘worshippers’ are not worshippers; they are talking among themselves, they hold not victims or other offerings, but the implements of the drama—a mask, a tambourine. This is clearly seen in the case of the middle figure, a woman[924]. The worshippers are tragic actors. This prepares us for the fact disclosed by the inscriptions beneath the figures of the youth and the attendant woman. Under the youth is written quite clearly Dionysos: under the woman was an inscription of which only two certain letters remain, the two last, ια. These inscriptions, it should clearly be noted, are later than the relief itself, probably not earlier than 300 B.C. The name of the woman attendant cannot certainly be made out: the most probable conjecture is (Paid)ia, Play, a natural enough name for a nymph attendant on Dionysos.

The name of the god is certain, and, though the inscription is an afterthought, it certainly voices the intention of the original artist. It is to the honour of Dionysos, not to that of a hero, that the actors with their masks assemble—to his honour rather than to his definite worship. But none the less there remains the significant fact that the god has taken over the art-type of the ‘Hero-Feast.’

The second relief[925] in fig. 111 tells in slightly different and more elaborate form the same tale. The design is from a relief in the Museum at Naples, and is an instance of a type long known as the ‘Ikarios reliefs.’ Its style dates it as about the 2nd cent. B.C. It clearly presents a blend of the ‘Hero-Feast’ to the left and the triumphal entry of Dionysos, drunken, elderly, attended by a train of worshippers to the right. The immigrant god is received by the local hero. What local hero receives him we cannot say. Legend tells of such receptions by Ikarios, by Pegasos, by Amphictyon, by Semachos. The hero must remain unnamed; anyhow he plays to Dionysos the part played by Sophocles, he is Dexion, Receiver, Host. It is a Theoxenia, a feasting of the god. The ‘Ikarios’ reliefs are late, and, in the euphemistic manner of the time, the representation is all peace and harmony. The hero, be he who he may, receives in awe and reverence and gladness the incoming divine guest. But Herodotus tells another tale—a tale of the forcible wresting of the honours of the hero to the glory of the god. In telling the early history of Sekyon under the tyrant Cleisthenes he[926] makes this notable statement: ‘The inhabitants of Sekyon paid other honours to Adrastos and they celebrated his misfortunes by tragic choruses, for at that time they did not honour Dionysos, but honoured Adrastos. Now Cleisthenes transferred these choruses (from Adrastos) to Dionysos, but the rest of the sacrifice he gave to Melanippos.’ It is a sudden glimpse into a very human state of affairs. To put down the cult of Adrastos, the hero of a family alien to his own, Cleisthenes introduced the worship of a Theban hero Melanippos. He dared not for some reason give the tragic choruses to Melanippos; rather than the local enemy should still have them he hands them over to a popular immigrant god, Dionysos.

The recumbent hero in the ‘Hero-Feasts’ is usually represented as reclining at a feast and as drinking from a large wine-cup, attended by a cupbearer. It may be conjectured that this type, which does not appear till late in the 5th century, came in with the worship of Dionysos. The idea of future bliss as an ‘eternal drunkenness’ came, it will later be seen (Chap. XI.), with the religion of Dionysos from the North. By anticipation we may note a curious fact. On the late Roman coins of the Bizuae[927], a Thracian tribe, the type of the Hero-Feast occurs. An instance is given in fig. 112. A hero is represented—of that we are sure from the cuirass suspended on the tree, from the horse and from the snake—but a hero, I would conjecture, conceived of as transfigured into the feasting god, Dionysos himself.

To the examination in detail of the cult of Dionysos we must now turn.