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every worshipper at Olympia, was by the Hellenes given as a prize to the victor in a competition.
The view, then, which we take is that the char- acter of Greek religion arose in the country, and sprang from the Greek genius, which took into itself, assimilated, and gave new life and character to elements gathered from its own past and from every race with which the Greeks came in contact, so far as those races offered anything worth learn- ing; but in this process the Gras spirit, so long as its bloom and vigour lasted, only grew more and more intensely Hellenic. The more the Greeks learned from Pheenicians or Phrygians, the more unlike them they became. In many of the Hellenic deities there is a certain Oriental element, but how utterly different in character and spirit is the Hellenic Aphrodite from a Pheenician goddess. Although Aphrodite, as she was worshipped in the cultus of the Greeks, bore strong traces of the ugly, gross, material Orientalism, and though Pheenician elements in origin can be assigned to her more confidently than to any other Greek deity, yet the Hellenic genius is almost more conspicuous in the graceful, exquisite, smiling Aphrodite of the Jdiad than in any other Greek deity. The Greek spirit could make her beautiful without making her moral in the modern sense.
IV. THE GROWTH OF HELLENIC RELIGION.— (1) Continuity of development.—The Hellenic re- ligion which was built on that older Greek founda- tion had in itself little of true religious character and depth. It was in many ways a beautiful development of artistic feeling, harmony, and grouping, instinct with the Hellenic sense of indi- vidual rights and liberty, and indissolubly inter- twined with the political institutions of the free, self-governing, progressive Greek City-State. The city was the highest creation of the Hellenic genius, with its free institutions and its education of the individual man; and the Hellenic religion was the ideal counterpart of the Hellenic city.
But, when we try to sound the real religious depths of the Greek nature, we must go to the worship of the dead or of the sacred stones (the Hermat), or the mystic worship of the deities of the old Pelasgian type. Yet the difference be- tween the old religion and the formed Hellenic worship does not amount to absolute opposition. The later grew out of the earlier by a simple pro- cess of easy development. No definite and unvary- ing line divides the older gods of Greece from the properly Hellenic gods. ‘There is hardly one of the latter who has not also in some district, or on account of some aspects of his worship, a place among the former.
(2) Growth of mythology.—The old personages of myth and religion continued to acquire new mean- ing and character amid the historical vicissitudes of the people. Just as among the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes the old Aryan tales took on a Christian character in their later development, so the old pre-Hellenic Divine personalities bear the impress of later history, or (to vary the metaphor) formed centres round which the floating beliefs and facts of later times gathered. Thus the name of Zeus goes back to the primitive Aryan stock, but he came to be the bearer of new thoughts and ideals in the Hellenic mind. To admit that Cad- mus represents a Phcenician element in Greek history does not necessarily imply that Cadmus must be a Phenician name. ‘To take a typical case of a markedly late development: As the Oriental seclusion of women began to spread among the Greeks in general, the familiar use of boys and male favourites in domestic service, with the vices that accompanied this custom, became general. As was invariably the case, a mythical or religious parallel and example was
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found, and Ganymedes became the mythical repre- sentative of the new custom in all its worst features. But, while one recognizes this, one may carry back the history of the mythic figure Ganymedes much further, and see in him one of the numberless local impersonations of the fresh- ness and bloom of nature, the Good Genius who came from heaven and returns again to it.
The old legends can be traced in Greece in never-ceasing transformations. They appear in the Lyric poets in a very different form from what they bear in Homer; and the Tragic poets take them and again remodel them, while in Pausanias we find occasional traces of local forms differing from all the literary embodiments. The Odysseus of Homer is not the Odysseus of Sophocles. But the inference, which has sometimes been drawn, that the Tragic poets did not know the Homeric poems in the form in which we possess them, has no validity. The Lyric and the Tragic poetry represent a deeper phase—certainly a very differ- ent phase—of thought and religion from the Epic ; and those later poets treated the myths as their poetic or dramatic property, and read in them or into them the thoughts of their own time.
(3) Polytheism and the Hellenic wnity.—The older Greek religion, as we have seen, was compara- tively simple. There was not a large number of gods worshipped in any one district. But the conception and names of the Divine beings varied in different districts to some degree. Though fundamentally the same, the idea of ‘the God’ tended in each district to assume some of the special character of the people, and to run through a special kind of development according to the succession of immigrant tribes or the varying ex- perience of the original tribe. New religious conceptions came in with new tribes. The special deity of each race reflected in his nature the whole history of his people. The power of each deity was confined to his own district and the circle of his own worshippers.