VII

GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION

THE hope of discoveries bearing on ancient Greek religion lies mainly in three directions: excavations of ancient sites; research in Hellenic and contiguous lands for survivals of ancient ritual; and, thirdly, general anthropological investigation throwing light on obscure points of the classical problem.

The last year has been fruitful at least in the two former directions. The excavations of the British School on the site of the Temple of Artemis Orthia at Sparta have been an admirable work. The results are published in the Annual of the British School, 1906. The great antiquity of the cult is proved, and the early local associations with Asia Minor (probably with Ephesos) have been revealed, which are suggestive of important possibilities of religious influence. The most archaic inscription records a dedication Τα Παρθένοι Γορθείᾳ. The official name appears to have been "Αρτεμις Γορθεία (variants, Βωρσέα, Ορθεία), while Ὀρθεία occasionally occurs alone. These facts would not bear out the hypothesis that an earlier "adjectival Sondergottheit" called 'Opoeia was absorbed by Artemis. As regards the flagellation at the altar, a new and interesting view was expressed by Mr. Bosanquet, in a paper read at the last meeting of the British Association; namely, that the Siapaoriywois was a late institution of the days of Sparta's decadence-a cruel and useless exaggeration of an ancient ritual-practice of whipping away the boys who tried to steal cheeses from the altar, described obscurely by Xenophon.1

1 Rep. Lac. ii. 9.

Brilliant results have been obtained by Mr. R. M. Dawkins from a travel recently undertaken in Thrace to Bizye, the royal residence of the Thracian kings; and he has published his discoveries in the Hellenic Journal,1 in a paper of great importance. He describes a ritual-play-at which he was present and photographed the chief scenes-acted by men in goat-skins, one of whom carried a wooden phallos. The play is performed near a church, towards the end of the Lenten carnival. The leading motives are a marriage, the mock death of one of the goat-men, and the mourning over his body by his wife, and his resurrection; a "holy ploughing," with the goat-men yoked to the plough; the carrying about of a new-born baby in a cradle, which is significantly called Xíxvi, shaped like a trough. We have here all the essentials of the ancient Dionysiac mystery; and must regard this rite either as belonging to the primaeval stratum of peasant-religion, out of which the ThracianHellenic Dionysos-worship developed, or as descending from that very worship itself. And here, for the first time, we find clear proof of goat-men dancing a serious tragedy; and it is these that have long been wanted by those who believe in the Dionysiac origin of at least the Attic "tragedy,” and in the explanation of τpay día as the song of the "goat-men."

Investigations on other sites have also contributed something during the past year. Dr. D. M. Robinson, of the John Hopkins University, has published an important monograph on Ancient Sinope, containing several new inscriptions, which bear on the local worships, and show the influence upon them of the Anatolian religion. We find among them indications of star-worship, and a dedication to "Zeus the Supreme Justice,” Διΐ Δικαιοσύνῳ Μεγάλῳ. An inscription of the second century B.C., recently found near Tanagra, shows a cult of the goddess 'Apíorn in that neighbourhood, who has hitherto been known to have been worshipped only at Athens and Metapontum. An interesting discovery has been published in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 1 1906, p. 191. Athen. Mittheil. 1907, p. 434.

of 1906-a mosaic of the Hellenistic period from Delos, showing a winged Dionysos riding on a tiger, an illustration of his cult-title Tina.

A parallel to the Boeotian Daphnephoria has been cited by a writer in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft,1 from a book by Josefine Kopecky, Cechischer Weihnachtszauber und Festlieder.

Looking now at the treatises or articles bearing directly on Greek religion or mythology, that have appeared within the last year, I may briefly refer to my two new volumes of The Cults of the Greek States, published by the Clarendon Press last spring. The third volume is taken up with the account of the worships of Ge, Demeter and Kore, HadesPlouton and the Mother of the Gods, with Rhea-Cybele. The primitive festivals of Demeter are examined, and the problems of the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia are discussed at length. In the last chapter some estimate is given of early Cretan influences on Greek religion.

Volume iv. deals solely with the two cults of Poseidon and Apollo, the former being considered especially in its relations to the problems of Greek ethnography. The larger questions handled in the latter are the significance of the Hyperborean legend, the position of Apollo in Attica and Ionia, the constitution of the Delphic and other oracular shrines, and the problems concerning the Thargelia and the other leading Apolline festivals. I regret that the work was in type before I was able to avail myself of Gaston Colin's monograph on "Le Culte d'Apollon Pythien à Athènes,” in the Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome.

A short treatise on the "Outlines of Greek Religion," written in English by Dr. Rafael Karsten of Helsingfors, is of some value and interest. The writer has evidently worked thoughtfully and critically upon many departments of the whole subject, but does not assign sufficient prominence to the civilising influences and the higher thought in the Hellenic worships; and his theory is occasionally crude. 1907, p. 156.

1

The dogma on page 6, "We may take it for granted that the Hellenes did not reach the polytheistic stage in religion until after they had settled in their own land," is unverified, and in my opinion opposed to the probabilities of the evidence that is at hand. The belief in personal deities is found at a very low level of culture; nor are we obliged to date back the Hellenic migration into Hellas to an earlier period than the latter part of the third millennium; and even the Thracians, with whom they must have once been in close contact and who were far below them in potentiality of progress, had evidently passed the animistic stage before the Homeric age.

Many articles have appeared in the last year dealing with special problems. Mr. A. B. Cook's papers, in the Classical Review of October and November 1906, on the subject "Who was the wife of Zeus?" will have been read with interest, though his conclusions may be regarded with doubt. Mr. Cook is an original inquirer, and has already done valuable work; but he is still under the spell of “matriarchy," and uses uncritically that very dubious term in his theory that Herakles was united to Hera in a "matriarchal" marriage. It would be a great gain if he, or some other independent scholar at Cambridge-which has done so much for anthropology in other fields-would work upon the question of traces of the matrilinear system in Greece, and its possible influences on religion, with full knowledge of the facts of modern anthropological investigation. In the meantime, M'Lennan's crude theories about the Oresteia are out of date.

A number of suggestive articles have recently appeared by M. Salomon Reinach. Special attention may be called to his article in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique1 on "La Mort du Grand Pan." The solution that he offers for that curious puzzle is most attractive and intrinsically probable. He suggests that the voice heard from the isle of Paxae, which so astonished the ship's crew and the Roman world, was Oaμoûs, 1 1907, pp. 1-19.

Θαμούς, Θαμούς, Πανμέγας τέθνηκε, and that this was merely the lament for "the great Thamous," or Adonis, uttered by Syrian votaries; and that the coincidence of the ship's pilot bearing the same name, Oaμoûs, and the misunderstanding of Πανμέγας, οι Παμμέγας, gave rise to the curious fiction about the death of Pan; for there is no evidence that the Greek Pan ever died in ritual or myth. Another interesting study is his "Hippolyte," in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft.1 His theory is that Hippolytos was a horse-god torn to pieces by horse-votaries. He relies partly on the etymology of the name, which he interprets as "Horse-torn," and labours (not very successfully) to justify this use of Xúew. But he is unable to show that the horse has anything to do with the ritual—as distinct from the legend-of Hippolytos, unless we are obliged to accept Virbius as his real Italian " double”; but the ritual of Virbius should not be used to prove anything about the ritual of Hippolytus. The article contains also a good exposition of the writer's views about zoolatry in its relation to the personal gods—and zoolatry he here keeps distinct from totemism, which is undoubtedly a gain; but the theory which would explain all sacred associations of animals with gods as descending from an original zoolatry is not always convincing or necessary.

In the Revue des Études Grecques, M. Reinach offers a new and ingenious explanation of that baffling word συκοφάντης. The person so called was originally a religious official, who conducted "a fig-mystery," and revealed to the mystai a sacred fig, as the hierophantes at Eleusis revealed a sacred corn-stalk. Then, as the σuкodávтns had to keep off criminals and improper people from initiation, he became an unpopular person, and his name-when the office fell into disuse -was retained in the sense of "calumniator." The theory lacks probability on more grounds than one. Had there been a "fig-mystery"-about which there is no record and had the supreme office in it been the revealing of a fig in solemn silence, it is hardly likely that the chief 1 1907, p. 48.

$ 1906.