to fate is not uniformly represented in the Homeric poems, and probably the poet had not formed a distinct notion of it. Fate is generally described as emanating from his will; but sometimes he appears to be no more than the minister of a stern necessity, which he wishes in vain to elude. This is especially remarkable in the chief of the gods, whose Greek name, Zeus, answering to the Latin Deus, and simply signifying god, may frequently have been used without any more definite meaning attached to it, though it was peculiarly assigned to the lord of the upper regions, who dwelt on the summits of the highest mountains, gathered the clouds about him, The fatalism of the Greeks was very remote, shook the air with his thunder, and wielded the both in its nature and consequences, from the lightning as the instrument of his wrath. From dogma which, instilled into the minds of feroelements drawn from these different sources, cious and sensual barbarians, sometimes rouses his character, a strange compound of majesty them to a temporary phrensy, from which they and weakness, seems to have been formed by subside into an apathy that unfits them for successive poets, who, if they in some degree useful exertion on ordinary occasions. The deserved the censure of the philosophers, seem belief of the Greeks was the result of their at least not to have been guilty of any arbitrary natural reflections on the apparent order of fictions; while, on the other hand, by estab- the world, the weakness of man, and the mode lishing his supremacy, they introduced a prin- in which his conduct and success are swayed ciple of unity into the Greek polytheism, which by unforeseen and inexplicable causes. It servwas not, perhaps, without influence on the ed neither as a substitute for courage nor as a speculations of the philosophers themselves, pretext for indolence. It inspired them with though it exerted little on the superstition of resignation to evils when arrived, but did not the vulgar. The Olympian deities are assem- stifle their energies so long as any prospect rebled round Jupiter as his family, in which he mained of escaping by prudence and activity, maintains the mild dignity of a patriarchal king. nor did it divert them from imploring the aid He assigns their several provinces and controls of the gods. The blessed inhabitants of Olymtheir authority. Their combined efforts cannot pus did not disdain to interest themselves in give the slightest shock to his power, nor retard the affairs of mankind, an inferior and unhappy the execution of his will; and hence their way- race, but yet of kindred origin, not always unwardness, even when it incurs his rebuke, can-worthy of their alliance, and never below their not ruffle the inward serenity of his soul. The tremendous nod with which he confirms his decrees can neither be revoked nor frustrated. As his might is irresistible, so is his wisdom unsearchable. He holds the golden balance, in which are poised the destinies of nations and of men; from the two vessels that stand at his threshold, he draws the good and evil gifts that alternately sweeten and imbitter mortal existence. The eternal order of things, the ground of the immutable succession of events, is his, and therefore he himself submits to it. Human laws derive their sanction from his ordinance earthly kings receive their sceptres from his hand he is the guardian of social rights: heity, a crime which they seldom failed to visit watches over the fulfilment of contracts, the observance of oaths: he punishes treachery, arrogance, and cruelty. The stranger and the suppliant are under his peculiar protection: the fence that encloses the family dwelling is in his keeping he avenges the denial and the abuse of hospitality. Yet even this greatest and most glorious of beings, as he is called, is subject, like the other gods, to passion and frailty. For, though secure from dissolution, though surpassingly beautiful and strong, and warmed with a purer blood than fills the veins of men, their heavenly frames are not insensible to pleasure and pain; they need the refreshment of ambrosial food, and inhale a grateful savour from the sacrifices of their worshippers. Their other affections correspond to the grossness of these animal appetites. Capricious love and hatred, anger and jealousy, often disturb the calm of their bosoms: the peace of the Olympian state might be broken by factions, and even by conspiracies formed against its chief. He himself cannot keep perfectly aloof from their quarrels: he occasionally wavers in his purpose, is overreached by artifice, blinded by desire, and hurried by resentment into unseemly violence. The relation in which he stands sympathy. But though the gods were accessible to prayer, no invariable rule could be ascertained for securing their favour. A hero of the most exalted virtue was not safe from the persecution of a god whom he had innocently provoked. The motive, however, by which they were believed to be most uniformly, if not exclusively impelled, was that of which their worshippers were most frequently consciousconcern for their own interest and honour. Pride and insolence, the intoxication of wealth and power, in which men forget their weakness and mortality, were generally odious to them: an open affectation of independence and equal with signal punishment. But even a long continuance of uninterrupted prosperity roused their envy of the man whom it brought too near to them, however meekly he might bear his fortunes. The milder view of affliction, as sent with the benevolent purpose of averting the dangerous consequences of unalloyed felicity, seems to have been long foreign to the Greek mode of thinking. In general, no quality was so pleasing to the gods as pious munificence, and no actions so meritorious in their sight as the observances that related singly to their service. These were so important, that even an involuntary neglect of them was sufficient to bring down the heaviest calamities on a whole people. Such conceptions of the gods, and of their dealings with mankind, had in themselves no tendency to strengthen any moral sentiments, or to enforce the practice of any social duties. Yet they might produce such effects, when the sanctity of religion was accidentally or artificially attached to the exercise of healthy natural affections, or to useful institutions. They were not unfrequently so applied, with great immediate advantage, but at the fearful risk of involving things really holy and venerable in But the contempt incurred by such errors, when de- | most interesting scenes in Greek poetry and tected, which, in a half-enlightened age, is usu- history depend entirely on this feeling. When ally extended to the truths of which they have the soul has made its escape through the lips been auxiliaries. On the other hand, the mis- or the wound, it is not dispersed in the air, but chief resulting from these mean and narrow preserves the form of the living person. views of the Divine nature was probably much the face of the earth, lighted by the sun, is no less than might at first sight have seemed like- fit place for the feeble, joyless phantom. It ly to spring from them. The gods, though their protracts its unprofitable being in the cheerless frailties did not abate the reverence which they twilight of the nether world, a shadow of its inspired, were never seriously proposed or con- former self, and pursuing the empty image of sidered as examples for imitation, nor did their its past occupations and enjoyments. Orion, worshippers dream of drawing a practical infer-like the spectre of the North American hunter, ence from the tales of the popular mythology. is engaged in chasing the disimbodied beasts If the gods were not raised above human pas- which he had killed on the mountains over the sions, they were too great, and too remote from asphodel meadow. Minos is busied in holding earthly affairs, to be tried by the same rules mock trials, and dispensing his rigid justice to which bind an inferior race. But the interests a race that has lost all power of inflicting wrong. of morality were chiefly connected with religion Achilles retains his ancient pre-eminence among by the functions of the powers whose peculiar his dead companions, but he would gladly exprovince it was to exact the penalty due to Di- change the unsubstantial honour, even if it were vine justice for atrocious crimes. Homer sim- to be extended to the whole kingdom of spirits, ply designates the office of the Furies, without for the bodily life of the meanest hireling. Noeither fixing their number or describing their thing was more remote from Homer's philosoform, which the imagination of later poets paint-phy than the notion that the soul, when lightened with terrific exactness; but the mysterious ed of its fleshly encumbrances, exerted its inobscurity in which he wraps their outlines was tellectual faculties with the greater vigour. On perhaps no less awful. Their dwelling-place, the contrary, he represents it as reduced by in the gloomy depths of the invisible world, was death to a state of senseless imbecility. "Alas!" an object of horror to the blessed gods, who exclaimed Achilles, when the spirit of Patroabode in the perpetual sunshine of Olympus. clus had vanished, "even in Hades there reThey shrouded themselves in darkness when mains a ghost and an image of the dead, but they went forth to execute their work of retri- the mind is altogether gone." Tiresias alone, bution, and, unlike the celestial powers, they among the shades, enjoys a certain degree of could not be propitiated; at least, in the Ho- mental vigour, by the especial favour of Prosermeric age, no rites seem to have been invented pine. It is only after their strength has been to disarm their wrath, and to quiet the alarms repaired by the blood of a slaughtered victim of a guilty conscience. They were especially that they recover reason and memory for a time, vigilant in enforcing the respect due to age, to can recognise their living friends, and feel anxparental authority, and kindred blood; but per- iety for those whom they have left on earth. jury, and probably all other offences proscribed While the greater part of the vast multitude as peculiarly heinous by public opinion, were that peoples the house of Hades merely proequally subject to their inquisition. The awelongs a dreaming, vacant existence, a few great inspired by these inexorable ministers of vengeance was a wholesome check, if not an adequate counterpoise, to the heedless levity which the easy and capricious government of the Olympian gods tended to encourage. offenders are doomed to a kind of suffering most in accordance with the character of the infernal realms-to the torment of unavailing toil and never-satisfied longings. A more tremendous prison, removed as far below Hades as earth is from heaven, was reserved for the audacious enemies of Jupiter-the abyss of Tartarus, fast secured with iron gates and a brazen floor. On the other hand, a few favoured heroes, instead of descending into Hades, were transported to a delicious plain, an island of Ocean, cooled by perpetual breezes from the west, and exempt from every inclement change of the seasons. The idea of retribution, however, was not generally associated with that of a future state. Homer views death as the separation of two distinct, though not wholly dissimilar substances -the soul and the body. The latter has no life without the former, the former no strength without the latter. The souls of the heroes are sent down to the realm of Hades (the Invisible), while they themselves remain a prey to dogs and birds. And when it is said of Hercules that his shade The favour of the gods was believed to be is among the dead, while he himself shares the obtained by means similar to those which are banquets of the immortal gods, it must be sup- most efficacious with powerful mortals-homposed that his virtue has been rewarded with age and tribute, or, in the language of religion, a new, undecaying body, and a divine soul. worship and sacrifice. Considered from one "When a man is dead," says the shade of An-point of view, the sacrifices of the Greeks apticlea, "the flesh and the bones are left to be pear in a highly pleasing light, as an expresconsumed by the flames, but the soul flies away sion of pure, though misdirected piety; viewed like a dream." Funeral rites seem not to have from another side, they present only the blind been accounted a necessary condition of its en- impulses of a rude superstition. A simple feeltrance into Hades, but it could enjoy no resting of dependance on the Divine bounty natuthere till they had been performed. Hence arose the importance attached to them by surviving friends, the obstinate contests that take place over the slain, Priam's desperate effort to recover the corpse of Hector. Several of the rally vents itself in the form of an offering, which, however trifling in itself, may be an adequate symbol of the religious sentiment. In many of the Greek rites, as in those of domestic worship, in the libations that accompanied we shall shortly have a fitter occasion for speaking of them. The holy places and edifices themselves belong to the same head. Though the gods abode in Olympus, several of them had territories* and domains on the earth, where they sometimes loved to sojourn. The piece of land which was consecrated to a god bore the same namet with that which was assigned for the maintenance of the kingly dignity, and was viewed in a very similar light. It seems to have been always distinguished by an altar, which, when raised in the open air, was probably sheltered by a sacred grove. The cultivated portion served, no doubt, for the supply of sacrifices and the support of the priest. It was, perhaps, from some of these consecrated tracts that the poet drew his description of the desert island, where flocks and herds of the sun were tended by the nymphs, and, though they bare no young, never experienced any diminution in their numbers. the social meal, in the eirisioné and other har- | religious principle which suggested them, and vest offerings, in the votive locks which youths and virgins frequently dedicated to a guardian deity, this merely symbolical character is predominant; and these may have been among the earliest forms of devotion. But the same unworthy, conceptions of the Divine nature which led the Greeks to treat the material of fering as the essential part of every sacred service, gave birth to more luxurious and less innocent rites. The image of earthly kings applied to the heavenly powers, suggested the persuasion that the efficacy of a sacrifice depended on its value, and that the feeling which prompted the offering was not merely to be expressed, but to be measured by it. This persuasion was cherished by two popular prejudices: by the notion that the gods were capable of envy and jealousy, which men might allay by costly profusion in their gifts, and by the view taken of a sacrifice as a banquet for the gods the more agreeable in proportion as it was rich and splendid.* The nature of the Greek religion implied the existence of persons who exercised the sacred functions which it prescribed-of priests, if the word be taken in this general sense. But, un formed a distinct class, what notions were commonly entertained of their office, and what privileges and influence it conferred, the name may serve only to mislead. None of the acts which composed the ordinary worship of the gods, neither the sacrifice nor the accompany But When the sacrifice was designed to soften the anger of an offended deity, it would, of course, be unusually sumptuous; for it was then at once a propitiatory offering and a self-less it be ascertained whether these persons imposed penalty. This mode of thinking might easily lead to the notion that, on some extraordinary occasions, the Divine wrath was to be appeased by no oblation less precious than the life of man. And it seems certain that, before the times described by Homer, the Greeks had been brought, either by their own train of thinking prayer, were, among the Greeks, appropriaing, or by the influence of foreign example, to this dreadful conclusion. This high antiquity of human sacrifices among the Greeks has been disputed, on the ground that such rites are not mentioned or alluded to by Homer. We conceive, however, that Homer's silence would not, in the slightest degree, shake the authority of the numerous legends which speak of human victions as occasionally, and even periodically, offered in certain temples, more especially as, in the latter case, they record the early substitution of other victims or of milder rites. Though the practice of dedicating living persons to a deity, which was unquestionably very ancient, may not have been originally connected with any effusion of blood, still it indicates the prevailing sentiment; and there is nothing in the manners of the heroic age to prevent us from believing that the same sentiment sometimes manifested itself in the sacrifice of human life, even if the practice had not been transmitted from earlier times. But, in fact, Homer himself appears strongly to confirm the testimony borne by later writers to the antiquity of the usage, when he informs us that Achilles immolated twelve Trojan prisoners at the funeral pile of Patroclus, not to indulge his own vengeance, but to soothe his departed friend. The poet, indeed, considers this as a terrible display of friendship, but it seems clear that he would have found nothing inconsistent with piety or humanity in a similar sacrifice offered to the gods. Offerings of a different kind, designed for the perpetual ornament of holy places, are impor1t rather in the history of the arts than as affording any new or peculiar illustration of the * Od., vii., 203. ted to any certain order of men. The father of *KA pot, Pindar, Ol., vii., 101. existed in Greece, when the domestic hearth organized body, and their insulation was not was the only altar, and the house of the chief the only temple of the tribe. But in the heroic age, though it was still true that every king was in some sense a priest, the priestly office had so long ceased to be a mere appendage of royal or patriarchal power, that in the Homeric poems we do not find a single instance where it distinctly appears that one who is described as a priest was also, like Virgil's Anius, a king.ing among them, even on occasions which Yet, when a temple was built for the tutelary god of a tribe, the ruling family may often have been invested with the charge of it, which, of course, then became an hereditary office, and might frequently survive the civil pre-eminence out of which it arose. Political changes, or some of the numberless accidents that are perpetually varying the course of every popular superstition, frequently enlarged the sphere of a local worship, and transformed it from an obscure domestic ritual into a branch of the national religion. In such cases the hereditary ministers of the god gained a proportionate increase in dignity and wealth, and their priestly character would become their most distinguishing and valued title. On the other hand, a priesthood which was originally of a public nature, and arose with and out of the temple where it was exercised, was probably seldom appropriated to a particular family, except where the gift of divination was believed to be likewise inherited, or in cases like that recorded by Herodotus of Gelon's ancestor, Telines, who had composed the civil dissensions of Gela by the influence of religion, and stipulated that his descendants should be hereditary ministers of the deities in whose name he had prevailed. Homer himself indicates the mode in which such offices were usually conferred, when he mentions that Theano was made priestess of Athene by the Trojans. In the later times of Greece the administration of religion embraced an endless multiplicity of forms: the elective priesthoods were bestowed, sometimes for life, sometimes for a very short term in the latter case the citizen evidently acquired no new character by the temporary office; but in the former, it might frequently become a profession which completely separated him from the rest of the community. The most learned of our historians has observed that the distinction between the laity and the clergy was unknown to the Greeks and Romans. The assertion is true in the sense in which it was meant to be understood; but it may be proper here to notice the limitations which it requires, and to point out that in another sense the distinction was not unknown to the Greeks. The priestly office in itself involved no civil exemptions or disabilities, and was not thought to unfit the person who filled it for discharging the duties of a senator, a judge, or a warrior, either on the ground that these occupations were less pleasing to the gods, or that their service claimed the dedication of the whole of a man's time and faculties. But the care of a temple often required the continual residence and presence of its ministers, and thus, in effect, excluded every other employment, and kept them in sacred seclusion, apart from the ordinary pursuits of their fellowcitizens. The Greek priests never formed one merely an effect of the political divisions of their country: even within the same state they were not incorporated in any kind of hierarchy, and they had neither means nor motives for entering into voluntary associations. Considered, therefore, in the aggregate, they appear absolutely powerless and insignificant; nor are there any traces of a party spirit or fellow-feelmight have been expected most to have called it forth. The jealous hostility which beset the progress of Athenian philosophy, and sometimes broke out into open persecution of its professors, appears neither to have sprung from the machinations of the priests, nor to have been cherished or directed by them, though the opinions which excited the popular indignation threatened their peculiar and common interests. But though, as an order, the priesthood had no bond of union, and, therefore, no engine of ambition at its command, the several local corporations comprised in it were perhaps, on that very account, animated with the more lively consciousness of their peculiar character and interest. The ministers who were permanently attached to a temple felt their honours to be intimately connected with its renown, and many still more solid advantages often flowed from the control of a much frequented shrine. Priestcraft had inducements as effectual, and as large a field, in Greece as elsewhere, and it was not less fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture. The qualifications required for the priesthood were as various as the aspects of religion itself. Herodotus was struck by the contrast which he observed in this respect between the Greek and the Egyptian institutions : In Egypt," he says, "no god or goddess is served by a priestess." In his own country, the female ministers of religion were perhaps as numerous as those of the other sex; and the usage appears to have obtained from the most remote antiquity, even in the temples of deities whom he supposed to have, been of Egyptian origin. No period of life was excluded on any general grounds, and the choice of that which was preferred in each case was determined by accident or caprice. It was no part of the priest's duties to expound theological dogmas or to deliver moral precepts. Even the memory was but lightly tasked by the liturgical forms, in the repetition of which his ordinary functions consisted, so that Isocrates had room to observe that some men deem the kingly office within every one's ability, as if it were a priesthood. The moral character of the priest was never viewed with regard to the influence of his example or authority on the minds of others; yet the service of the gods was supposed to demand clean hands, and in some degree a pure heart ;* it could not be duly performed by one who was polluted by bloodshed or by any atrocious crime. Even celibacy was frequently required; but in many instances the same end was more wisely pursued by the selection either of the age when the passions are yet dormant, or that in which they have subsided. The most important branch of the Greek re Hom., I., vi., 266. Esch., c. Tim., 188, p. 370, Bek. phenomena as thunder, lightning, and eclipses. The various appearances of a victim, in the sev eral stages of a sacrifice, were believed to indicate the mind of the deity to whom it was offered. Hence arose a system of experimental divination, which in later times afforded employment for a large class of soothsayers. A victim was sacrificed on great occasions, as the eve of an expedition or a battle, for the purpose of ascertaining the event by the inspection of its entrails. The diviners who interpreted these signs did not usually pretend to any per to found their predictions, or advice, on rules discovered by experience. The flight of birds, the changes of the atmosphere, and the heavenly bodies were likewise, at times, subject to delib erate inspection. But neither augury, nor the other branches of the art, were so studiously cultivated, and reduced to such a semblance of scientific exactness by the Greeks as by the Tuscans; and in the Homeric age, though accidental omens are carefully noted, experimental divination seems hardly to be known. We are even agreeably surprised to find the poet putting into Hector's mouth a sentiment which it surpassed the force of Xenophon's mind or character to conceive: One omen is the best: to fight for one's country. Dreams also were held to proceed from Jupiter, and the art of interdiviners. But it does not appear that oracles had yet been founded, in which the established method of intercourse with the deity consisted in nocturnal visions, obtained by passing a night in his temple. ligion, that which more than any other affected the political institutions, the history, and manners of the nation, grew out of the belief that man is enabled by the Divine favour to obtain a knowledge of futurity which his natural faculties cannot reach. Though the gods rarely permitted their own forms to be seen or their voices to be heard, they had a great variety of agents and vehicles at their disposal for conveying the secrets of their prescience. Sometimes they were believed to impart the prophetical faculty, as a permanent gift, to some favoured person or family, in which it was per-manent or temporary inspiration, but professed mitted to descend; sometimes they attached it to a certain place, the seat of their immediate presence, which is then termed an oracle. It is probable that these oracular sanctuaries belong, for the most part, to that eldest form of religion, which took its impressions from the natural features of the country, and that they were not originally viewed as the abode of any deity more definite than the powers which breathed the spirit of divination from springs and caves. But when Jupiter's supremacy over the Olympian family was generally acknowledged, and the offices and attributes of the other deities were distinguished, the father of the gods, as destiny was his decree, was naturally regarded as the great source of prophetical inspiration, and Apollo, it is not certain how, came to be considered as the general in-preting them gave a name to a distinct class of terpreter of Jupiter's will and the dispenser of his prescience. The most ancient and celebrated of the Greek oracles were attached to the sanctuaries of these deities at Dodona and Delphi. The political causes that raised the oracle of Apollo at Delphi to its high pre-eminence over all similar institutions, belongs to a later period; but Homer describes it as already renowned and wealthy before the Trojan war. He is equally, or, rather, more familiar with the personal and hereditary faculty of divination. The shades of the dead were also believed to possess the power of revealing the future, and there were a few oracles where they might be consulted. But these institutions seem not to have been congenial with the feelings of the Greeks, and to have been seldom resorted to, except by those who had been goaded by re-itude to a departed friend. kinsman, or benefacmorse into an unwonted superstition. The worship of heroes, which in after times forms so prominent a feature in the Greek religion, is not mentioned by Homer. We are very far from adopting the opinion that this worship was the foundation of the Greek religion; but the views and feelings out of which it arose seem to be clearly discernible in the Homeric poems. The Greek hero-worship presented two sides: it was an expression of religious veneration for departed excellence, which had exalted the deceased mortal above the level of his kind; and it was a tribute of affection and grat society of the gods, as it had changed the nature of Hercules, or it might transport him, as Menelaus and Rhadamanthys, to a state of blessedness little inferior. In either case, the person who approached so nearly to deity was a fit object for similar worship. The piety of surviving friends displayed itself in the most costly offerings at the funeral pile; and it was probably usual, at a very early period, to repeat such honours at certain intervals over the grave of the decesed. Thus the tomb gradually became an altar, and sometimes the site of a temple. But this kind of worship was indebted for its wider diffusion to an opinion, which appears first expressed in the poetry of Hesiod, who speaks of thirty thousand guardian dæmons, spirits of departed heroes, which are continually walking over the earth, veiled in darkness, watching the deeds of men, and dis tor. According to the Homeric theology, emiAnother mode of divination which has pre-nent virtue might raise a mortal even to the vailed, and, perhaps, continues to exist in almost all countries of the world, was known in the earliest ages of Greece, and survived every other similar form of superstition, the interpretation of casual sights and sounds, which, as they derive all their imaginary importance from the difficulty of perceiving their connexion with the ordinary state of things, attract notice precisely in proportion as they least deserve it. Every variation, however minute, from the common and anticipated tenour of life, was regarded as an omen denoting some remarkable turn of events, and was observed with the deeper interest when it happened to coincide with a momentous occasion. Thus, in an assembly convened for a grave deliberation, the utterance of a word associated with a pleasing or unwelcome thought might suspend or determine the issue of a debate. The flight and voice of a bird was never witnessed with indifference at a critical juncture; still less, such VOL. I-N • Of Leucothea, also, it is said (Od., vi., 334) that she was once a mortal, but afterward obtained divine honours. |