* On the meaning which we attach to this term ‘half-Greek,’ see the following paragraph.
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other views. It is also necessary to explain that the writer’s views are founded on a far from com- plete survey of the facts, and are liable to correc- tion, doubtless, in many details, if the opportunity should ever be granted him of writing a complete account of Anatolian religion; but the general principles are the result of more than twenty years of interest and occasional study, and are not likely to be much changed by further thought.*
The phrase ‘half-Greek races’ is not used in an
ethnological sense in this article. It does not imply a mixture of Greek and non-Greek blood in any race. It is employed to indicate a eradual shading off of character, as one proceeds from Greece proper towards the East. The view which we take is that even the tribes of Greece proper were far from uniform in blood and stock. The Hellenic idea and civilization which those tribes evolved was far too many-sided to arise among a homogeneous nation: there were combined in its composition a great variety of characteristics con- tributed by various tribes of very diverse character, nursed and matured amid the peculiar circum- stances of the seas and lands that touch and mingle in south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor. The lands that border on the Augean Sea were pre-eminently the nursing-home of Hellenism, and the further we go from it the more faint and evanescent become the traces of the Greek spirit. Hellenism is only partially a racial fact; it denotes also a general type of intellectual and political development, of industrial education and artistic achievement. « The point of view from which we start may be stated in outline as follows. (1) The religion of the Anatolian race or races, in its origin, was to a considerable extent an idealized presentation of the actual life of the time, exhibiting a Divine model and authorization for the existing customs and institutions in family and society and the State as a whole.
(2) Their religion was the authority for the laws and rules on which rested their industry and agri- culture and general well-being. Perhaps it origin- ally taught those rules to a simple people, in which case the knowledge embodied in them probably belonged at one time to the priests alone. Cer- tainly, the sanction for the rules was religious: the violation of them was punished by the Divine power through sickness, whether disease of any part of the body or the general indefinite fact of fever, which was considered to be a consuming of the body and strength by Divine fire.
(3) The Divine power was the ruler of the people, acting through its visible representatives, namely, the kings or priests: there is every probability that the king was the priest: the priest-kings or priest-dynasts are a most characteristic feature of Anatolia.
This is obviously the religion of a comparatively civilized people, not of a barbarous race. And it must be distinctly understood from the outset that we are not investigating the origin of the religious forms which are described in the following pages : we are attempting to understand clearly and state precisely the religious ideas of a population, possessing an ordered system of government of a peculiar and well-marked character, surrounded by many equipments and devices and implements of an artificial and developed character, practising both agriculture and a very highly developed
* In the Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, i. and ii., the present writer was groping his way to the views now expressed in part A. A considerable portion of part B was written in 1879-81, and needed hardly any change to adapt it to the writer’s present views. In view of recent theories it should be added that the view here advocated, as to the way in which pre-Hellenic religion developed into Hellenic, remains practically unchanged since 1881, but the name ‘Pelasgian’ was not used in that old sketch of the subject.
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system of treating domesticated animals and adapting them to the benefit of mankind.
A question of extreme interest and importance is, how far any signs of progress and development can be observed in the religion which we are studying. It may be doubted whether there can be detected anything in the way of growth from within, of elevation of the religious idea and of the moral standard in the application of religion to life, such as is the most striking feature in the history of Hebrew religion. On the whole, the history is one of deterioration and degradation rather than one of elevation. Any improvement that does take place seems rather attributable to, and fully explained by, the meeting of different races with different religious ideas corresponding to their differing social and family organization ; and is probably not caused by any mind working from within the religion, unfolding and vitalizing the germs of truth which it contained, and burning away the envelope and accretion of accidental idolatrous forms that clung to it. We use inten- tionally these last words, for it will appear that the fundamental and essential idea in{the Anatolian religion is not strictly idolatrous, and that the de- velopment in polytheism and image-worship was gradual, and was external and accidental rather than natural and necessary.
A. PRIMITIVE ANATOLIAN AND PRE-HELLENIC RELIGION. —In treating this subject, reference must often be made to primitive Greek, or, as it may be called, Pelasgian worship (anticipating part B, §§ I, II), which illustrates the Anatolian religion so remarkably as to demonstrate that some intimate relation once existed between them. We must here simply assume the relationship without inquiring into its nature.