* See U. Kohler’s commentary on the famous Cean inscription, Athen. Mitthetl. i. 189; Plutarch, Solon, 21.
devote him to the infernal gods, on the ground that her duty was only to bless (Plut. Ale. 22).
The worship of the Chthonian deities was for the most part mystic ; and a very brief description of the character of the ritual of the Mysteries has already been givenin A, § VII. This mystic and secret character shielded the Chthonian gods against the Hellenizing tendency; and thus the awe that attached to them remained unimpaired. Awe was foreign to the spirit of Hellenism; but the human spirit demands an element of awe, and the Hellenes were human. Accordingly, Hellenism protected the Chthonian gods against itself by keeping them private, mysterious, and apart.
VI. THE RELIGION OF APOLLO AND THE DELPHIC ORACLE.—To attain a conception of the spirit and character and the infinite variety of Hellenic re- ligion and its relation to Hellenic life, it is above all necessary to study the practical development of the individual gods out of their primitive form into the full Greek idea. We can here take only one example. We might select Athenaia, the champion and mother of Athens, originally a form of the Pelasgian Mother-Goddess, who became step by step an almost purely Olympian deity (at least in the popular idea, though never in the actual cultus*), patron of what the world holds in memory as most characteristic of Athens, protector of the democracy, of art and of letters, opposed to and yet closely connected with Poseidon, who was the champion of the oligarchic and aristocratic element in the city.+ But Apollo is, on the whole, the most typical and representative Hellenic deity, and his oracle at Delphi was the most powerful influence in guiding and moulding the growth of Hellenism. And as, in the much debated subject of Greek religion, it is useful to see more than one view, Mr. L. R. Farnell, the author of Cults of the Greek States, will treat this part of it.—
[If the study of any single Hellenic divinity can suffice for the comparison of the pagan and Christian classical world in respect of religious thought and rite, one may be justified in selecting the Apolline worship for the purpose. It may not indeed present us with the highest achievement of the Hellenic spirit in religious speculation : for instance, to trace the gradual evolution of ideas that made for mono- theism, we must turn rather to the worship of Zeus. Nor, again, did it attempt to satisfy, as did the Dionysiac and Eleusinian cults, the personal craving for immortality and happiness after death which was working strongly in the Hellenic world before the diffusion of Christianity. Currents of mystic speculation, coming partly from the East, and bringing new problems concerning the provi- dence of the world and the destiny of the soul, scarcely touched and in no way transformed the personality of Apollo. Until the old Hellenic system was passing away, he remained a bright and clearly outlined figure of the early national religion, a Pan-Hellenic god, whose attributes reflected and whose worship assisted the various stages of material, social, and moral development through which the race had passed. The study of the cult is of the highest value for the student of Hellenism, and not without value for the wider study of European ethics and religion.
To understand this, we must distinguish more carefully than is often done between the figure of worship and the figure of myth. ‘This is the more necessary in the case of a religion such as the Hellenic, that was not fortified by any strong and imperious dogma which might bring the mythic
* Her relation to the Eumenides, the Gorgon, and the serpent- footed Erichthonios, shows her Chthonian and antique char-
acter. ‘ bt: + See Neil’s edition of Aristophanes’ Knights, p. 83.
144 RELIGION OF GREECE
fancy under control. Hence Greek myth, though usually bright and attractive, and often illumina- tive of actual worship, is sometimes repulsive, and no adequate expression of the serious mood of the worshipper. If we confine our view, then, to the public cults—Greek devotion being mainly public —and to the myths that illustrate these, we soon discover that Apollo did not instantly reveal himself, as he emerged above the horizon of pre- historic Hellas, as the divinity of the higher life who brought a higher message to his worshippers. The Apollo of Auschylus and Pindar is not quite the same as the Apollo of the earliest Greek tribes. The records of the historic period still preserve the impress of a wilder and more savage age.
The meaning of the name Apollo, like that of most of the Divine names in Greece, escapes us. A modern etymology that connects it with dé\)a, the Doric word for ‘assembly,’ would yield us, if we could accept it, the very interesting result, that the aboriginal deity was not a mere ‘ Nature-god,’ a personification of some portion of the natural world, but already a political divinity full of promise for the future public life of the race. But for etymological reasons the word dé\\a could not give rise to the derivative ’Aré\\wy, though they might both come from some common stem.
We must content ourselves with having the right to believe that he is at least an Aryan god, brought in by the Hellenic conquerors, and the common possession of several of the leading tribes. In countries where the autochthonous population claimed to have survived, such as Attica and Arcadia, he is clearly an immigrant, not an indi- genous deity. And Greek ritual preserved and hallowed the memory of his original entrance into Hellas from the north. It seems that in Herodotus’ time the Delians were still in the habit of receiving certain cereal offerings at the festival of Apollo that purported to come from the ‘Hyperboreans.’ The route which the offerings followed entered Greece from the north-west, and, passing southward as far as Dodona, then struck across eastward to the Malian Gulf, and so by the Eubeean Carystos to Delos. Wild fancies have been conceived and foolish theories devised about these Hyperboreans. Error arose from the illusory belief that any people, known however dimly to the Greeks, and known to be worshippers of Apollo, could have been styled ‘the people who live beyond the north wind. The key to the puzzle has been undoubtedly found by Ahrens, who as a philologist has made one of the very few philological contributions to the study of Greek religion that are of any value. He discovered that the word “YrrepBépero: is a slight popular corruption for “YrrepBdpo. or ‘LrepBeperato:, a well-attested Mace- donian dialect form for the Delian word Tleppepées that Herodotus declares was applied to the sacred ‘carriers’ of Apollo’s offerings. They are then northern Greeks, all bearing pure Greek names, which all have a religious origin proper to their ritualistic function. And it is of the greatest in- terest to note that the route by which the oblations of the North-Greek tribes are reported to have travelled is the natural route of invasion which the Aryan conquerors are now supposed by modern historians to have followed.