* Of Soph. dip. Tyr. 1497; Asch. Sept. 753 ; Burip. Phen. 18, etc.; also the old Attic legal formula tx’ &porw saidwy yvyciwy. See A, § VI(2), (3).
136 RELIGION OF GREECE
RELIGION OF GREECE
phoros founded and presided over social order, family life, the functions of women, and the birth of children ; marriage was the chief thesmos,* and the priestess Thesmophoros gave some instructions to newly married couples. A Hellenic touch lies in the custom of giving prizes to the most beauti- ful women in Arcadia, and apparently also at Thermopyle.+ Here two great Hellenic ideas, love of beauty and liking for the competitive principle, are united in the developed form of the rites; but the goddess whose festival was thus honoured was Eleusinia and not the more primitive Thesmophoros.
The resemblance of this Demeter Thesmophoros to the outlines of the Anatolian Mother-Goddess, as it has been traced in the earlier part of this article, is too obvious to need any words; and Herodotus points out (ii. 171) that the Thesmo- phoria rites were formerly practised by the Pelas- gian women of the Peloponnesus, but perished when the Dorians conquered the country, except in Arcadia, where the primitive population and ritual remained. Moreover, the worship of the goddess Thesmophoros was confined to women (which markedly distinguishes her worship from that of the Eleusinian Demeter), and swine were sacrificed to her by throwing them alive into holes in the ground. These are very primitive character- istics, and show that the cult of this goddess had not been developed so much as that of the Eleu- sinian goddess, who is in the myth marked as an immigrant with a long history of growth out of her Pelasgian germ.
Pausanias is sometimes inclined to identify those earlier conceptions with Hellenic deities. He feels that ‘the Good God’ must be Zeus;t but about the nature of the two Anaktes he expresses doubt, which proves that he was struck by some marked difference between them and the two Dioscuri. In short, the Greeks felt that those gods whom they counted older, and sometimes called Pelasgian, were different from their own gods, and yet closely related to them. The succession is sometimes de- scribed as the inheritance of child from parent, sometimes as the acquisition by victor from van- quished and even exiled gods. Those old deities were not in harmony with the later Hellenic gods ; there belonged to the older a graver, sterner, and more solemn character ; yet there were implicit in them the germs of the double Hellenic conception of Olympian and Chthonian deities, on which see § V, below.
The conservatism with which, as a rule, the old cult-ideas were preserved in Greece and allowed a certain scope alongside of the later, give great his- torical importance to the study of Greek religion. Often the institutions of a bygone age retained a religious existence long after they had disappeared from actual society.
IE. GREEK RELIGION AND GREEK LAwW.—That early religion was practically coextensive with the whole circle of public and ‘private life. Religion was the only sanction which originally existed to enforce a custom or strengthen an institution 3 re- ligion impressed these on the people by constituting them into solemn rites binding on all. When in the development of the Hellenic system political institutions grew and law became a power, the legal sanction to some extent replaced the religious sanction.
One by one the various branches of duty between members of the State were taken into the circle of law. In earlier times this was often done under the advice and approval of the oracles (especially
* Odyssey, Xxili. 296, Adzrporo rarocrod Osruov, is a faint echo of the religious idea. : o ats t Hesychius, 8.0. Tlvaasidees ; Athenzeus, xiii. 90, p. G09. { Pausanias, VIII. xxxvi, 5.
the Delphic). One set of duties after another was formulated as a branch of public law sanctioned by stated punishments and penalties. In various cases the old form was continued alongside of the later, and the offender against a law was not merely
unished legally, but was also formally cursed, 2.¢. handed over to the punishing care of Heaven. The Court of Areopagus in Athens well exemplifies the gradual transformation of the religious into the legal sanction, with the religious forms persisting to some extent alongside of the legal.
But the old sanction in its primitive form con- tinued to reign in the circle of family duties and rights, the duty of children to parents and of the younger to the older, the right of children to pro- tection and care at the hands of their parents, of the poor to the charity of the richer, and of the stranger to hospitality. It was the Hrinnyes, the old vague conception of the avenging power of nature, older almost than the conception of per- sonal gods, who punished any infraction of those duties and rights.* Here a conception akin to the primitive one reigned in the developed Hellenic thought. The Lrinnyes of the father, of children, of the poor, protected their rights and punished the violator ; in other words, punishment was left to Divine action, and rarely interfered with by human law. Even the inviolability of the oath is described by Hesiod as protected by the Erinnyes, who punished bad faith alike among gods and men.'t a
In the sphere of international law, heralds went between States as Divine officials (kjpuxes ‘Epuod). A species of international custom, not formulated into law in the strict sense, was re- cognized as existing between Hellenic States, but not between Greeks and barbarians ;¢ but it was considered to be Divine or unwritten law, it de- pended on the conscience and feeling of the indi- vidual State, and was regarded by some more than others. By the religious, however, it was con- sidered more binding than the formal laws. §